By the way, here’s a meta update which I forgot to put out there. I have ended the trial of the Glass app — the subscription price was hefty for my usage. I am not a photographer, you see. So, I did not fit there. At the same time, I decided to pay for Ulysses and Reeder. I love both the apps, and they reduce that slight friction from the two activities that I love doing.
Meta
I updated my Now page today, the weekly reminders help. Sure, I don’t update the page every week. But I am doing that way frequently than what I would otherwise.
Some newsletters are just too long for my liking. I can read long ones if they are genuine essays, someone sharing what they are or have gone through. Some life experiences. Or something of interest for them. But when you curate, and still have hoards of links to some external content, I am not in. In short, long texts are fine for me. Not 100s of links.
When you say you curate, you should curate. Not include link to everything that you and your friends read.
If you were to take a guess, when do you think the term “microblogging” was first coined? Another term that was gaining popularity the same year was “vodcast”. I am relieved it didn’t catch on — neither the term nor the media format.
I modified my homepage today to group posts by date and sort in chronological order in the day. Why? I never liked the reverse-chronological order across.
It’s crazy how one’s mind works. Here are two posts separated by 4 years. I recently published one a couple of weeks back. I had published another in 2017. Both the posts talk about a similar observation, about the constant fight between the coder and a writer in me. It reads in such a similar manner. The choice of words, the structure, the flow. It should be pretty apparent to anyone who reads it that both the posts come from the mind. From the same author.
Surprisingly, when I wrote the recent post, I had no clue that I had written about the same topic earlier some time. In a way, then, the adage that “there’s no original work being written, but just rewrites” is not that far off.
Ulysses looks to be a really great app for writing all types of posts. Sure, it does not work cross platform - something I dearly wish it did. But I have iA Writer for that. My big problem at this point is I have no clue what editors I am paying for currently, for which platforms and in what form - subscriptions from Google Play Store, App Store or I have them out right purchased. I need to sort this mess up pretty soon. Sigh!
I am reading many people's writing process today and am absolutely stunned at how simple my writing needs are. I don't write drafts after drafts in any tool. All my drafts are one line ideas in my notebook or saved articles with tags "to-write". I find time for writing and complete a post about an idea or article.
For that matter, most of my posts are spontaneous -- I get a thought and I put it down into a post. I don't insert too many images, individual or as part of the posts. Sure, there are times when I need to spend time on researching or explaining some projects that I am working on. Or when I am writing a fiction. Such posts are very rare, though (and continue to become even rarer as the time goes on).
Plus, I like writing in Markdown. But I am not too attached to the language. I could very well go about writing posts after posts without using any of the Markdown syntax. The most I do is emphasize a word or a line. It won't matter to me how I do it. That said, I continue to enjoy writing my post in Markdown editors and would do that wherever I get a chance.
There was a time when all my posts originated in some text editor installed on my laptop. But that's not the case any more. Most of the posts that I write are in a portal of sorts hosted on web - mainly Quill. (I wish Micro.blog had a better writing interface, though. The current one is too basic and doesn't work well for longer posts). On a mobile device, I only write microposts and I would post them from some Micropub client -- I use Micro.blog apps (Gluon or Dialog) or Indigenous.
All in all, I have realized I have a simple publishing workflow. I open a web or mobile app, put down my thoughts and hit publish. So, what use do I have for the text editors any more?
I dislike the fact that I have published very few long form posts recently. It's as if I can only think in micro form. Should it matter? I don't think so. But I have slowly come to the realization that I am writing with one eye on the character count. It's really foolish of me to do that. But I do this subconsciously.
Somewhere deep down, a thread also continuously evaluates how the post is going to look in a timeline -- the only one where I believe it matters would be Micro.blog. Again, it's foolish. But I have realized it affects me. If it didn't, I would be publishing more posts with titles.
I need to bring my mind out of the habit to character check my posts.