Excursions

Ganeshotsav - a festival that has me mesmerised for 10 days. One that makes me forget all the crippling and cribbing of the routine mundane life. That makes me attempt to overcome my shortcomings, imbuing me with a sense of calmness and a zeal.

One’s devotion to a deity is about beliefs. And I believe I am blessed with a divine presence during Ganeshotsav.

No wonder then that Anant Chaturdashi - a day of immersion of Ganesh idols - dawns with a sense of emptiness, restlessness. But irrespective, Bappa has to be given a smiling farewell. And 2017 was different. News18 has captured the whole festive mood really well — just a good click for reference. Do visit that link.

This has to be the best click and a great comment on what Ganesh Visarjan should, and does, represent.

https://twitter.com/statuses/905333071221624832>}}

And of course, I had to bide farewell to my Bappa. Somewhere at the corner of my eye, I did have a tear shining.

Ganpati Bappa Morya. Pudhchya Varshi Lavkar Ya.

I like to write. Emphasis is important because that is exactly what I like to do. I do not want to make the writing process too complicated. I just want a blank canvas that I can fill up with some thoughts in the form of words. It should not matter then if I open it from a desktop or a laptop, a smartphone or a tablet. A blank canvas, without any bells and whistles.

But even after 10 years of the whole smartphone revolution with the iPhone launch, it is surprising why the platforms that crown themselves as champions for writers’ interests still fail at enabling them to write on the go. The interface they provide are either too loaded or are just non-existent. For example, this is where Wordpress wants the writers to write at on mobile devices.

Can this be made any more clunky? Why does it need so many options? Why can’t words be interpreted as they are written¹? Why does the interface still need to ask for all this added metadata - especially on a mobile device where the space is already a limited resource?

It’s just the same with many of the professional publishing platforms. They just have too clunky an interface. Squarespace, same. Wix, ditto. At least with these, it can be understood that the target user base just may not be the writers and the bloggers sort. A look at the templates that they provide and it is clear that they want to target the designers, the professionals in photography or the small businesses. However, irrespective of what sites their users own, they need to understand that they do write too, at times. And when they present their intention to do so, shouldn’t you provide the cleanest experience you possibly can? Why load them with too many choices?

Ghost comes closest to ticking all of the right boxes. It has a markdown based clean editing interface with a preview option. However, during my extended usage while I was hosting this site with Ghost, I found that the interface was a bit too buggy and a lot heavy. It tries to do a lot many things which it needn’t really do. When I write, I just do not need a constant CMS and metadata access for the post neither do I need a live preview of what am writing. Unfortunately, it just cannot sort out the minor niggles².

And then there is the flag-bearer of writer’s messiahs - Medium. This platform impressed me with how clean the writing experience was. That was before I intended to do so on a mobile device.

Yep. No comments. “You can’t be a serious writer if you want to write from a mobile device. Get a typewriter and then we will talk. We are for the serious lot.”

“But there is an app for that,” you say. Yes, there is. But first of all, there is nothing the app does that cannot be fit in the web application. Secondly, the app itself is extremely limited. There is no support for series or publications, yet, for example.

This just makes no sense to me. I just cannot stress this any stronger - Do not neglect mobile. Today’s mobile devices (especially, the iPad) are getting a lot capable. There is nothing they cannot handle. A plain text editor should be a cakewalk. Alas, I still do hit such forced hinderances.

"Not Yet Mobile Friendly"! Sorry, in today's age that just makes no business sense. pic.twitter.com/DQjJArqNWj

— Amit Gawande (@_am1t) August 22, 2017

Anyway, as an attempt to mediate, I propose the following guidelines for writing interfaces for all the writing/blogging platforms out there, especially on mobile.

1. Interfaces need to be clean. Just let the text be written without any onscreen distractions.
2. No toolbars, no sections, no configurations.
3. If emphasis to the text needs to be added, let the word(s) be highlighted and provide the limited options then.
4. If image is to be added, provide option as a shortcut (for example, long press on new line)
5. Forget 1-4. Explore and enable Markdown with easy (not live, but closer to WYSIWYG) preview mode.
6. Remember, many writers do prefer writing in dark. Preferably provide a dark mode.

Yes, just roll an empty screen with a blinking cursor³. Nothing more. Let the writers fill it up their imagination.

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1. I understand it is Wordpress and hence there is a plugin for everything. But the point isn’t if a clean writing interface can be plugged into a platform. Point is why should there be a need for one.↩

2. Ghost is not an easy publishing platform to work with. You either need the technology inclination of a developer to self-host and roll your own instance of Ghost or pay way too much to get access to their managed platform (Pro) service. For comparison, it is cheaper to get a website with Squarespace with E-Commerce setup than to get an online blog with Ghost. That’s just not competitive enough.↩

3. Svbtle does it well. So does pen.io. Not sure why these services struggle to exist. They have understood what writers need the best. But they just couldn’t convince many to join them. Wish Medium and others learn from these and roll out some more writer friendly interfaces on mobile.↩

A good round-up by Quartz on why Microsoft failed with Windows Phone; an attempt is also made to run with an alternate reality where Microsoft has avoided that. Its based on Microsoft declaring “Windows Phone is free”.

Compared to Google, Microsoft has much stronger connections to hardware OEMs on the one hand and software developers on the other. Its products are widely used and respected by business and consumer customers alike. By offering the Windows Phone platform for free, the company sacrifices licensing revenue, but this unnatural act is more than compensated for by the expansion of the Windows ecosystem. Windows PCs become more attractive, more compatible with the outpouring of mobile devices and applications created by enthusiastic hardware makers and eager app developers.

Biggest problem there? Microsoft just didn’t have a competitive solution in 2007-08. They were still rolling out devices with Windows Mobile OS¹ and were struggling to come up with their own alternative which would be distinct from what Apple and Google had on offer. Of course, they attempted and failed, before they finally launched a good enough solution with Windows Phone. But this was around 2010 - good 3 years after iPhone was launched. It just was too late.

So, I really think it would not have mattered if Windows Mobile was free. It just wasn’t good enough against iOS and Android. What Microsoft needed was a quick relook at their mobile strategy which their success with Windows just didn’t allow. Quartz does a good job to summarise the attempts Microsoft made to turn the tide. But abstracting it to “Windows Phone failure was easily preventable” is simply a stretch.

It wasn’t the culture. Microsoft failed because there just was no space to play between the killer duo of “open” Android that different OEMs combined owned the larger market share with and the “closed” iPhone that gobbled up the premium market.

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1. One, that had a Start button, a taskbar, a tool bar, a file system and even Internet Explorer. To get an idea of how lagging it was behind what iPhone OS and Android, just above is how it looked like in 2008.↩

A writer who also is a technology enthusiast is a worst combination. Every now and then there is a constant fight between the writer and the tech guy to divert the limited focus. The writer wants to write. The tech guy wants to evaluate the place, the setting where he is writing from. It is constant struggle. It needs to be well defined when the writer needs to be suppressed and when the other guy.

Suppressing writer is easy — rather writer does not need suppressing. He rarely shouts or fight backs. He is the simpleton; he gives up easy. The tech guy? Not him. He keeps popping his head every so often, questioning the person on how the writer is spending his time.

“Is this really the best platform you would be writing at? Look at that writing interface. It is so clunky. How the hell can you write here. I bet there are a lot of better options out there. Why won’t you just fix this? Why write when it is just not right?”

It is so difficult at times to keep the writer focused, to keep the tech guy far away from pestering. Only way I have found this to work is to give him no distractions. Nothing. Leave him with just a screen, a blinking cursor and a keyboard.

No mobile devices around, with screens constantly lighting up on every notification. No laptop devices with multi-window. No music. No television. Lock the two guys down — more often than not, the tech guy gives up and goes into a deep somber out of sheer boredom. The writer prevails.

Forecasting the future of technology has always been an entertaining but fruitless game. Nothing looks more dated than yesterday’s edition of Tomorrow’s World. But history can teach us something useful: not to fixate on the idea of the next big thing, the isolated technological miracle that utterly transforms some part of economic life with barely a ripple elsewhere. Instead, when we try to imagine the future, the past offers two lessons. First, the most influential new technologies are often humble and cheap. Mere affordability often counts for more than the beguiling complexity of an organic robot such as Rachael. Second, new inventions do not appear in isolation, as Rachael and her fellow androids did. Instead, as we struggle to use them to their best advantage, they profoundly reshape the societies around us.

This is such a great article from Tim Harford, a must read to understand how we have been always wrong while foreseeing where the technology is moving. Especially important is the fact that it was never the big-bang technological advances that changed the world.

But many world-changing inventions hide in plain sight in much the same way — too cheap to remark on, even as they quietly reorder everything.

Tim calls it the “toilet paper principle”. Again, so apt. He has a detailed run-down of many such important, but often overlooked events that deeply affected the multiple phases of industrial revolutions. Do read this article. It is a nice summary of what we have been getting wrong about the technology over time. Also, it lets us reevaluate our perspective and beliefs on where we see the advances to be coming from.

Everyday, I have a lot many thoughts about Medium these days. For some reason, I find it is turning out to be not so good a platform for writers. Unfortunately, even the reading experience is slowly degrading.

The posts there are too disparate, with the platform really struggling to present them in an easy-to-comprehend manner. Especially the fiction. A dark emotional rant on life is placed right next to an erotica. Yes, erotica.

https://twitter.com/statuses/901695978889068544

For some reason, Medium has no strict and defined policy around how to publish, tag and present these NSFW posts. It just is no reader’s paradise if one has to be fully attentive and on look out for these posts and people around you. Sigh! By the way that option you have to “Show fewer stories like this”? Yeah, about that. It does not work. Not sure if Medium team even has any backend logic coded for that. Bruh!

And don’t even get me started on how horrible Medium is for writing on the go.

Yes, that is a help document on “How to write?”. On an iPad. Not really sure what all is involved in writing a post on Medium that it can’t be done with Safari on iPad. Dumbfounded.

I have recently converted my blog to a website and, as I have already documented, I serve it as a static website. I have preferred this approach over a dynamic one that gets driven by a full-fledged blogging software or a publishing platform. Of course, these were not the only possible options. As is so well captured by Christopher Heng at his website¹, the options are just too many.

It wasn’t an easy call to select one, it never is. Every option one chooses has its own advantages and disadvantages. And, of course, going with a standalone website builder and serving the content as pure HTML had its own too. For me, though, benefits really outweighed the challenges.

Why choose a static website for blogs?

A static website is nothing but a string of HTML pages served by a hosted web server. Every document, blog post or update is a plain HTML page. Given this simplicity of existence, it has some key benefits that attracted me.

1. It’s quick and cheap to develop
2. It’s easy and cheap to host
3. It’s fast to be served

Again, Hugo captures them the best.

Improved performance, security and ease of use are just a few of the reasons static site generators are so appealing.

The most noticeable is performance. HTTP servers are very good at sending files—so good, in fact, that you can effectively serve the same number of pages with a fraction of the memory and CPU needed for a dynamic site.

I have already seen this benefit realised with the performance of my website too.

Static website has really helped the overall performance — avg response time has gone down from 1300ms to 300ms. 👊🏽😊 https://t.co/pPoQNMXCsM pic.twitter.com/udsTKM0RpO

— Amit Gawande (@_am1t) August 18, 2017

These benefits should attract every blogger out there looking for a simple manageable solution for their blogs. Then why aren’t all blogs served as static website? The answer is, of course, nothing’s perfect and static websites are not for all. They bring with themselves a list of challenges.

Creating static pages needs a bit of programming skill, and a lot of interest to slog it out over web design and development. In the longer run, maintaining these pages can become cumbersome if they are to be updated even so slightly, every now and then. Especially, if all you care about is the text you write, what gets placed around it is really not of much an interest to you. All you want to do is write and publish. You don’t want to awaken the web dev in you every time you want your footer to be updated or a page to be added.

Ironically, a rush to dynamic websites to solve this challenge is totally counter to what you really care about, the text. The text is light, the page carrying them needs to be the same. To have these generated every time someone requests for them² is just too costly. And to have them stored as database entries is just too messy. It is text, it needs to be stored as text.

Hugo (and the likes) provides a nice middle ground. Smashing Magazine summarizes it well.

Each generator takes a repository with plain-text files, runs one or more compilation phases, and spits out a folder with a static website that can be hosted anywhere. No PHP or database needed.

Hugo takes caching a step further and all HTML files are rendered on your computer. You can review the files locally before copying them to the computer hosting the HTTP server.

Isn’t it, after all, better to make the whole user-facing part of your website into a cache of servable HTML pages and have it generated and deployed locally — without loading the server with a programming runtime or a database? This is exactly what Hugo enables.

This helps to design, build, test and maintain the website without much of a hassle. And with Hugo, I have already hit all the benefits of a static website I mentioned above, bypassing the challenges it presents. A one-time effort to design and build the website is handled with little pain; now I can focus on writing.

Workflow to write, especially on mobile

There is another challenge with such websites that are built locally and served statically - all they contain is the final product, the HTMLs. Any change needs to be followed by a rebuild and redeploy. There is no online CMS to handle your content from a browser, especially no WYSIWYG³ web editor to create or modify your posts. Of course, one way to handle this is to deploy a separate light-weight CMS.

But for blogging, there is a simple way. All you need is a continuous deployment setup and a couple of applications to handle writing and publishing your posts. I have already explained how Netlify has helped me achieve the first part. Below is how I circumvent the second challenge⁴.

1. Write: It is important you can write from multiple places, especially your mobile devices. Web editors of the blogging platforms allow you just that, keeping your drafts ready for you to pick up from where you left earlier. A static website lacks this and so calls for some other alternatives.

   I use iA Writer to write all my posts. It has apps for all the platforms I own, iOS and macOS. It allows me to focus mainly on writing, automatically saving all the words as I write them. It also keeps all the posts synced up across all the devices, granting me the convenience of cross-device writing that web editors enable. I find it goes even a step further as it provides me a consistent experience across all the platforms, as compared to the messy state of online writing — more on this later.

2. Deploy: Doing this from desktop was always trivial; handling this from mobile was what puzzled me. However I managed to get a workable solution. Once I have the post ready, I use Git2Go to push the final Markdown (.md) files to my Git repository. Net lify does the rest, making the post available at the website. Any minor modifications, it is just an update with iA Writer to these .md files and a push via Git2Go.

3. Workflow: Though it is easy to say just write at one place and push to repository, it would be a significant effort to get a file, as per Hugo-defined format, ready for writing. Any generator needs some added metadata, front matter in Hugo land, embedded along with the content to create a serve-ready HTML. Adding this to every post I write would have been a downer; especially with my intention of writing different types of posts - fiction, non-fiction and links.

   It needed Workflow, I mean literally. The Workflow app is a boon for anyone who wants to automate common tasks on iOS. It is a powerful tool with hundreds of actions that can be easily stitched together to create a workflow — one that can handle complex tasks with a single click. For example, here’s my workflow to get a link post ready.

• Once I find a link I want to share and add some comment on, I open it in Safari and just copy the content I want to comment on
• I trigger the relevant workflow from the share sheet
• Workflow then
  • fetches the template for the link post
  • adds the link to the metadata as the source URL
  • adds the current date and time as the post date
  • adds the title I provide (or the title of original post if none provided)
  • takes the content from clipboard, adds to the content body
  • saves the file and opens it in iA Writer to be edited further
• Once the post is ready to be published, I just export the post as Markdown from iA Writer and import it to Git2Go in the content section.
• Commit & Push, and the link post is ready on the website.

This is just one such workflow. I have managed to create one each for every type of posts I write. Workflow does the routine heavy lifting for me, allowing me to focus on writing.

I know just this effort might be overwhelming for many. The act of building, managing and updating the static websites is not everybody’s cup of tea. However, for me, I have found that this triplet of enablers - iA Writer, Git2Go and Workflow - serves me well. I have never been so satisfied with either the website or the process involved in publishing to it. I am pretty confident this setup, with minor modifications, will last long.

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1. Heng’s website “theSiteWizard” is really a great resource for anyone interested in building or maintaining their own websites. It doesn’t matter the scale — be it for an individual blog or a full fletched website for your group.↩

2. Of course, the dynamic generators, especially the CMSes like Wordpress and other, do handle this well now-a-days by caching the HTML pages to avoid the unnecessary delays of generating and delivering the pages to the end users.↩

3. What You See Is What You Get↩

4. I focus mainly on the platforms I own i.e. iOS and macOS. Of course, if you have a different set of devices, your solution may vary, or may not exists at all (chances are slim for that though).↩

Ganeshotsav. The festival that brings families together. The festival that makes everyone forget about their individual differences and work with a sole purpose to welcome Lord Ganesh to their homes, their region. No one holds any grudge against anyone for a few days when Bappa is with them. Everyone contributes just towards making the event better.

It starts with planning Bappa’s welcome; families plan together.

Then its about implementing; families implement their plans together.

And then it is all about fun; and of course again, families have fun together.

Lord Ganesh brought our family together this time again. And I am sure He was smiling his happy smile looking at the family enjoying His presence. Ganpati Bappa Morya!

Historical #SolarEclipse2017

Historical it was tagged. It had so much of hype and so much of build-up. It really was surprising how much big of an event it was made. And of course, given I inadvertently end up consuming more news blurbs from US, I had logged, wondering where, of all the possible sources streaming this event live, should I catch this event as it happens.

I am happy I did. It indeed was an event with a style. Eclipses are always captivating, they make you realise of your order & significance in nature’s canvas. And given it happened in US gave this one the best opportunity to be caught in all its glory. And of course I wanted to Journal all the best posts about it. Starting with mine.

https://twitter.com/statuses/899687057496317959

And of course there had to be a timelapse of this mesmerising event.

https://twitter.com/statuses/899685904553451522

International space station did not miss a chance to photo bomb the Eclipse.

https://twitter.com/statuses/899679364920389632

And then this capture. Sigh. This one post makes you realise how minute you are in grand scale of things when you capture nature playing its games.

https://twitter.com/statuses/899728331364458496

Sana hated Joel. It was not because he was a terrible person. It was, rather, for exactly the opposite reason. He was a gem of a person.

He always adorned his face with a wide, charming smile. A smile that captivated everyone, but was neither an attempt at hiding some innate stupidness nor a craving for being characterised as “the cheery guy”. It was all authentic. At work, he was best at what he did - extremely smart and diligent. He mesmerised everyone in the team, inside or the outside, with his knowledge and his stories. Sana had not yet come across a single topic which had him stumped.

Sana, on the other hand, was miserably inadequate at work. She rarely completed stuff assigned to her on her own, helping others was unthinkable. She wasn’t too keen either, as it involved interacting with them. As part of a group, she was perceived to be the pensive dumbo. She rarely added anything to a conversation, but got always swayed by everyone’s perspective. More often than not, she left a conversation being bitter for her inability to contribute.

Not Joel. He was never seen fussed. Outside of work, he dialled his impressiveness up a notch. He was a terrific singer — Sana believed he was good enough to be a lead singer of any band. Every party had a performance from the cheery guy. Him, strumming guitar, and his soulful crooning.

Sana had no interests, no passions. She was into her late twenties, and she had no profile to boast of. Every attempt of hers to break free was shot down mercilessly by her fate. Some by the fateful accident that took her family away. Some by the untimely fire that took her friends away. Fate never allowed Sana to be the unfettered child, burdening her always with the needs of ever debasing circumstances.

“Sana?”

Sana was woken up by a collective shrill around her. Everyone was looking at her. And she, through her teary eyes, had been looking at Joel, a usual guitar in his hand. She, then, heard Joel speak.

“Yes, her. She is a great singer. I have heard her croon many times.”

Fate, over her life, had nurtured Sana to be a grouchy wench. Sana hated Joel for dissuading her from being herself.