Joel Hooks shared this post about writing more and worrying less about the polish. He mentions how shifting from thinking about his writing and site as a blog to a digital garden helped him to write more: > Seriously. The idea of a "blog" needs to get over itself. Everybody is treating writing as a "content marketing strategy" and using it to "build a personal brand" which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed. I…
All posts in publishing
It's been a while in the making, but I finally finished the move to Ghost [https://ghost.org] this past week. Earlier this year, I started to have a couple of issues with Kirby. And since I was a couple of versions behind, the thought of paying for another license and updating was feeling like a chore. When we added Ghost to People-First Jobs, I started to consider the idea of using a hosted service again. While using Digital Ocean was a good learning experience, I don't have a lot of time or i…
Matthias Ott is another person making a fresh plea for people to ditch social media and publishing platforms like Medium for a much more promising and healthy technology: > There is one alternative to social media sites and publishing platforms that has been around since the early, innocent days of the web. It is an alternative that provides immense freedom and control: The personal website. Hear, hear. Not only does he share why running your own site is good, but he takes it a further step an…
My thoughts have turned back to independent publishing on the web of late.
My favourite writer writing about email newsletters. This is the epitome of my reading experience. About the burgeoning popularity of the age old technology, Craig Mod has this to say: > Newsletters and newsletter startups these days are like mushrooms in an open field after a good spring rain. I don’t know a single writer who isn’t newslettering or newsletter-curious, and for many, the newsletter is where they’re doing their finest public work. And while we often discuss this topic in terms of…
Related to the recent theme of running your own website [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/personal-websites], Craig Mod interviews Jason Kottke on the latest episode of On Margins*. Craig’s podcast is focused on books, but he interviewed Jason on the premise that his hundreds of thousands of words published on his site over 20 years is several books worth. And God bless Craig for providing a transcript of each episode!A lot of the interview is only tangentially related to the theme I’ve been har…
I recently shared [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/personal-websites] a list of personal blogs that I enjoy. But I neglected to add Alan Jacobs to the list. Perhaps it’s because he maintains several blogs, some regularly, others less so. But his primary personal blog [http://blog.ayjay.org] is one I subscribe to, and it’s almost like a digital commonplace book. I first mentioned Alan in this space because of Habits of Mind in an Age of Distraction [https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/habits-o…
We all have those people we follow online that we admire. The people who get us excited when their site pops up in our RSS feed reader, or when they share a link to their site on Twitter. For me, Craig Mod is at the top of that list. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about people making their own home on the web. Not on places like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. You can achieve success there, but it never feels to me like I’m getting a fuller picture of the person behind the persona. H…