A lot of people seem to be talking about writing; more often, more thoughtfully, more purposefully. Jeremy Keith rounded up quite a few of them earlier today which, in their several ways, make the point that writing regularly is a habit, that it may help others but mostly helps yourself and that you should write whatever you want. All good and true. None of the people Jeremy singled out says much about setting constraints, except perhaps for Patrick Rhone's plea that anything over 280 characters should be "on a blog that you own". Recently, however, I have seen other people remark on the value of a set constraint, usually a number of words. The morning brain dump folks set a minimum of 750 words, and no maximum. Others like a set number of words, no more, no fewer. And that reminded me that ages ago, when blogging was still new and exciting, I took part in a little challenge.

There’s more ➢

No June, because holidays, travel and offlineness. No July, for the same reasons, plus even before the month had ended I was deep into ...

... August, in which I did almost only one thing, and did it well, with great satisfaction.

There’s more ➢

Quite a few people, online friends and unknowns, discovered today that they won't easily be able to syndicate from their WordPress websites to their Facebook profile page, at least not automatically. There is a lot of hurt anger and confusion -- why didn't WP say something earlier? Why is FB doing t...

There’s more ➢

Snail

Continuing my baby steps towards equipping Grav, which runs this, my main website, with a Micropub endpoint, it took me almost half a day to remember where I had got to. And about ten minutes to undo all my good work. Like the proverbial snail, though, I am now a little bit closer than I was, even if I had to drop down a bit to get here. And i (re)learned two important lessons: git; and small steps.

There’s more ➢

Mildred Marianne asked How do you define #IndieWeb? and a couple of us weighed in. My own brief answer concluded "More a state of mind than a thing, I'd say" but Chris Aldrich went into a lot more detail. His piece is well worth checking out in detail, as it offers a bird's eye view of all the different things the IndieWeb is and could be. I might take issue with singling out the country of America for his metaphor as being a tad parochial, but one could choose any reasonably democratic place instead.

I want to respond to a little thing. In questioning the closed nature of the big silos, Chris asks parenthetically: Would you use your phone to only call friends who use AT&T?

There’s more ➢