Month: May 2011

The Problem — or So It Would Seem — With the Em Dash  →

Noreen Malone’s case — please hear her out — against the em dash:

What’s the matter with an em dash or two, you ask?—or so I like to imagine. What’s not to like about a sentence that explores in full all the punctuational options—sometimes a dash, sometimes an ellipsis, sometimes a nice semicolon at just the right moment—in order to seem more complex and syntactically interesting, to reach its full potential? Doesn’t a dash—if done right—let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?

The Problem — or So It Would Seem — With the Em Dash

Auctioning of the Unabomber’s Personal Effects  →

This link is to a Flickr set featuring images of some of the personal effects of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, which are being auctioned by the U.S. Marshals Service. The pictures are curiously interesting and frightening at the same time — particularly the typewriter which Ted Kaczynski used to type his 35,000-word “Unabom Manifesto”.

Proceeds from the auction will be given to Kaczynski’s victims.

(Via ★feltron.)

Auctioning of the Unabomber’s Personal Effects

Balancing Think and Feel

Yesterday I wrote about how easy it is to over-think and over-edit the things I write about and link to on the site. This is also something Ben and I talked about in the latter half of last week’s episode of The B&B Podcast.

It’s a topic spanning much more than just link blogging. I think it goes so far as to encompasses leadership, creativity, and entrepreneurialism as a whole. The concept is to find the balance between think and feel. On one hand you have logic and reason, and on the other hand you have passion and zeal.

There is a way to do things where, if you find something you’re passionate about, you jump right in. And then analyze and gauge each step along the way.

But what if we flipped that approach from time to time?

When you find something you’re passionate or excited about, then think about it for a long time. Make boundaries. And then? Go for it. Let passion and zeal drive us through each step as we keep within our pre-determined boundaries.

The idea is that sometimes, instead of working with restraint inside of passion, try to put passion inside of restraint.

Balancing Think and Feel

Making Inconsequential Decisions Can Hinder Your Ability to Make Important Decisions  →

Tony Schwartz:

It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying to resist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.

“Acts of choice,” the brilliant researcher Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have concluded, “draw on the same limited resource used for self-control.” That’s especially so in a world filled more than ever with potential temptations, distractions and sources of immediate gratification.

I met a man recently who has the same thing for lunch every day because it’s one less decision he has to make. This, apparently, is why.

Making Inconsequential Decisions Can Hinder Your Ability to Make Important Decisions

Writing a Weblog Full-Time

When I began writing shawnblanc.net full-time I was worried that I’d run out of things to write about. There are only so many apps I use all the time which I find worthy of in-depth reviews, and I’m not really one for staying on top of posting commentary pieces about every bit of breaking news.

So far I have had no trouble finding topics to write about. In fact, most of what I’ve published since going full-time has not been on the list of what I was planning to write so far. Meaning, hardly any of the articles that I was planning to write when I began have been written yet. There is still much I want to write about and there are new things arising every day.

So I find myself with the opposite problem, in that there is not enough time in the day for me to write all that I want to, and that, my friends, is a very good conundrum.

However, I will say that it has been difficult choosing what to write about. I am good at writing about things I am involved with and have experience using — such as software and hardware reviews — but am not so confident writing about more abstract issues which I am not as intimately familiar with (such as business model and industry analysis). And while I certainly enjoy writing detailed reviews about software, I haven’t yet decided if that is all I ever want to write. Moreover, I have only ever written reviews about apps that I use and enjoy. But that list is somewhat finite, which means I will, at some point, need to begin writing about software that I am not completely sold on as user. Fortunately, since this job is my full-time gig, I can allow myself the time needed to truly live with an app and get acquainted with it — even if that I am only using it for the sake of reviewing it.

As far as links go, I try to only post links to the things I find interesting or entertaining — something that I found worthwhile in one way or another.

Unfortunately, I am finding just how easy it is to over-think what I choose or chose not to link to. Over thinking these nuanced details can strangle the life out of my work. And so I have been working to focus more on the feel of what I write about and link to rather than over thinking those items. Instead of logically deducing based on n number of factors if such-and-such is worthy of a link, I base it on emotion — do I want to link to it?

In a way, I have to pretend that I’m the only site out there. That if someone was interested in the things I’m interested in, how then would they find out about those things unless I wrote about them? I can’t pass by something I find exciting or interesting because I see that others are already talking about it. That would be a road to silence.

Of course, in another way, I have to pretend that I am not the only site out there. There is so much happening in the tech / design / writing / coffee-drinking community every day that there is simply no way I can stay on top of it all. Let alone write thoughtful and in-depth pieces about everything noteworthy. Harder than choosing what to write about has been choosing what not to write about. And then being okay with leaving certain notable topics left untouched.

At the end of the day, the best advice I can give myself is to: (a) put great care and thought into what I write about and how I write it; and (b) don’t take myself or my site too seriously.

Writing a Weblog Full-Time

The Burning House  →

In similar fashion to The Items We Carry, The Burning House is: “what would you grab if your house was burning down?”

Honestly, Anna and I don’t have anything in this home that we couldn’t do without other than one another and the memories, music, and work we have stored on our computers.

This reminds me that since I began working at home two months ago I no longer have an off-site backup of my digital assets. It’s all the stuff that’s on my computer — photos, journal entries, music, financial information, etc. — that is irreplaceable. I think I’ll be looking into a good online backup service so that if anything catastrophic ever does happen all we need to think about is getting out.

The Burning House

Update On the “Previous Entries” Experiment  →

Two weeks ago, as an experiment, I removed the “Previous Entries” link on the bottom of the homepage that would take you Page 2 of the site. In its place I put a link to recent articles, reviews, and interviews.

My reasoning for the experiment was to test my hypothesis that those who wind up at the bottom of the homepage are most likely new readers. And therefore, offering a link to the “best of” content would be more relevant for them and more likely to convert them into regular readers. My metrics for success in this experiment were increase in overall site pageviews and an increased rate of growth of RSS subscribers.

Today I compared the analytics of the site for the past two weeks against the two weeks prior to the experiment.

During the two-week experiment visits to the Reviews, Interviews, and Articles archive pages all went up noticeably. Which was to be expected. However, there was virtually no marked increase in overall pageviews or RSS Subscribers.

As a third metric — reader feedback — the vast majority of feedback I did receive was that current readers missed having a link to Page 2.

And so, I’ve put the link to Page 2 back at the bottom of the homepage.

On a side note: the most-clicked-on link of the recent articles, reviews, and interviews was to the Reviews page. Clearly that’s a hot topic, so I added that as a stand-alone link in the footer in addition to the archives.

Update On the “Previous Entries” Experiment