A lot of folks I admire have posted content on Medium in recent months. Medium [https://medium.com/] is a nice looking tool, another creation of the wonder pairing of Ev Williams and Biz Stone. The focus of this service is on sharing ideas, a publishing tool that houses your content and enables better interaction. Mr Williams describes [https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48] it this way: > More concretely, Medium is a system for reading and writing. Sounds nice. It also sounds a lot like the I…
All posts in publishing
Once upon a lifetime, I enjoyed conducting interviews with people I followed online. Over time, those interviews have sat in the corner of an abandoned SQL database. No longer! They've been taken outside, beaten with a stick, and are ready for a fresh set of eyes. If you enjoy a long conversation with various internet celebrities, give this a look: * Dan Benjamin [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/probing-the-hive-mind] * Dezene Huber [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/interview-dezene-huber] *…
This latest iteration of my site is powered by Kirby [http://getkirby.com], a lovely CMS created by Bastian Allgeier. Kirby has no database and is folder based, so its simplicity is felt in managing the site and, more importantly, in publishing your content. EE can be set up to work with MarsEdit [http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/], a great tool. This would have made it much more palatable, but with my complex set up of multiple channels for different post types, it never worked correctly.EE…
If one waits long enough, time will prove your routine. This has proven true for me and my writing and my personal website. A daily morning routine has given place for my writing, but on a larger scale, I tend to evaluate the entire site on a yearly basis. Looking back to my first blog in 2008, I can see that I have two routines for the site. It gets a visual refresh once a year. And the CMS changes just less than every second year. I started with WordPress, moved to Tumblr, made the leap to Ex…
What else is there to say about the latest essay [http://craigmod.com/journal/subcompact_publishing/] from Craig Mod? Everyone I follow seems to have read it, loved it and linked to it. If you haven't yet read it yourself, do so at your first available time slot. All I'll add to this conversation is this: the solution Craig believes is coming is something I need. I've been working on a new project, one that requires a way to do two things — deliver content and charge for access. Sadly, there ar…
The availability of new publishing platforms is good news. Truly. But a comment I made yesterday could be taken in a manner I did not intend. I said [https://twitter.com/chrisbowler/statuses/238023245775912960]: > Publishing platforms are fine, tools lacking friction even better, but the platform/tool does not make the writer. A few friends called out my thinking (always a good thing) and presented their beliefs that platforms can be enablers, giving people an ability they previously did not ha…
It's term that has changed a lot in the past ten years ago. Even five years. One way to approach self publishing is to host a personal blog, like this site or Shawnblanc.net [http://shawnblanc.net/]. This type of setup is fun because it's so flexible. Running a site under your own name allows you to write on any topic that interests you. Another approach is to be focused. Take one subject that you're passionate about and stick to that. I like this concept as well because, if the publisher foll…
All the recent hubbub around Readability is fascinating. And exciting. So [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/03/30/readability] many [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/04/02/davidsonability] insanely [http://dashes.com/anil/2012/04/readability-instapaper-the-network-and-the-price-we-pay.html] talented [http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2012/04/what-the-betamax-case-teaches-us-about-readability] folks [http://brooksreview.net/2012/03/explanations/] are chiming in on this dis…