Tags: writing

Once Again From the Top • Jason Santa Maria

Welcome back, Jason!

My favourite bit of the archive on this site is the link that says “on this day”. It’s of no interest to anyone except me, but I love going through this little time tunnel.

Using that link this month gives me a flashback to March five years ago when The Situation was unfolding.

I remember the build-up at the end of February. We were in Galway for a birthday weekend getaway. One morning in the hotel I saw the papers were running a story that seemed so Irish to me: because of this emerging virus, people were no longer to give the “sign of peace” at mass (that’s the bit where you awkwardly shake hands with the people around you). I chuckled. Nervously.

Then we were leaving Ireland, in the taxi to the airport in Dublin the radio was on. A medical professional was urging the cancellation of the St. Patrick’s Day parade because a grand total of 2 or 3 people in the country had this virus. The DJ reacted with incredulity. It sounded like a pretty far-fetched idea to me too, because St. Patrick’s Day was just over two weeks away.

The St. Patrick’s Day parade was cancelled.

Throughout The Situation I was keeping track of things in Ireland. It was like seeing an A/B test unfolding. Everything that England was doing wrong, Ireland was doing the opposite. It wasn’t quite New Zealand, but they put scientists front and centre of their decision-making precision. Whereas here, policy was driven by wishful thinking.

I was writing about it all here on my website. I also started recording a tune every day for 200 days. Here’s the first one. See how fresh-faced I am? I decided to stop shaving during lockdown. After six weeks, I looked like this.

But to really recall what that time was like, I recommend reading Jessica’s account of 2020. The first entry is called A Journal of the Plague Week and it was published five years ago. The final entry was A Journal of the Plague Week 52 a year later.

Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected (Interconnected)

Ah, this is wonderful! Matt takes us on the quarter-decade journey of his brilliant blog (which chimes a lot with my own experience—my journal turns 25 next year)…

Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)

Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.

Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.

Monzo tone of voice

Some good—if overlong—writing advice.

• Focus on what matters to readers
• Be welcoming to everyone
• Swap formal words for normal ones
• When we have to say sorry, say it sincerely
• Watch out for jargon
• Avoid ambiguity: write in the active voice
• Use vivid words & delightful wordplay
• Make references most people would understand
• Avoid empty adjectives & marketing cliches
• Make people feel they’re in on the joke – don’t punch down
• Add a pinch of humour, not a dollop
• Smart asides, not cheap puns and cliches
• Be self-assured, but never arrogant

The Imperfectionist: Seventy per cent

If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it.

Works for me!

You’re also expanding your ability to act in the presence of feelings of displeasure, worry and uncertainty, so that you can take more actions, and more ambitious actions, later on.

Crucially, you’ll also be creating a body of evidence to prove to yourself that when you move forward at 70%, the sky stubbornly fails to fall in. People don’t heap scorn on you or punish you.

I’ve been tagged in a good ol’-fashioned memetic chain letter, first by Jon and then by Luke. Only by answering these questions can my soul find peace…

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

All the cool kids were doing it. I distinctly remember thinking it was far too late to start blogging. Clearly I had missed the boat. That was in the year 2001.

So if you’re ever thinking of starting something but you think it might be too late …it isn’t.

Back then, I wrote:

I’ll try and post fairly regularly but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.

I’m glad I didn’t commit myself but I’m also glad that I’m still posting 24 years later.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I use my own hand-cobbled mix of PHP and MySQL. Before that I had my own hand-cobbled mix of PHP and static XML files.

On the one hand, I wouldn’t recommend anybody to do what I’ve done. Just use an off-the-shelf content management system and start publishing.

On the other hand, the code is still working fine decades later (with the occasional tweak) and the control freak in me likes knowing what every single line of code is doing.

It’s very bare-bones though.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I usually open a Mardown text editor and write in that. I use the Mac app Focused which was made by Realmac software. I don’t think you can even get hold of it these days, but it does the job for me. Any Markdown text editor would do though.

Then I copy what I’ve written and paste it into the textarea of my hand-cobbled CMS. It’s pretty rare for me to write directly into that textarea.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I’m supposed to be doing something else.

Blogging is the greatest procrastination tool there is. You’re skiving off doing the thing you should be doing, but then when you’ve published the blog post, you’ve actually done something constructive so you don’t feel too bad about avoiding that thing you were supposed to be doing.

Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to posting something. I find myself blogging out loud to my friends, which is a sure sign that I need to sit down and bash out that blog post.

When there’s something I’m itching to write about but I haven’t ’round to it yet, it feels a bit like being constipated. Then, when I finally do publish that blog post, it feels like having a very satisfying bowel movement.

No doubt it reads like that too.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I publish immediately. I’ve never kept drafts. Usually I don’t even save theMarkdown file while I’m writing—I open up the text editor, write the words, copy them, paste them into that textarea and publish it. Often it takes me longer to think of a title than it takes to write the actual post.

I try to remind myself to read it through once to catch any typos, but sometimes I don’t even do that. And you know what? That’s okay. It’s the web. I can go back and edit it at any time. Besides, if I miss a typo, someone else will catch it and let me know.

Speaking for myself, putting something into a draft (or even just putting it on a to-do list) is a guarantee that it’ll never get published. So I just write and publish. It works for me, though I totally understand that it’s not for everyone.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I’ve got a little section of “recommended reading” in the sidebar of my journal:

• Split
• Web! What is it good for?
• Seams
• Hyperdrive
• Design doing
• Iron Man and me

But I’m not sure I could pick just one.

I’m very proud of the time I wrote 100 posts in 100 days and each post was exactly 100 words long. That might be my favourite tag.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I like making little incremental changes. Usually this happens at Indie Web Camps. I add some little feature or tweak.

I definitely won’t be redesigning. But I might add another “skin” or two. I’ve got one of those theme-switcher things, y’see. It was like a little CSS Zen Garden before that existed. I quite like having redesigns that are cumulative instead of destructive.

Next?

You. Yes, you.

HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me | WIRED

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a desktop browser or an e-reader screen to a mobile app or a screen reader for the blind (so long as that device is built to present hypertext).

Hell, yeah!

Ultimately, even as HTML has become the province of professionals, it cannot be gatekept. This is what makes so many programmers so anxious about the web, and sometimes pathetically desperate to maintain the all-too-real walls they’ve erected between software engineers and web developers.

Hell, yeeeeaaaaahhh!!!

What other programmers might say dismissively is something HTML lovers embrace: Anyone can do it. Whether we’re using complex frameworks or very simple tools, HTML’s promise is that we can build, make, code, and do anything we want.

People spent a lot of time and energy in 2024 talking about (and on) other people’s websites. Twitter. Bluesky. Mastodon. Even LinkedIn.

I observed it all with the dispassionate perspective of Dr. Manhattan on Mars. While I’m happy to see more people abondoning the cesspool that is Twitter, I’m not all that invested in either Mastodon or Bluesky. Or any other website, for that matter. I’m glad they’re there, but if they disappeared tomorrow, I’d carry on posting here on my own site.

I posted to my website over 850 times in 2024.

I shared over 350 links.

I posted over 400 notes.

I published just one article.

And I wrote almost 100 blog posts here in my journal this year.

Here are some cherry-picked highlights:

• January: Continuous partial ick — Voigt-Kampff.
• March: What the world needs — Write for yourself.
• April: My approach to HTML web components — Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.
• June: Filters — A web by humans, for humans.
• August: Frostapalooza — A truly special event.
• November: The meaning of “AI” — Naming things is hard, and sometimes harmful.

Authors Apart

Another handy list of where you can get works published by A Book Apart authors.

Authors Together

In 2024, A Book Apart closed its doors after publishing a much-loved collection of more than 50 brief books for people who make websites. The rights to each book have reverted to the authors — hi, that’s us — and we’ve put together this semi-official directory to help you find our books in their new homes.

…now including Going Offline.

I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online.

If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser.

Needless to say the web book works offline. Once you go to goingoffline.adactio.com you can add it to the homescreen of your mobile device or add it to the dock on your Mac. After that, you won’t need a network connection.

The book is free to read. Properly free. Not the kind of “free” where you have to supply an email address first. Why would I make you go to the trouble of generating a burner email account?

The site has no analytics. No tracking. No third-party scripts of any kind whatsover. By complete coincidence, the site is fast. Funny that.

For the styling of this web book, I tweaked the stylesheet I used for HTML5 For Web Designers. I updated it a little bit to use logical properties, some fluid typography and view transitions.

In the process of converting the book to HTML, I got reaquainted with what I had written almost seven years ago. It was kind of fun to approach it afresh. I think it stands up pretty darn well.

Ethan wrote about his feelings when he put two of his books online, illustrated by that amazing photo that always gives me the feels:

I’ll miss those days, but I’m just glad these books are still here. They’re just different than they used to be. I suppose I am too.

Anyway, if you’re interested in making your website work offline, have a read of Going Offline. Enjoy!

The Free Web - The History of the Web

I am going to continue to write this newsletter. I am going to spend hours and hours pouring over old books and mailing lists and archived sites. And lifeless AI machines will come along and slurp up that information for their own profit. And I will underperform on algorithms. My posts will be too long, or too dense, or not long enough.

And I don’t care. I’m contributing to the free web.

Daring Fireball: Kottke on the Art and Power of Hypertextual Writing

Hypertext links are an information-density multiplier.

The way I’ve long thought about it is that traditional writing — like for print — feels two-dimensional. Writing for the web adds a third dimension. It’s not an equal dimension, though. It doesn’t turn writing from a flat plane into a full three-dimensional cube. It’s still primarily about the same two dimensions as old-fashioned writing. What hypertext links provide is an extra layer of depth. Just the fact that the links are there — even if you, the reader, don’t follow them — makes a sentence read slightly differently. It adds meaning in a way that is unique to the web as a medium for prose.

Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Also, developers:

Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

Designers, the same advice applies to you: write first, come up with that perfect design later.

The secret power of a blog – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

If you only write when you’re sure you’ll produce brilliance, you’ll never write.

POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world

This rhymes nicely with Mandy’s recent piece on POSSE:

Despite its challenges, POSSE is extremely empowering for those of us who wish to cultivate our own corners of the web outside of the walled gardens of the major tech platforms, without necessarily eschewing them entirely. I can maintain a presence on the platforms I enjoy and the connections I value with the people there, while still retaining primary control over the things that I write and freedom from those platforms’ limitations.

Long live hypertext! – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

This is how I write:

As an online writer, my philosophy is link maximalism; links add another layer to my writing, whether I’m linking to an expansion of a particular idea or another person’s take, providing evidence or citation, or making a joke by juxtaposing text and target. Links reveal personality as much as the text. Linking allows us to stretch our ideas, embedding complexity, acknowledging ambiguity, holding contradictions.

Coming home | A Working Library

While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.

Mandy’s writing positively soars and sings in this beautiful piece!

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art | The New Yorker

Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Another great piece by Ted Chiang!

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception.

This bit reminded me of Simon’s rule:

Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Simon also makes an appearance here:

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

I could quote the whole thing, but I’ll stop with this one:

The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

s19e01: Do Reply; Use plain language, and tell the truth

Very good writing advice from Dan:

Use plain language. Tell the truth.

Related:

The reason why LLM text for me is bad is that it’s insipid, which is not a plain language word to use, but the secret is to use words like that tactically and sparingly to great effect.

They don’t write plainly because most of the text they’ve been trained on isn’t plain and clear. I’d argue that most of the text that’s ever existed isn’t plain and clear anyway.