Last month, I wrote a post that never got published. It was written out, formatted, edited and ready to go. As far as I could take it, but I hovered over the publish button and decided against it. There was nothing controversial there, but it criticised a poor take from someone who is well liked, and I couldn’t do doing with the hassle of replies.
In many respects, the unpublished post in question did its job.
Adam Newbold, writing about using URL as a sentence:
URLs convey valuable information, and good URL design ensures that they provide the right level of context and set proper expectations. Incidentally, good URL design is something that is still lacking all over the internet,
I can’t remember where I saw Adam’s post linked to, nut it had the exact pull quote highlighted and I saved the post for reading later, thinking this was a fascinating idea.
Can I quote post, a quote post? Well, tough, I am. Matt Birchler talking about dunking on people being a sport:
…a surefire way for you to generate engagement this week is to talk shit about…
The first thing that comes to mind reading Matt’s post is the outline of all the performative behaviour that happens on social media. Big brands and users alike farming the rage of other people for attention.
Ali Abdaal writing The Optimisation Paradox edition of his newsletter:
There’s nothing wrong with optimising something for growth, and “treating it like a business”. But it comes with the trade-off that, usually, the thing becomes a little less fun.
It doesn’t matter what you like doing, the moment you get reasonably good at it someone will say “I bet you could make some money doing that”. Should you choose to, it is at that point the fun will be sucked out of it.
For far too many years of my life, I was seeking ideas to boost the things I could get done. At first, it was tips for better conversion rates, better management styles and more recently it’s pure productivity “getting things done” advice. When you digest this kind of thing for even a short period of time, you begin to realise there is no hack for hard work.
In the least few years, self-help advice has exploded to become a multi-billion pound industry.
There are some mornings you get up, feel so under the weather from illness that you can’t face the world. Not to mention, you shouldn’t be spreading your infliction around to the rest of the workforce — so you ring in ill. Spending the day resting and recuperating instead. What if the opposite were true and you could pull a healthy?
I stumbled on this idea as a meme reel on Instagram, but I think they are on to something.
Whenever anyone asks me how I write so much, my default answer used to be because I read so much. The words from other people producing content I enjoyed, be it on the web or in a book, never failed to give my pause of thought and inspiration to write them out. Not all of them were published, but I got to the stage where I was constantly putting things on my blog — currently, not so much.
Evan Sheehan in their post RSS?:
I wonder what the alternative looks like. A tool that helps you remember the sites you like to visit so that you can browse them at your leisure, but that doesn’t create a commitment to read—or at least look at—absolutely everything that is published on all of those sites.
At first, this seemed like a crazy idea, but the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense.
Leo Babauta saying Become Quiet So You Can Listen:
…it’s a very human tendency to want to be busy, productive, filling every space with something useful or entertaining.
I’m one of those suckers. Those people who accuse the modern world of always being to blame for everything wrong until proven otherwise. This is one of those posts that makes me think about a small throwaway point and change my view.
Alan Jacobs with an interesting note on plagiarism:
…see something in a digital book or article that they want to use, copy the relevant text, and then paste it into Word with the intention of editing it later to in some sense make it their own.
Alan’s note covers controversy in academic publishing and the plagiarism that could be caused by sloppy writing and the pressures of education. However, I spent the whole time thinking about blogging and linking posts.