Sam Wilson: writing

Hand writing

Sam Wilson — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 16:15:00 GMT

Fremantle
2025 February 6 (Thursday), 12:15AM
· writing · linkblog ·

Hand writing, 5 February 2025:

While I find computers effective for writing longer prose, hand writing in a notebook affords me more space to think and note. I can stop and notice things around me without wondering what else there is to check on my computer. I can sit still and look around without obligation to write or to write full prose. If I think of something, I can note it down; otherwise, I can, as I wrote in my notebook, let my mind wander.

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Markor

Sam Wilson — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 09:45:00 GMT

Fremantle
2023 October 1 (Sunday), 5:45PM
· writing ·

I'm experimenting with writing blog posts on my phone, using Markor, and syncing them to Nextcloud, from where I can manually move them into my website once I'm back at the computer.

Not sure it's a good way to do things yet, but it seems promising. The auto-upload feature of Nextcloud works, although I'm not sure it's good to delete-after-upload because then every time I save in Markor it removes the file (but equally annoying is without that, when it uploads new versions every time). This might need some more thought.

Get Blogging!

Sam Wilson — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 01:57:00 GMT

2023 September 6 (Wednesday), 9:57AM
· writing · blogging ·

This is a good site to point people to when trying to explain why anyone should start a blog:

https://getblogging.org

A blog is an easy way to get started writing on the web. Your voice is important: it deserves its own site. The more people add their unique perspectives to the web, the more valuable it becomes.
Remember that your blog is yours! Your posts can contain exactly what you want them to: a sentence of text or a novel-length essay; photos and videos; audio; links and bookmarks. What you want to share is entirely up to you.

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Private drafts

Sam Wilson — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 08:30:54 GMT

2021 March 11 (Thursday), 4:30PM
· Twyne · writing · privacy ·

It's a bit odd: I've built this new blogging system with access control because I wanted to be able to write and not have posts be immediately visible to the world (unlike in MediaWiki). But now that I've got it up and running (mostly) I keep stopping myself writing random thoughts because I think that they're not ready for the public eye. I can just hide them!

I should look into adding a 'default view group' setting, so posts can default to private.

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Writing for the internet across a human lifetime

Sam Wilson — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 16:33:00 GMT

2020 November 3 (Tuesday), 12:33AM
· indieweb · writing · websites · CMSs ·

Writing for the internet across a human lifetime, Len Falken:

WRITING FOR THE INTERNET ACROSS A HUMAN LIFETIME
No more walled gardens, no more chains of complexity.
Today I declare what once was, is again. Never again will I run another invocation of a static site generator or document renderer. 80 to 100 characters per line is and will continue to be maximum width of English documents. No longer do I pull from social networks, but they will pull from me.
This is MY writing platform. Mine. Me. There is no way to censor or revoke my power. The Internet does not forget one byte, or one bit.

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Website status

Sam Wilson — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 04:22:00 GMT

on the train near Subiaco
2020 September 3 (Thursday), 12:22PM
· writing · blogging · websites ·

I've been working in various fronts lately, none of which have been my own website. This place feels like a complete mess, but I do have plans for it. I've been making some slight progress towards having all my photos here (or at least spread over my three personal wikis), and I also need to sort out the RSS feed situation (which is currently based on a fairly annoying and slow system). The indieweb HWC meetup was this morning but I wasn't awake enough for it, unfortunately.

Of course, the main point of a blog is to write, and I'm terrible at that at the moment. There's too much to write, and not enough time. Or at least, the time for writing exists quite separate to the time when the inspiration comes – at some point I'd like to sit quietly of a morning, explaining what I'm trying to do. But instead, I'm too busy banging my head against what I'm doing to relax enough to do that! Oh well. Another day.

In a café in Berkeley

Sam Wilson — Sun, 09 Dec 2018 21:32:00 GMT

Berkeley
2018 December 9 (Sunday), 1:32PM
· writing · recording ·

Is the internet a good place to start typing random thoughts? It feels like it’s probably not, because of all the “taken out of context”, “recalled in future years and laughed at”, and “what’s the point no one will see it” responses. But it also feels like random beginnings and unplanned words are the only things that will ever lead to more coherent and useful words, and that putting them out in the great wash of the online world is slightly better than hiding them away in a notebook in my own bottom drawer. I do write lots and lots of words that only I will ever see, and they’re usually pretty unpolished. I don’t think that what I put on this blog or Twitter or anywhere else is particularly good, but I do at least attempt to finish sentences and thoughts, and fix typos. Maybe that’s all I mean: that uploading ideas makes the brain follow through and express them, and in doing that there’s a surprising amount of satisfaction.

Email letters

Sam Wilson — Sun, 25 Feb 2018 01:15:00 GMT

Fremantle
2018 February 25 (Sunday), 9:15AM
· writing · archiving · correspondence · email · friends · letters ·

I’ve been attempting to write to people again lately. As in, proper letters on paper and in envelopes and stuck through holes in walls and doors. It doesn’t work though. Ten years ago I wrote to people, and it was reasonably easy although one had to ignore the anachronistic self-consciousness. Now, it feels like writing a telegram, for all the relevance it has to modern life. And doing so on some sort of rare letterpress’d form at that — the mechanics have become harder, the whole thing far less familiar. Where even is there a post box around here? Do stamps still come in booklets? What’s it even cost to send a letter? Only people having weddings send things in the post these days.

I once wrote a little system for writing email-letters. It was a bit like Gmail’s system of having the reply-box at the bottom of the to-and-fro conversation, except it went to further extremes of actually deleting the quoted reply text from emails, and of actually tracking correspondents as entities in their own right and not just by email address. It also prohibited writing to more than one person at once.

It feels like there’s a place for a letter-writing system that really is just email but also isn’t one’s normal email client (be that Fastmail, Gmail, Thunderbird, or whatever). Writing to a friend should be a different act to tapping off a note to a colleague or haggling with a civil servant. The user interface should reflect that. It should be simpler, calmer, and prioritise longer paragraphs and better grammar. (I’ve read similar sentiments relating to the design of the Discourse forum software; the developers of that want the software to shunt people towards better discussions, and I’m pretty sure Google don’t have anything like that idea with the Gmail interface. No one wants to write a letter on a blotter edged with full-colour advertisements for Fletcher’s Fantastic Fumigator, and Google want you to use the exact same interface for work and for social interaction. Doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.)

I’d still be using my email archiver, but it dates from an age before two-factor authentication, and improvements in the security of email providers broke it and I’ve not yet gotten around to fixing it. Perhaps it’s time to do so.

Ink or keyboard? (Revisited)

Sam Wilson — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 13:14:41 GMT

2011 August 14 (Sunday), 9:14PM
· Reading · Dichotomy · Ink · Typing · Writing ·

I was just sitting there, just now, reading the natural navigation book that Mum gave me earlier this year, and I was struck by just how nice it was to hold something physical, something nice, in my hands. I wanted to have more of that. I wanted to be a woodworker, making my house nice all over, and having things that are good and real. But then, it all seemed pointless, as well. Why have nice things? For what purpose? Just because they’re nice? Well, yes. That’s it, really. Nothing more. It’s about the present, and the personal, immediate experience of them. It’s not about the future, and how these things will fare in the coming decades and centuries. It’s also not about how sensible and efficient and practical these things are. The book, for instance: this afternoon Tristan and I popped in to the bookshop near the Stock Road markets, and it was lovely. Nothing special, just a normal second-hand bookshop — but it was real and immediate and did not look to the future or the past; it was just for now. I bought a couple of paperbacks, thinking to add to my growing collection of Penguin Classics. Now I feel like that’s all wrong: I can’t have these temporary, poorly-made paperbacks! Why not get an ebook reader?! That’s what a paperback is aiming to be! The simplest thing, least concerned with aesthetics and the feel of the thing in the hand. So paperbacks are superseded; but well-bound hard-covers aren’t. They’re objects of beauty in their own right. I should collect them, because they’re worth more than the sum of the words they contain. But I should not collect them, because there’s just no need.

There’s no need to have these things that are nice! They’re satisfying, in the moment, but if that for which they’re being used — and now I’m thinking more about books in which one writes, journals, than published books — is not a thing that is about the current moment, then what’s the point? No, worse than that: they’re detracting from the real purpose! I write, to get words down, and be able to re-read them in years to come; this is better done on a computer (which is backed up, and the words are printed, and in other ways assured to live on) than in a paper journal. I read, to hear the author, and not to be happy with the heft of the cardboard case and the smell of the pages; these are incidental. There are lovely things about the physical objects, and using them; but if the loveliness blinds me from getting better quality in the features that the objects exist for in the first place — exchange of ideas over time — then I’m losing out.

It’s a hard decision, and turn after turn I think I’ve made the wrong one… but ultimately, words are better off in digital form (remembering that they can always make it back on to the paper, and in multiple copies) than as ink in books. There are so many other objects that can be nice to hold, and physically satisfying to use; kitchen knifes, for example. Amazon aren’t going to replace them any time soon.