Words I wrote in 2020

Once again I wrote over a hundred blog posts this year. While lots of other activities dropped off significantly while my main focus was to just keep on keepin’ on, I still found solace and reward in writing and publishing. Like I said early on in The Situation, my website is an outlet for me:

While you’re stuck inside, your website is not just a place you can go to, it’s a place you can control, a place you can maintain, a place you can tidy up, a place you can expand. Most of all, it’s a place you can lose yourself in, even if it’s just for a little while.

Here are some blog posts that turned out alright:

• Architects, gardeners, and design systems. Citing Frank Chimero, Debbie Chachra, and Lisa O’Neill.
• Hydration. Progressive enhancement. I do not think it means what you think it means.
• Living Through The Future. William Gibson, Arthur C.Clarke, Daniel Dafoe, Stephen King, Emily St. John Mandel, John Wyndham, Martin Cruz-Smith, Marina Koren and H.G. Wells.
• Principles and priorities. Using design principles to embody your priorities.
• Hard to break. Brittleness is the opposite of resilience. But they both share something in common.
• Intent. Black lives matter.
• Accessibility. Making the moral argument.
• T E N Ǝ T. A spoiler-filled look at the new Christopher Nolan film.
• Portals and giant carousels. Trying to understand why people think they need to make single page apps.
• Clean advertising. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising.

I find it strangely comforting that even in a year as shitty as 2020, I can look back and see that there were some decent blog posts in there. Whatever 2021 may bring, I hope to keep writing and publishing through it all. I hope you will too.

Terence Eden’s Blog

A blog post can be a plain text document uploaded to a server. It can be an image hosted on a social network. It can be a voice note shared with your friends.

Title, dates, comments, links, and text are all optional.

No one is policing this.

Robin Rendle — Good and useful writing

The most important lesson that blogging taught me is that writing is for thinking first, communication last.

WriteFreely

I hadn’t come across this before: a barebones blogging tool with built-in fediverse support—neat!

“You can be a carpenter this time around.” – Lucy Bellwood

A personal website is a lovely thing. Nobody will buy this platform and use it as their personal plaything. No advertisers will boycott and send me scrambling to produce different content. No seed funding will run out overnight.

Word Persons and Web Persons · roytang.net

This resonates with me.