Chris Coyier quoting Dan Cederholm:

As soon as I typed the HTML for my first hyperlink, the power of it hit me. This is the DNA of the web, the fabric that connects all of the bits and pieces all over the globe. It sounds so primitive now, but when this was all new to me and I was discovering how it all worked and how simple it was to create links, it was magic.

It’s still magic! URLs are one of mankind’s greatest achievements. It took a lot for them to exist, and now that they do, they have literally advanced civilization. They are the ultimate unbeatable feature.

I couldn’t sleep last night (big surprise), and when I can’t sleep, I either watch TV or think. I watched this tutorial on how to create and organize a Capture One Catalog (yes, I like watching webinars sometimes), but that wasn’t enough to knock me out. So I lied in bed, and I thought—about my life, about my friends, about my writing, about things I’ve read.

About a week and a half ago, I read Tom Critchlow’s post titled Small b blogging. In it, he wrote:

And remember that you are your own audience! Small b blogging is writing things that you link back to and reference time and time again. Ideas that can evolve and grow as your thinking and audience grows.

As Venkatesh says in the calculus of grit - release work often, reference your own thinking & rework the same ideas again and again. That’s the small b blogging model.

Before I read this, I always believed that “small b blogging” was about linking to my ideas again and again, that none of my “ideas” or “essays” or “posts” existed in a vacuum. I’ve always considered my website as my second brain, and by linking to other things I’ve written, I’ve been able to reinforce these connections in my head, helping me remember things I’ve thought about and thus, helping me connect disparate ideas together and create new connections. It’s really fun when I think, “Wait… didn’t I mention something like this before?” And I search for it, and there, I did write about it before, so I link to it and move on, this new connection firmly created in my brain.

I don’t know how many people actually follow my links (my guess is not many), but that’s okay. I write mostly for myself. It’s like I’m holding a conversation with myself through time, and each time I link back to something from before, I’m crafting this web of ideas that only really makes sense in my head. Am I “literally advancing civilization” like Chris says? I doubt it, but I’m advancing myself, I think, and that’s pretty cool.

Small b blogging is cool.

Om Malik:

I have known the truth about social platforms. I quit Facebook and Instagram years ago, and candidly I am better for it. I don’t need 5000 friends — 15 good ones will do.

I don’t need 5000 friends — 15 good ones will do.

I read this article today, and this line has stayed with me since. I never deleted my Facebook or Instagram accounts, especially after writing my thoughts on social media platforms on my website, but for a while, I either had my accounts deactivated or I simply didn’t login to them. That changed this summer. In this post, I described how I shared one of my posts on Facebook. In truth, I’ve shared many of my posts on Facebook this year, and the entire experience has been wonderful.

I have such a love/hate relationship with Facebook. The hate part is easy. If you have paid attention to what that company has done over the years, it’s hard not to hate them. Disinformation. Zuckerberg. The Metaverse. I get it. But I’ve had a Facebook account since September 2004. That’s 18 years, or half my life. For half my life, I’ve been on Facebook. I don’t think I have an active account that’s older than this, and that’s crazy to me. At the end of 2020, I downloaded all my data, then I spent a few days deleting as much as I could from that site short of deleting my entire account. I deleted all my posts and photos and likes and comments and anything else I could see to delete, but I never deleted my account.

With that said… I believe that Facebook is a fantastic tool to keep in touch with friends and to even know what’s going on in my community. Here in rural Montana, where all our towns have more bars than schools, more churches than grocery stores, Facebook is where everything happens. Somebody lost their dog? Sure enough, if you post it on the local community group, someone will help to find them, and most of the time, they do! It’s amazing. Somebody needs help with paying for medical bills? More than likely, the community knows the family, and the community will pitch in what they can to help this family. Hell, I donated to a family I know through Facebook because I would not have heard of it in any other way. In this sense, Mark Zuckerberg has succeeded in connecting people in a way no other tool has done before.

And for me? By posting many of my essays on Facebook, I’ve been able to grow closer to more of my friends, and I truly value that, and I hate to say it, but Facebook helped in that. Ever since I first heard about friend circles, or some optimal number of friends that people can realistically “have,” I’ve tried to keep my “friend” number on Facebook at or below 150 people. That means I’ve both unfriended many people and haven’t accepted many friend requests from people, even from people I know. If I met you at a party once, that’s not enough for me to accept your friend request, sorry.

I can’t count how many times someone I know, either a friend or a coworker, has come to me or contacted me and told me how much they liked this essay or that essay that I posted on Facebook. Many times, this has sparked conversation, and sometimes, these conversations have turned into regular contact, either at work or through text messages. I cannot disregard the fact that Facebook had a hand in this. Even today, a coworker came up to me and asked me if I was a “professional writer.” I said no, and she said I should be because I have “such a way with words.” It was heartwarming and amazing, and this 50-60 old woman would not have had a chance to learn about this part of me without Facebook. Hell, the day after I shared my essay on how I secretly like to dance, a friend of mine jokingly started dancing with me, and that was adorable as hell, too.

Sure, I’m on other social media platforms, most notably Micro.blog, but as much I value that community, they are not part of my life in the same way my friends on Facebook are. I see my friends regularly, and they now know something more about me because of my website, because I share them on Facebook where they are more likely to see these posts. I don’t personally know those people on Micro.blog or, now, Mastodon, and that’s fine. But like Om says, “I don’t need 5000 friends — 15 good ones will do.” And my 15 good ones are part of my regular life, but they are also part of Facebook, and Facebook helps connect us in ways that no other tool can.

However. I’ve had to setup rules around my social media usage, and these rules have changed everything for me. If you have noticed me be more active on social media lately, it is because of these rules. I will write about them soon. But for now, I’m not deleting my Facebook account anytime soon, not when it has proven to be a valuable tool in my life.

And yes, I truly cannot believe I wrote an essay defending Facebook. But here we are.

I admit, National Blog Posting Month is kicking my ass.

Part of the issue is finding the time to write. Here’s a rough accounting of my daily routine:

• Wake up at 5am
• At my desk with a cup of coffee and writing in my notebook at around 5:20am
• Finish writing at around 6:20am-6:30am
• Study German and Japanese until 7am
• Leave for work at 7:10am
• Work from 7:10am to around 4:15pm
• Come home 15 minutes later, change into my workout clothes and start my workout at around 4:30pm
• Shower, make my post-workout shake, and relax by watching TV, starting at around 5:15pm and going until dinner
• Cook dinner and eat it, 6pm to 7pm
• Write???
• Go to bed at around 8:30pm to 9pm

It’s a bit after 7:30pm as I’m writing this now, and my eyes are heavy, I’m tired, and I want to go to bed. It doesn’t help that I didn’t sleep well last night. I’ve been having trouble sleeping all year, and I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to go to bed earlier and earlier so I can get as much sleep as I could. Frankly, I need 8-9 hours of sleep a night or I’m miserable. And I feel miserable tonight.

I’m trying to build this second writing habit, and quitting now isn’t going to help me. I. Must. Keep. Going.

Warren Ellis wrote about the zero draft last week. The zero draft

is the draft you will never show anyone. It’s the draft you know is wrong but which contains the bare bones and meat-scraps of the story you’re trying to write. Get to the end of the zero draft, wait a day, and then go back and make it readable to other humans and fix all the egregiously wrong stuff, and that’s your first draft. Zero drafts are always too short: they fill out in the process of revising into a first draft. Stop thinking about your first draft as a first draft, call it a zero draft, and you give yourself permission to just slap everything you’re thinking about on to the page, knowing you can fix it before you have to inflict the draft on some other poor bastard.

I like this a lot. This is my zero draft. All the posts I’ve written for NaBloPoMo thus far feel like zero drafts to me. Sitting down at 7pm to write something and posting it online an hour later doesn’t feel like it deserves to be more than just a zero draft. Am I being too hard on myself? Maybe.

Did I mention I’m tired?

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe I’m trying to bite off more than I can chew. I did give this project very little thought, after all. Writing is something I love, though, and I want to work on being a better writer. But when I have bills that need to be paid and a life that wants to be lived… it’s tough. It’s really tough.

“I’m much more a gardener than an architect,” concluded George RR Martin in an interview with the Guardian in 2011. What did he mean? He explained that there are two types of writers,

the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows.

I’m definitely a gardener, but I’ve always wished I was an architect.

In school, I always struggled with writing essays because I was usually required to write an outline first, and I hated writing outlines. I didn’t know what I wanted to say; how am I supposed to write an outline for an argument I don’t have yet? I needed to write to know what I thought—to drop the seed in the hole and water it and see what grew from it. But I never allowed myself to explore this side of writing because I had deadlines to meet, and because I was an immature student, I always left all my assignments until the absolute last minute.

In this, I haven’t changed much.

It’s almost 8pm as I’m writing this. I mostly had an idea of what I wanted to write, but instead of spending time throughout the day writing, I procrastinated and only started writing a few hours before I usually go to bed. Sure, deadlines are one of the great motivators in life, but I’m not a young and naive teenager anymore—I don’t have the strength or the time to procrastinate. Nor do I want to anymore.

All my novels have languished for two reasons: I could never meet my own deadlines, and I spent too much time watering the soil instead of figuring out how many rooms the house is going to have. You don’t want to know how many times I’ve rewritten the same story because of the new “seed” I found and I just absolutely had to see what grew from it. Even this post has grown into something I didn’t quite plan or foresee. I had this John Ruskin quote I wanted to fit into this, but I think I’ll have to save it for another day.

I want to be an architect, even a bad architect, as Warren Ellis wrote back in June. “I’m bad at plans,” he wrote. “I try, but I always end up winging it.” And here, I can find both solace and a valuable lesson: as long as I’m out in the field scoring the soil with my trowel and planting the seeds and watering them, I’ll be okay. But an unplanted seed won’t grow, and an unwritten story will never be told.

Whether I plant seeds joyfully and see what grows from them or whether I pull out my drafting pencil and straight edge and get to drafting my house, as long as I’m writing, I’ll be fine.

This may be hard to believe, but I am not perfect.

I make mistakes. Like, all the time. One of the reasons why I’m still single in my 30s is because of the many mistakes I’ve made.

After I published yesterday’s post, I went to bed feeling like something was off. Was it the clunkiness in my writing? Yes, but that wasn’t it. My writing is always clunky. Was it how rushed I felt while writing it? Yes, but I always feel like that when working under a deadline. Was it my borderline inappropriate title? Yes, but it wasn’t quite that either.

It was all the above.

Another one of my many “rules” over the years has been to never update or revise anything I’ve published, except for the odd typo or to add a word I’ve needlessly omitted. I’ve never written this “rule” in some style guide or anything, but it was something I did and followed. Once my post is published, I felt like I was done with it, and it was time to move forward.

One of my goals with this project is to refine my craft and revamp my mindset, and part of that means clarifying these unwritten “rules” I hold in my head, to challenge and question them. And this is one of those “rules” I’m challenging.

I remember reading that Robin Sloan edited his posts all the time, and that has provided some comfort. Robin writes:

I remember when I blogged on Snarkmarket, years ago, I would change my posts ALL THE TIME. Not just typo fixes but make pretty substantial tweaks—clumsy language detected with the benefit of an hour’s reflection. Like oil paint; you can move it around for a long time. I loved it.

That quote comes from a post on the great Austin Kleon’s blog, a post where he writes that “blog posts can be edited, added to, improved upon.” Why is that important? Because “I want to be able to be wrong. I want to change my mind! I want to evolve.”

I want to evolve.

To evolve is to admit you’re not perfect, that you are capable of improvement, that your journey is ongoing and never-ending. To evolve is to live, and all I want is to live, mistakes and all.

Earlier today, I re-read yesterday’s post, and I spent some time revising some of it. I changed the title, I polished some of the clunkiness, and I clarified a few thoughts. I would normally be petrified of doing this, but part of my evolution is to do the scary things and hope my readers understand.

Like Austin writes, “to do the exploration that growth and change requires, one needs a forgiving medium… but what one really needs is forgiving readers.”

I will add that I also need to forgive myself for the many mistakes I’ve made and will make. After all, a life without mistakes is a life not lived at all, and again, all I want is to live.

And by here, I mean my website. By here, I mean my RSS feed in your RSS reader app. By here, I do not mean Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or any other social media company whose purpose is to suck up your content greedily to feed their money making machine without regard to you or your well-being.

It starts here.

My words in my home under my name. I own this—I own all of it—and you should, too. Your words in your home under your name. This is what the internet is, and what the internet should always be, a place by people and for people. No algorithms telling you what you should pay attention to, no corporations shoving their half-baked ideas in your face and telling you to like it, but a place where a shy, weird, nerdy guy can write without restraint and share photos of leaves or whatever.

Recently, Manuel Matuzovic, a very well-respected web developer was banned from Twitter for reasons unknown. In a post on his blog, he describes some of the things he’s lost since his ban. He doesn’t have access to his direct messages anymore, images, or bookmarks, and he even lost access to some sites that used Twitter as the login method. One day, everything was normal and the next, all the years of content he produced on someone else’s website was locked away from him, possibly forever.

Isn’t it somewhat ridiculous that these companies exist because of the content their users produce, content millions of people produce for free, and yet these users own none of it? That they can lose all of it by the whims of someone like Elon Musk? Or Mark Zuckerberg? What kind of living hell is this?

Toward the end of his post, Manuel writes:

If there’s something I’ve learned from this whole thing, it’s that I must be more careful with how and where I share my content. A social media platform should not be the primary source. […] Create everything on my own website and syndicate elsewhere, because you never know what might happen to your content or profile tomorrow.

“Now is a good time to reclaim control over your content,” he concludes.

I agree.

And it starts here.

Have you heard of National Novel Writing Month? Apparently, there’s a National Blog Posting Month, too.

After giving it very little thought, I’m going to participate in NaNo—no, NaBloMo—wait, NaBloPoMo—there we go. At least, I’m going to try.

From Amy:

Having taken part in NaBloPoMo last year (See a summary of 2021’s effort), I found out the hard way how important it is to get ahead with ideas and drafts, rather than leaving it until the day of each post to write it.

Have I learned from my mistakes and organised myself better this year? No. But here we are.

I’ve done daily challenges before, and I’ve enjoyed them well enough, so why not challenge myself with something new? I’ve been collecting dozens upon dozens of ideas and half-written blog posts over the past year or so, and I’m tired of them collecting dust. I want to explore them and work on them and draft them and publish them and see what happens.

I’m hesitant because oh my god who has time for this? But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We choose what we pay attention to, and by making this choice or that choice, we are choosing how we want to live our lives. I choose to write. That’s how I want to live my life.

So, let’s write.

For a full month.

What could go wrong?

I guess we’ll have something nice to look at while the world burns around us:

Climate change will increase opportunities to see rainbows, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Hawai’i (UH) at Mānoa. The study’s authors estimate that by 2100, the average land location on Earth will experience about 5% more days with rainbows than at the beginning of the 21st century.

That’s about 18 more days than normal, which I guess is something. Silver lining and all, considering.

Finally, some good news: the Earth isn’t likely to get flung off into deep space for at least 100,000 years.

Phew.

I needed this laugh today:

A group in Poland called 4th of July LARP (LARP is short for live-action role-playing) dresses as Americans and acts out various scenarios that they imagine happening in the U.S. during the summer holiday.

[…]

“LARP 4th of July is a drama about the wasted American dream,” the group writes on Facebook. “It is a story about hope, about a small homeland, about finding one’s place in the community.”

So many more great photos on their Facebook page.