Category: Writing

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For November 2013, I decided to try NaBloPoMo and post every day this month. I’d been getting all the NaNoWriMo emails, and while I didn’t have the time or story ideas (and Katie’s covering the “writing a novel” thing), I was a little nostalgic for a writing challenge. Today wraps up my participation in the event.

I learned two things about daily posting:

  1. It’s not as easy as it sounds, unless you’re willing to count the equivalent of a Tweet or Facebook status as a blog post.
  2. I would rather write fewer, higher-quality posts than more, lower-quality posts.

That quality vs. quantity issue especially bugged me when it came to my ongoing Les Miserables commentary. Those take a couple of hours to put together, and as a parent with a full-time job, free time is at a premium. I can think of a number of occasions when I sat down to work on my next article and realized no, I need to get a post up today, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to finish that one. Some of the resulting posts are worth it, including a few where I would have written a short note, but found that I had a lot more to say on the topic. Some, I’d probably delete tomorrow if I didn’t want to keep them up for the record.

I thought I’d do a breakdown of this month’s posts:

Broad Categories:
11 Life observations
9 Entertainment/reading
6 Photo-centric
4 Tech

Recurring Topics
5 Les Misérables
4 Trip to San Francisco
4 Local city observations
4 Comic conventions (the actual Long Beach con, wondering about WonderCon’s future)

Originality
19 Substantially new content at this blog only
4 Built around previously-posted photos (mostly from Instagram)
4 Short commentary posts linking to other content (3 of which were at least to my own stuff at another blog)
3 cross posts (two at Speed Force, one at Reading Les Mis)

I only resorted to blogging about blogging twice (except to fill out the links to my Les Mis articles and give them a little more substance), and only once did I just toss up a random photo to make deadline.

Full list (or if you prefer, a standard blog view of the posts):

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So, I think I’ve lost the NaBloPoMo challenge, since I failed to write anything yesterday. I had something planned and everything, but I’ve been blogging in the evenings, and felt sick last night and completely forgot that I even needed to. All I remember is lying on the couch, reading Les Miserables, and reading kids’ books to my son.

Although technically I did write a post for Speed Force on Wednesday, so I suppose I’m still in the clear.

It’s been an interesting process. I’ve found myself stumbling on topics to write about, observations that ordinarily I’d let drop, or in some cases start writing and never come back to again.

It’s also been a problem. Specifically with my Les Miserables commentary. I’m on page 1162 reading, almost at the end, but my posts are only up to page 843. I’d really like to get that going again, but while I had plenty of free time in the evenings on my business trip, now that I’m back to my normal life, I have a lot less free time.

If I’ve got half an hour, and an obligation to blog something, I’m going to use that half hour for something that I can write quickly, not to get started on something that’s ultimately going to take me three hours spread out over several days to finish. And that, IMO, is counterproductive to the goal of blogging more. I’m still of the opinion that in the long run, less frequent high quality content is better than more frequent low quality content.

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  • Geek Merit BadgesFanboy Scouts has launched a series of Merit Badges for Geeks including achievements for Speedster, Mt. Doom, Tie Fighter Pilot, Away Team, and more.
  • Privacy in terms of contextual identity. How you present yourself to your friends is not how you present yourself to your colleagues, and what you’re willing to share in each context is going to be different.
  • XKCD is probably right about the future of “old-timey” speech. “Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties?” We have a hard enough time getting the mid-twentieth century right, and that’s with people around who lived it!
  • Darryl Cunningham debunks the Moon Hoax in comic-strip form.
  • The new Kindle looks nice. They’re starting to get to the price/feature/polish point where I’d be tempted. (Well, except for that pesky DRM…) Also, Amazon launched Kindle for Android recently, but I haven’t tried it out. While it will run on Android 1.6, it’s a bit big for my G1 unless I clear out some other apps.
    Kindle Wireless 3G+WiFi.

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It’s clear that a lot of people don’t actually read web pages before they respond to them. They’ll do things like…

  • Contact someone with a similar name, even when it’s clearly the wrong sort of organization — say, a student writing club and not the bookseller that’s been causing them problems.
  • Ask a blogger for a job application for a company mentioned in the post.
  • Ask unrelated tech support questions on a blog post because they used the wrong search terms for their problem.
  • Ask for help creating Flash animations on a forum dedicated to the Flash super-hero, then get indignant when people have the gall to point out that they’re in the wrong place.

Now, usability guru Jakob Nielsen reports on a study showing just how much people don’t read. In the average visit, users only read 28% of your text if you’re lucky. You have to drop way down — to 111 words — just to count on visitors reading half of it.

Depressing, but it explains so much. And it suggests there’s a benefit to highlighting key phrases. If they’re only going to read ¼ of the text, you may as well make sure it includes the important stuff.

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Organization for Transformative Works – dedicated to protecting the expression of fan fiction, fan art, etc. (via Naomi Novik)

Open Standards, One Web, and Opera – Just why are standards important, anyway? (via Opera Watch)

Speaking of Opera, their EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft has been making waves. Responses at CSS3.info, Web Standards Project, Slashdot (edit: more Slashdot), Asa Dotzler, Opera Watch, plus a Q&A w/ Haarvard. My take: Good luck on unbundling, but if they can force Microsoft to catch up with the rest of the market in terms of standards support, I’m all for it.

Nissan vs. Nissan. On my way to work I saw a bumper sticker on an XTerra that said “In support of our freedom, it’s my last Nissan.” Huh? There was clearly a web address below it, but it was too small to read at that distance. So I looked up the phrase, and apparently there’s been a long-running dispute over the domain name nissan.com, between a small computer business named after its founder, Uzi Nissan, and the Nissan car company. The dispute was eventually resolved (correctly, IMO, since he has a legit reason to use the name) in favor of the little guy. On the other hand, I don’t see why the site makes such a big deal about Nissan’s “French Connection” to Renault.

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