vanderwal.net

My Writing Process with Obsidian

A few times lately my writing process has come up as it relies heavily on markdown for portability, longevity access, flexibility, and using the Shift Happened – Part 2: Small Apps Loosely Joined – Personal InfoCloud. The Small Apps Loosely Joined concept is something I use heavily for many things, but for writing the use of markdown I use the concept quite heavily.

Recently in a IndieWeb gathering, James who runs and writes James’ Coffee Blog shared his process and workflow for writing through to posting on his site, which was similar to my own process, but uses different tools along the way. He had something in his process he was looking to improve upon so I walked through my process.

My Process has Morphed Over the Years

My current writing process is an extension and evolution from my initial processes that trace back to college. But, it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s that my current process formed iterated upon. My early writing for blog posts and articles all start in markdown, which years back was well structured text and sometimes HTML for the structure.

My notes prior to formal blogging (started at the tail end of 2000) that I posted to my site were all hand coded HTML (or raw coding). If a note was going to turn into a blog post it quickly was marked up, and often as I was making the note or post.

Automate Early

One of the core elements I learned in the 1990s was to automate early for anything you can automate, use the tools you have at hand to help yourself be more productive. Most of my writing up through around 2010 was text and then quickly turned into HTML markup, as it is simple to do. But, the tough part is connecting related content, which is why I created my personal content management system (CMS) to run this vanderwal.net blog in 2000 and fully put it to use in 2001 (I used Blogger for a bit early on). Taking rote patterns and automating them was a great addition to help my process in 2000 to now.

In 2010 I shifted all of my note taking to markdown as moving across apps and devices made using other note making methods difficult to access and use. This shift to full markdown for notes, helped my writing move from notes to posts and articles much easier.

Markdown Workflow Process

Today and the last 5 years my notes start most often in Obsidian (and on mobile in Drafts, which is great for the good practice of get it out of your head and then sort out what to do with it). I have many notes flagged as “blogfodder” and track those through the writing process and moving them from a stub of an idea, to draft, not posted but ready, and posted (which includes a link to where it was posted). I’ll have another post about my new blogfodder process, which I’m really liking.

The writing starts as a note and gets fleshed out, if it is needed. If it is a short item I may stay in Obsidian and then grab and drag the markdown file in the Finder to the next step (I will get to this shortly).

Quite often I will leave Obsidian and from it click to open the Finder with the markdown file highlighted and then open that file in iA Writer - iA Writer, which is a nice focussed writing app for markdown, with additional capabilities. I often use the old journalism marker for needs attention (tk!) or “to correct” for things that need links, fact checks, or reference notes. Once I’m happy with the writing and structure in iA Writer (or Obsidian) I move to the next step.

Move to Prep for Posting

In years past I would take the markdown and quickly take the markdown structure and convert it to HTML markup by hand. Around 2013 or so I started scripting this transition, but the script was fussy. I’m not sure when, but it wasn’t long after this, I ran across Marked 2 - Marked 2. I think I started using Marked to convert markdown to PDFs and Word documents (for things that need to be sent out for formal article transformation in publications from Word). But, I realized Marked 2 had really good markdown to HTML conversion that was as good as my script, but not fussy. As I moved to Obsidian with properties in front matter and a footer with blogfodder tracking, it can remove all of that with ease, translate external links very nicely, and remove all backlink notation.

It is often in Marked 2 that I find markdown problems or the tk! marks. Marked 2 also includes some light grammar checking, which I appreciate and I’ll work through those suggestions. Then I flip to the HTML markup view and make edits, if needed, there.

Open My Blog Entry Form

Once I’m happy enough with the post I open my blog entry for for vanderwal.net or Personal InfoCloud and paste the HMTL into the form for the body of the post. On vanderwal.net I add in the title, location, type of post (these days everything is a weblog, but in the past it was more diverse), then select the related categories and submit it. Then I just to look at the post and review it again. If it needs an edit (up until July 5th) I would go into the database and make edits to the post there, but now have an edit process in my CMS (after 25 years, I figured it was about time). Once that is done, I go click to generate the RSS feed for the site, and send out alerts to services that share out links and summaries farther.

Wrap-up of the Workflow

This workflow is now done, except for seeing spelling errors or things not right and needing tweaks.

The process that starts in a markdown note, then progresses through to a more formal writing process and flow. I replaced a lot of manual steps that I didn’t think were difficult nor took a lot of time and automated the steps that do exactly what I had been doing with the same level of care, but saving time and reducing errors.

I don’t use AI in any of this writing process. I run across too much AI written content that is lifeless and doesn’t sound like the writer any longer. I’ve stopped reading many colleagues who used to have great ideas and a great personal voice, but are now just bland slop through the use of AI that tilts at, but doesn’t achieve mediocrity.

I have my own quirks and writing patterns, which I am fine with. I don’t write to impress, but to get honest ideas and understandings out. I blog and write to find connection with others of like or similar minds.

The 8 Questions Answered in the Blog Questions Challenge

It has been a while since I’ve regularly blogged. I’m still writing a lot, but it is going into notes, and I need to get those back shared out. It used to be things I now put in notes, I just posted online (this sort of gets to the first question). I saw Joe Crawford answer these eight questions on his blog - ArtLung: Blog Questions Challenge ~ 16 Jan 2025. This seems like it would be a great thing to get the writing and workflow to post muscles functioning again.

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?

I had some odd notes in HTML markup, mostly to myself, that I had posted before I started blogging. They were just HTML files roughly linked in a web directory. On this site I’ve had my links running as an HTML page since 1995, which is a couple years before I had my own domain.

In the web development community in the 1999 and 2000 I was reading sites that had become blogs. It was late 2000 when I was playing around with Blogger, mostly as a means to share links between home and work (this is what my FTP HTML files to my web directory was doing). In very late 2000 I made my first post in Blogger tied to this website. It worked on an FTP model as well at that point, but when I travelled hotels would block FTP from their hotel networks. I wrote a travel note system in PHP that allowed me to capture ideas, links, and notes. When I would get home I would introduce them back into Blogger. The travel notes turned into a CMS at work (I had been regularly rolling CMSes for work life for a few years).

2. Why did you choose to write your own blogging software?

I started with Blogger, but quickly was writing my own CMS for when I travelled. But, what I really wanted was the multiple categories added to blog posts that Grey Matter blogging software (Greymatter (software) - Wikipedia) had that Noah Gray created. I didn’t have an interest in going back to Perl as I had moved to PHP for easier development and having it be more readable code. So, I turned my Travel Notes I wrote in PHP into a more full fledged blogging tool. In Spring or Summer of 2001 I moved fully to my own hand written blogging software and It had stayed there. I still has functionality missing that I’ve long wanted to add.

I’ve updated the underlying code when I move hosts and I need to update the PHP to a newer version (I’m currently in the midst of doing that and hope by May to have that done, if not much sooner).

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?

My Personal InfoCloud blog started on TypePad in 2005 (I had it on MovableType for a short bit, but Perl was rusty for me and I shifted to TypePad). Around 2012 that moved to SquareSpace and I’m in the midst of moving that to self-hosted WordPress. The PIC blog I just wanted to write and post, where as vanderwal.net I was fine messing with the underpinnings. I’ve setup and run a few WordPress sites. I helped get Home - Boxes and Arrows on MovableType, before MT was publicly available (Jay Allen ended up doing a lot of the heavy lifting as my worklife got very busy). Today I use Micro.blog very lightly and I need to sort out what I’m going to do with that.

4. Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?

When I started blogging on this site I write in Bare Bones Software | BBEdit 15 in text, then would hand code the HTML and copy and paste that into the form, add in the title, location, type of post, and click categories to add. Around 2010 I shifted to Markdown in various Markdown editors. When the app Marked came out I started dragging the Markdown file to Marked and it would convert to clean HTML and I would check it, copy and past in to my system.

The since around 2010 or 2011 I’ve used iA Writer: The Benchmark of Markdown Writing Apps to write my blog content in Markdown. I have used Marked 2 to convert to HTML for this blog since it came out. The remainder of the workflow is to post into the CMS, it returns a blog post link, which I check through. If edits are needed I edit in Markdown, drag to Marked 2, drop in the test again for the post, and submit. If it is good, I go back to the CMS management screen and click to update the RSS feed. Then go to a push the notification something is posted to a ping service (it used to have 20+ options and now it is 2 or 3 I think).

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?

Most days I write thoughts I’ve been mulling as I wake. I capture links of interest I’ve read and write about those through out the day. In the evening I try to clear out open tabs and capture links then.

Sadly, in the last 4.5 years, since I’ve had Obsidian I just write in Markdown in there in a Daily Dump structure note template I have. Those all sit in the same directory as the Markdown for blog posts, as they are all notes.

I really need to get back in the habit of posting, at least a weeknote, if not more regularly. I have a long stack of writing to hone and post into Personal InfoCloud (more than 80 “blogfodder” items in a list for there - my past job didn’t take kindly to blogging, so I’ve held on to a lot of writing that just needs to get out).

6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Here on vanderwal.net in the Off the Top blog, it is pretty much what it says on the tin. As it is written it is posted. I’ve been trying to edit a bit more to fix missing letters, missing words, and making shorter sentences (that last bit becomes a rabbit hole), but mostly it goes out as I hit the last period. Marked 2 does some grammar checking and other lightweight edit helping, but not much more than that goes in to it.

7. Your favorite post on your blog?

Most posts I forget I’ve written once posted. The act of writing and posting clears them from my head, which is part of why I blog - so to clear my mind for other things. But, I think my favorite isn’t in the actual blog but adjacent to it, Model of Attraction - First Draft :: vanderwal.net, which is a brain dump while on a flight after the inkling of the idea for it was seeded. It was going to go into the Off the Top blog, but I set it apart as a draft. There are many posts I’ve written about attraction since that time -Attraction :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net. The Model of Attraction is the underlying foundation for a lot of approaches to thinking through and assessing things technical, social (along with grad degree with deep social sciences and analytic / quant).

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

I am in the midst of updating the PHP on the back end to bring the site’s code current. Once that is done I really need to add pagination to categories, a better previous and next navigation, calendar / chronology focus display of posts, and site search. I’ve also long wanted to have concurrent category views, say “folksonomy” and “data visualization” for better .

The other thing I really am wanting to do is to have a Digital Garden section shared out, like Maggie Appleton lays out here A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden and does on her site, or as Tom Critchlow has been tending to on his site - Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create..

Weeknote - 3 January 2021

Happy 309th day of March in the Year of Covid and welcome to the first weeknote of the year here. Having a work break since Christmas Eve has been fantastic. But, it took me about seven days to get into the swing of the break and put behind things that weren’t part of the break. This being the turn of the year many of the news and media outlets, as well as many of my favorite blogs still running were posting their year end wrap-ups and I really enjoy reading those, particularly for books, things to watch, music, and ideas to explore.

This week I stumbled onto a new podcast that is a gem for me, but also in digging through ideas, links, and related exploration to the podcast I stumbled upon one of my own posts from 2006 about technisocial architect, which still hits at an awful lot of my approach and where I’m really happy focussing (that across multiple domains with depth in beyond generalist depth, but aiming toward a polymath depth). The labelling of people with multiple depths and expertise and to this day still bugs me as old style business that haven’t modernized think in one dimensional people and most often have no understanding how to use people with serious depth (they mostly just leave to go to places that know what to do with then and respect them) and really are lost with people with multiple deep dimensions. I’ve been back to pulling others like this together as really missing them and the conversations the freely spin across different domains and open opportunities to explore adjacent ideas.

A wifi hub going south (the end of my Apple AirPorts) meant switching to something different and was concerned with lack of ease of use, but was pleasantly surprised. Having WiFi 6 seems to have improve the odd drops we’ve been having and able to set priority for devices. The odd blind spots for wifi now seem to be gone as well.

Read

I’ve been reading across a bunch of new additions as well as going back through some books and gutting them for some idea spelunking related to the Near Future Lab podcast and newsletters (see below). The Near Future Lab newsletter has been a good find and the breadth of things it is covering with some depth has been triggering some pulling together quite a few things I’ve put in notes and tucked away over the last 15 to 20 years. Relatedly, I’ve had David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World out and gutting it, particularly around polymath, which Epstein has a good framing of, which I find far more helpful than the generalists, which is more of a deep generalist.

Book sales and gift cards have been adding to the stacks near the sofa during break, as well as targeted reading and gutting on subjects to flesh out some things in my notes (Obsidian has been great for showing gaps as I pulled in a couple of the blogfodder tagged notes and blogfodder lists).

One fiction book I picked and read the first chapter has me deeply enthralled is Richard Powers’ The Overstory: A Novel and was amazed with the beauty of it. It was like each word was a gem and each sentence a finely crafted bracelet or necklace. After two or three pages I was wondering if this would keep it up for the chapter, and it pretty much did. It has been a long while since I’ve read something this well crafted with language. I’ve been back reading poetry a little bit, but long for narrative this well crafted is a lot of work and I’m really impressed. But, with Overstory I’m also drawn by the story.

The end of this week I’ve been trying to catch-up with past [Near Future Lab Newsletters] as well as Jorge Arango’s writing and links (from the past few weeks). So much good fodder in these.

The “best of…” books I picked up and started reading a little bit, have not only been a source of good works in them, but I noticed the “other notable…” lists in the back of the books, which have been really good. These additional works mentioned have not only provided good pieces of interest to track down, but publications and sites that I’m now adding to my follow list. The last two or three years I’ve seen a lot of regular sources stop publishing and / or shut, which is problematic. There is a lot of fracturing and splintering of media recently. Most media is only as good as their individual contributors (which is the same as many things including analysts, contracting, consulting, etc.) and the really good individuals now have the capability to run things themselves or group with other strong individuals to build a good strong focused resource.

Watched

Early in the week I found myself watching downhill skiing, which I used to love watching as a kid. Not having Olympics this year has me wanting more skiing to watch and other winter sports (yes, I know it is a Summer Olympics year put on hold, but still).

Listened

One of my favorite sources for inspiration over the last 10+ years has been the Near Future Lab and this week they started a podcast (it is found linked in their 4th edition of their new newsletter Design Fiction newsletter - Design Fiction and the Optimistic Contrarian)and the first one is a pure gem for me. It is a discussion between Julian Bleeker, Fabien Girardin, and Nicholas Nova of the Near Future Lab. The focus is on what Giradin calls ambidexterity, or the switching of tasks and focus between domains and practice area. Julian maps that to what has been his favorite book of 2020, David Epstein’s Range, which is about the success of the generalist. This isn’t quiet your thin thinking generalists, but deeply curious multi-disciplinary generalist that go deep in across many domains and can deeply think (scientifically and exploratorily) as well as do. It is polymath as deep thinker and doer. The type of person who keep pursuing things to where there is boredom or able to hand it off to others. These folks are the ones who can easily have discussions with experts and leave the experts with new thinking and understandings beyond what they new prior.

Realizing Tidal added a ton of new music that is MQA wrapped from their Warner Music Group, I’be been rebuilding some play lists with the “master” version and listening as well. Along these lines I’m finding something is going on in Apple Music as a lot of their catalog is sounding much better running through a DAC on decent headphones (also finding Apple Music stopped scrobbling to Last.fm in December and I can’t get it functioning again, but Tidal still works).

Play

I was thinking I would play and finish Ghosts of Tsushima over break, but a discount on 2K21 made that the gaming focus. I’m a bit surprised with 2k21 as it isn’t as painful to play as it normally is with their “create a character” mode, but the GM mode is still as odd as it was last version. The storyline in the crate a character mode really wasn’t painful and felt more playable than usual and no annoying out of left field diversion thrown in.

Productivity

Obsidian has been getting a workout this week. I still need to sort out linking blocks, but I spent much of my time dumping in notes and connecting things. I need to sort out my workflow for writing, which is currently mostly done in iA Writer and that saves best for remote use in iCloud and my notes for Obsidian are in Dropbox. I need to work out a workflow for how to better handle this. One of the things I did this week was add a snippet for TextExpander for my existing blogfodder notes that were tagged in NValt. The snippet has the state for blogfodder to note if it is a stub, draft, done and not posted, and posted with a link to where it is posted. That would work to copy completed and posted pieces I’ve worked on in iA Writer, but need to sort out how to make that smooth.

Weeknote - 04 October 2020

I have so many partially completed weeknotes sitting for the last many weeks. Some are partial efforts to combine two, then three weeks or even more. The Black Lives Matter need for focus from utterly disgusting lack of people’s care for other humans diverts my focus.

But, I’ve also been needing to do a slight update to get this site running on a slightly newer version of PHP. Yet, in the next few months I needing to do a slow drip conversion to a quite modern PHP. To me it is utterly amazing that this site is still running on code I started writing in 2000 and fully started using in 2001 (I ran it is a temporary travel blogging fill-in when all too often hotels wouldn’t connect with FTP that I used to push Blogger pieces into place for new blog posts). I have made some minor changes to the underlying code three or four times, but this is going to be a large change. I will likely just do a straight conversion of the underpinnings, but following that may finish some better navigation and then a redesign.

Work has shifted from 4 days a week back to 5 days and that shift put a damper on a couple small personal side projects.

Another thing I’m working on is turning some of my core pieces of my talks and workshops into 1 to 5 minute video explainers. I regularly chat with grad students that run into my work around folksonomy, but also many of the social complexity models and lenses. Some of these have helpful animations I use as explainers and get really strong praise from professors when they run across them. This will likely lead to writing them up as well.

The other piece the last few weeks I’ve been focussing on is reworking my note taking and organization model. I will get into this in more detail below in the Productivity section.

Read

Reading took a bit of a back seat the past 6 weeks or so. I’be been reading two books in a slow meditative manner, due to the thinking and rethinking they are leading to. These two are The Map of Knowledge by Violet Moller and Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr., which I’ve mention here before (I think, they may be in unfinished weeknotes I haven’t posted). My fun read, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green, has turned into a slow meditative read, which is helping me realize why I stopped writing and sharing on the web as much, but also why I need to get back to it. The last of my concurrent reads is James Fallows and Deborah Fallows Our Towns: A 100,000-mile Journey into the Heart of America fits one of my favorite genres of exploring America though stopping and asking questions, but also listening deeply across America.

The Map of Knowledge runs quite counter to the poor assumption that the intellectuals of antiquity we know shared their knowledge and we have much of it. Well, we have very little of it. Much of it lost to lack of continual upkeep and continual recopying of works that was / is needed. The book looks at the old great libraries and how they disappeared and what happened to their collections.

A few years ago doing expert witness analysis I was amazed that much of the domain of canonical works about the internet, particularly around the Web 2.0 era, were gone from the web, they are also missing from the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine. I have a decent chunk of them in my own collection as archived html and / or PDF tucked away and searchable in DevonThink. But, many of these are linked to from Wikipedia the sites that hosted them are gone to the digital winds. For a long time we thought of the Web as being the holding of all the thinking of mankind and having it all searchable and within easy reach (this also means the appalling thought of the fringes that get over amplified are there as well), yet this is far far from the case.

I have yet to discern if this loss of knowledge and really good thinking and understanding not being a new reality is comforting or not. A high school economics summer school class that introduced the “pure flow of information” leading to good decisions. Searching Google for “pure flow of information” my blog pops up a fair amount where I’m pointing to Nobel Prize for economists work around the internet and this, how to manage a vast flow of information, disillusionment with the lack of reality of the pure flow, and more. The thought I keep having, is along the lines of, “I thought we had so much more than we do”, then weighing true repositories like the Bodlian Library and the Library of Congress and their seemingly vast collections. The vacillating perspective of “we have only a tiny slice of what we have known” and “we have far more than any one person or collection of people can know” are a tension I’m very slowly learning to live with as a viable tension while still believing in the pure flow.

Watched

Mostly I’ve been rewatching movies and shows. But, the newest season of Endeavour, The Young Wallander, Van Der Valk have scratched an itch that I can always use more of.

Like many, I’ve stumbled into and really been enjoying Ted Lasso which has been a really good cultural palate cleanser to the mess going on in the world who want to lead by hate and lies.

Listened

Through a Tidal recommendation I found Brian Bromberg’s album Bromberg Plays Hendrix, which is decently good, but Hey Joe really stuck out and I’m really enjoying it (particularly on Tidal and really wishing they had a Master (MQA) version of it).

My podcast listening slowed as I shifted my morning breakfast routine from a 15 minute making a black bean bowl (black beans, shiitake mushrooms, garlic, fresh turmeric, Canadian bacon, sometimes grape tomatoes (cooked so they are jammy), and with a farm fresh egg on top). The current is thick yoghurt and fresh fruit, sometimes with muesli on top and a perfect bar. I’ve also gone back to doing a coffee walk in the morning to fetch coffee (this ensures I get out for a decent walk at least once a day) rather than preferably making coffee at home. This shift from 15 minutes to under 5 minutes knocked out my usual podcast listening time.

Food

I finally tried some gluten free baking. A peach and blueberry clafoutis was a good pleasure, but the gluten free Dutch baby went all sorts of wrong.

Play

I’m about a third of the way through Ghosts of Tsushima and a bit stalled. This game is a really gem. It is utterly beautiful (yet insanely bloody, which is something I often steer clear of) with an open map, good game play, and a tiny bit educational and has lead to reading understanding feudal Japan and samurai culture. I am a big fan of Sucker Punch’s prior series, Infamous, and Ghosts expands on what I really like about their games.

Productivity

The past few weeks I’ve been needing to find a different and improved method for my note taking method and workflow. I have long used NValt and it stopped working, but since it is just a front end for many (1,200+) markdown text files, I can use any markdown editor or text editor. But, what is missing is a loose wrapper around these short snippets of somethingness, collections of quotes, lists of interesting words with definitions, drafts for blog posts, other stubs of ideas (fiction and non-fiction), and also finished items I’ve started in NValt and then using small apps loosely joined method of doing things I use focussed writing tools for longer pieces that work with markdown files natively and can output to many other formats.

This exploration I pulled from here and posted it as its own piece (in very rough form) as Rebuilding My Note Taking and Management System and Model on Saturday.

The Sidebar is the New Back Bar

Back in the days when I had time to hangout with friends for drinks, many places had a “back bar” that was more quiet and private.

I haven’t been in the habit of posting here as much as I used to, but I still am putting things into Pinboard and somethings I flag with “linkfodder”, which is my relatively unique tag to pull out favorites. I use the API from Pinboard to pull the linkfodder tagged items into the sidebar here. Occasionally I annotate them and that is brought here as well. This sidebar mini blog feels sort of like the back bar, which is a little more quiet and calm and you can see some things of interest to me (if that is of interest to you) and track them down.

The Writing Ache

It has been a while since I’ve written here, or over at Personal InfoCloud. I have an even larger stack of things in my writing queue and it is getting to the point that I am aching to write.

Shift Happened

I have a few things I really want to and need to get out. One is to take the Shift Happened series I started and made it through 4 of 16 I have outlined and I am finding the shifts myself and others saw and were living and advising through, happened to far more and they are really lost and acting as if these shifts never happened. Still.

Complexity / Social Lenses

The other thing is my Complexity / Social Lenses are now numbering in the 70s and I need to write to frame the core 12 or so I often use as half-day or full-day workshops to help others see through the fog of complexity with social and other complex environments they work and live within. I have been hoping to get these into a book, but the timing either wasn’t right or the environment (publishing company) shifted.

Information Strata

The last of these is around information depth, which I started relabelling Information Strata, that I have been including in client work and as one of the lenses related to social objects / socially mediated objects (depending if it was Jyri Engstrom or Karin Knor Cetina as one’s entry point). Information strata gets back to the core point and realization in the early 2000s that having a discussion with the subject in clear sight drastically improves the depth of the conversation, reduces errors from lack of clarity or misunderstanding, and improve conversational (information sharing) efficiency. Somehow today that basic concept is really lost and people accept the poor communication patterns as a given or don’t think to investigate a better way.

Over the last 10 years or so I started using a point system around the layers inhibiting a person from having a clear view of what is being discussed. This concept of having a clear understanding and isn’t new, it was something I learned as a communication major in many dog years ago as an undergrad. I need to do a decent write-up of this to have something to point to when helping others. I’m also realizing Info Strata leads right back to the “[Come to Me Web]” and related matters where the importance of bringing things related near has prime importance when building a service and system for someone to live and work with.

Now what I need is time and stability at the same time to get these going. Oh, and to get the ever bumped side project moving forward again.

PubPub from MIT Media Lab

I just stumbled into MIT Media Lab’s PubPub service that is an open platform for writing new research journals. It has some nice collaborative features, versioning, embraces markdown at its core, and inline discussions.

Social Circles

One of the pieces I really want to explore is how its social dimensions work. My my take on different things I write and have interest in have different social circles that I want to ping and get feedback from. But, there are subjects and groups / communities that I really would like to participate in as well. This is a more complicated and complex area that really needs work and focus. Google+ tried this but deeply flubbed it as their circles are based on individual’s perspectives and not socially constructed realities (knowing the boundaries of who is involved in a circle and having really solid social interaction design around that is a basic requirement, something nobody at Google seemed to consider nor have basic foundations in social sciences to understand this basic need). For PubPub, getting these constructs right would be really helpful and make it a really powerful service and platform.

Other than PubPub

PubPub is fairly close to what I was hoping Poetica would become and Draft app. I’ve been thinking about this for The Lenses and its subset, Social Lenses writings. Also just being able to write blogs and get knowledgeable sanity checks on them from others before posting. This is something I was trying to do with Draft app and had some success with people who are familiar with markdown (which is most people I interact with), but alerting people or subsets of groups that there is something I would really like early looks at and feedback is where it falls a bit short. It also seems like Nate Kontny is now more focussed on Highrise (light CRM service that he took over and now is CEO) than Draft. Also with the purchase of Poetica and its imminent shuttering, I’m looking at other options.

Some of what I have interest in can be found in Medium, but I’d rather just syndicate there, given their use policy. Medium is a really nice content creation platform, with some okay drafting with feedback capabilities, but I’m looking for a bit more. I also really prefer Markdown approach these days as it keeps things really light and I can edit and work on writing from most any platform I have with me or at my access, even if I’m lacking a network connection (which is something that is really helpful for focus for me actually).

One PubPub Wish

The one thing I wish PubPub had was an open source version where I owned the platform and could run it on a server of my choosing. But, it looks like this is in the plans (a few bugs need to be squashed on their way to this), as the PubPub About page states.