Chuck Grimmett

Archives

Category: Ideas

  • Digital gardens need RSS

    I was emailing with Aaron Young tonight about his digital garden and why I like to follow RSS feeds for digital gardens.

    Blogs these days are too polished and people don’t post enough on them. Old blogs used to be much more experimental and something that folks posted to multiple times a day without giving it a second thought.

    Now public digital gardens are much more interesting, IMO. People capture what they are researching, working on, and thinking about, and I usually find RSS feeds for peoples digital gardens much more interesting than I find their blogs.

    There is a much higher rate of discovering new things and interesting ideas in digital garden feeds than blog feeds. People generally write blogs for others first, whereas they write digital gardens for themselves first, and that is where the magic is 🪄

    Sadly, a lot of really cool digital gardens don’t have RSS feeds. They should. Think of it as an interop layer for your notes, allowing not only you to make connections between your notes, but other people to make connections, too. They should have pingbacks or webmentions, too, so you can see those connections and links.

    I’ve added all of this to notes.cagrimmett.com, my digital garden built on WordPress. Still, lots to improve there. I view it as a long-term project, something I want to exist for the rest of my life and hopefully beyond it, and I make it just a little bit better every day. I need even more interop on there as well, essentially being able to publish there from every other tool I use. I’ll get there.

  • What are digital gardens?

    At work a few months ago, I mentioned the concept of digital gardens on a call. Not everyone knew what digital gardens were, and the term means different things to different people using it, so I put together a P2 about what I think a “digital garden” is.

    What is a digital garden?

    • A collection of thoughts, ideas, highlights, annotations, quotes, summaries, and notes that are richer than a tweet, but lack the timestamped nature of a blog post or published essay.
    • Digital gardens are tended to and evolve over time. Sometimes they grow, sometimes they get trimmed back. Though they change, they have the four-dimensional permanence of a river or Theseus’s Ship.
    • A digital garden embodies the nature of working in public and learning out loud: Sharing your current understanding and allowing others to learn from it.
    • Like entangled roots and interwoven vines, the individual plants of digital gardens form a latticework of bi-directionally linked content that supports and encourages bridging and pollination to further understanding.

    to link, annotate, change, summarize, copy, and share — these are the verbs of gardening

    Mike Caulfield in The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

    Where is this term from?

    I first started noticing people I follow talking about it in April of this year: Maggie Appleton, Tom Critchlow, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Venkatesh Rao, Andy Matuschak, Anna Gát, and Joel Hooks.

    Maggie Appleton found the earliest use of the term, which harkens back to the old school web: Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.

    It is similar to a commonplace book, another popular term on the IndieWeb. A Zettlekasten comes to mind, too.

    Essays to check out

    Commonly used tools

    Some thoughts, digital garden-style

    • Web technology enables some cool things:
      • Version control allows users ability to see how digital artifacts change over time.
      • Bi-directional linking brings the Wikipedia-style wormhole exploration to other websites, increasing the scope of knowledge exploration.
        • WordPress’s trackbacks and pingbacks are a great start to bi-directional linking. Webmentions are another. Category-style taxonomy pages need to get added to the mix, too.
      • Live preview of links (transclusion) on hover or focus
      • Linked footnotes and sidenotes with references
      • Highlighting and sharing/reblogging/regardening of other content and notification with trackbacks, webmentions, and pingbacks.
      • Hierarchical post types for hierarchical content, tagging for non-hierarchical content
      • Links to relevant related content by search indexing
      • Real-time glossaries for slang and jargon
    • P2tenberg (the block-based comment editor built into P2) is awesome for front-end editing and is likely crucial to any digital garden built on WordPress.
    • Public wikis are digital gardens of sorts, but build to be highly collaborative, whereas digital gardening is more of a personal endeavor, or at least relatively small groups.
    • Imagine if we applied Edward Tufte’s principles in a web-first way, rather than just porting his style guide to CSS.

  • At The Remnant: Radical Individualism, Satisfaction, and Irresponsibility

    At The Remnant: Radical Individualism, Satisfaction, and Irresponsibility

    https://theremnant.substack.com/p/response-radical-individualism-satisfaction

  • What work/life balance means to me

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    I have a certain capacity for creative output. That level may increase or decrease over time, but it stays relatively constant day-to-day.

    You can think of this capacity as tokens that I have available to spend each day. I can either spend these tokens at my full-time job, at a side gig, or on a personal project.

    I feel most balanced when I use 80% of my creative capacity at my full-time job and 20% elsewhere.

    When I use 100% of my capacity at my full-time job for an extended period of time (say 2 weeks or more), I feel unbalanced. My overall creative capacity starts to decline. Some might call this feeling burned out.

    When I use more than 20% on personal projects or side gigs (i.e. less than 80% at work) for more than two days in a row, I feel unbalanced, like I’m neglecting my work responsibilities. Like I’m falling behind and my output isn’t up to par.

    I’ve never taken complete breaks from creating things. The manifestation just tends to shift. On vacations I tend to pick up photography and journaling to fill the creative gap. Sometimes drawing. During the holidays I tend to make more elaborate meals and try making new cocktails.

    I’ve also never shifted 100% of my capacity into personal projects for an extended period. I haven’t been unemployed for more than a week in the past 7 years. Vacations are breaks from personal projects as much as traditional work, so that is why the output tends to shift to photography, journaling, and drawing.

    I routinely go 3-4 weeks at a time at a 95/5 split on work/personal. Those times my personal creative output tends to be listening notes from podcasts and cooking. Days during high work periods where I manage to put out a longer blog post, I’m almost certainly eating leftovers or takeout. (Tonight, for instance: 3 blog posts plus curating a bunch of book recommendations on Likewise and I ate leftover soup for lunch and made a taco salad from leftovers in the fridge for dinner.)

    I radically cut down the amount of side gigs I take on in order to prioritize personal projects. In fact, I have no side gigs going on at the moment.

    What would my creative output look like when focused 100% on the personal side? I haven’t experienced that since high school and college, but the photography projects I focused on during those periods still rank among what I consider my best. Even periods where I’ve shifted to a 20/80 split on work/personal resulted in projects I’m proud of and look upon fondly.

    In the next few years, I’d like to take a complete month away from full-time work and focus on personal projects for the entire time. Deliberately throw myself out of balance in a way I’m not used to and see what I create.

  • Series are eclipsing movies

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    Cameron Sorsby asked the Praxis staff today what our top 3-5 favorite movies are, off the top of our heads. I came up with 3 easily, but none were recent. Then I realized that no movie I’ve watched for the first time in the last four years is memorable. Series are getting so much better and eclipsing movies since they are free from networks and ad breaks.

    What will the next leap forward for movies look like? Netflix/Amazon Prime hasn’t changed much for that format. What’s next?

  • Venkatesh Rao on Big Data, Machine Learning, and Blockchains

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    Venkatesh Rao had a good take on the big data/machine learning/blockchain mania in Breaking Smart a few weeks ago:

    Many people, database experts among them, dismiss Big Data as a fad that’s already come and gone, and argue that it was a meaningless term, and that relational databases can do everything NoSQL databases can. That’s not the point! The point of Big Data, pointed out by George Dyson, is that computing undergoes a fundamental phase shift when it crosses the Big Data threshold: when it is cheaper to store data than to decide what to do with it. The point of Big Data technologies is not to perversely use less powerful database paradigms, but to defer decision-making about data — how to model, structure, process, and analyze it — to when (and if) you need to, using the simplest storage technology that will do the job.A organization that chooses to store all its raw data, developing an eidetic corporate historical memory so to speak, creates informational potential and invests in its own future wisdom.

    Next, there is machine learning. Here the connection is obvious. The more you have access to massive amounts of stored data, the more you can apply deep learning techniques to it (they really only work at sufficiently massive data scales) to extract more of the possible value represented by the information. I’m not quite sure what a literal Maxwell’s Historian might do with its history of stored molecule velocities, but I can think of plenty of ways to use more practical historical data.

    And finally, there are blockchains. Again, database curmudgeons (what is it about these guys??) complain that distributed databases can do everything blockchains can, more cheaply, and that blockchains are just really awful, low-capacity, expensive distributed databases (pro-tip, anytime a curmudgeon makes an “X is just Y” statement, you should assume by default that the(X-Y) differences they are ignoring are the whole point of X). As with Big Data, they are missing the point. The essential feature of blockchains is not that they can poorly and expensively mimic the capabilities of distributed databases, but do so in a near-trustless decentralized way, with strong irreversibility and immutability properties.

  • Quick iPad Sketches

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    One evening last week I had the idea to draw some quick sketches to illustrate some concepts in the Praxis curriculum. I used my iPad, Apple Pencil, Procreate, Paper by 53Archived Link, and Pixelmator.

  • Building a Wide Base of Knowledge

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    Someone I’m advising asked me this morning how to build a wide base of knowledge across many subjects and disciplines. Here was my answer:

    The short answer is that you need to be curious. Specifically:

    1. Read widely.
    2. Ask people what they are working on and dig in to understand. Ask lots of questions. Spend lots of time listening.
    3. Work on your memory. If your memory isn't that great, take lots of searchable notes.
    4. Build good relationships with people who you can ask about things.
    5. Build up mental models: Conceptual understandings of how things are structured and work.

  • That was a good keynote. Makes me excited about Apple’s future again. I’m preordering a 10.5″ iPad Pro. I’ve been waiting a full year for an update to the line and this looks incredible.

  • First radish of the season! (D’Avignon)

  • A Prediction for the 2020 Election

    I think that the 2020 presidential election will finally be when we’ll see colors other than red, white, and blue showing up as main branding colors in a mainstream candidate. 

    The 2016 election and people’s response to Trump paved the way for “outsiders” and given people permission to color outside the lines. 

    I’d love for that to lead to a fracturing of the two party system into dozens of smaller parties, but I don’t think that is going to happen anytime soon. We’ll have to settle for more exciting campaign branding. Baby steps. 

  • How to Avoid Pastoralism

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    I’m rereading Breaking Smart Season 1 right now and I got to thinking about Rao’s concept of pastoralism vs prometheanism and how to avoid it. 

    Whenever you find yourself pining for a specific technological solution, especially one that was dreamt up more than 15 years ago, ask yourself whether or not you want the actual specified solution or to solve the problem which the thing you pine for was supposed to solve. 

    If it is the later, you should work on a new solution that takes into account the changed social and economic situation in the time that has elapsed and what is now technically possible that wasn’t before.

    Don’t keep working toward a technically difficult, but outdated, solution just for nostalgia’s sake. Question your motives and work toward solving the problem again. 

  • Focused vs Unfocused Reading

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    1. The gap between focused and unfocused reading is huge, especially when compounded over time. 
    2. Reducing distractions can lead to huge improvements in the number of pages read and understood. Maybe even more than traditional speed reading methods. 
    3. On my flight to Chicago this weekend, I read half of James Hogan’s Inherit the Stars. On the flight back to NYC, I reread 60% of Breaking Smart Season 1. Each leg was a little over 2 hours. I got through much more of each of these books than I have in equivalent amounts of time at home. It was like I had tunnel vision on the flight because I couldn’t get up and had no distractions available. 
    4. I need to do a better job at implementing airplane-like focus at home so that I can cover more ground in less time. I’m going though the 10 Days to Faster Reading book right now, but its methods aren’t that appealing to me. Working on my focus might be a better route. 

  • At dinner with Amanda’s French-Canadian Grandmother: “I don’t drink Bud Light. It tastes like rat saliva. Give me a nice IPA.”

  • Ted Kooser on Writer’s Block

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    Writing Routines, a great new sites that gives behind-the-scenes look at the daily habits of writers and authors, has an interview with Ted Kooser, a former US Poet Laureate. I love his answer to a question on writer’s block:

    William Stafford, one of our great poets, said that the best thing to do about writer’s block is to lower your standards, and it’s the best advice to give someone who’s stalled.

  • Ideas for WordPress Projects

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    A la James Altucher’s Ten Ideas a Day

    1. Implementing microformats into a theme
    2. Make a Timeline Builder plugin
    3. Make a book review custom post type and template
    4. Export WordPress posts and import them into Day One
    5. Tutorials explaining typical WordPress structure
    6. Persistent to-do list posts
    7. Plugin or custom post type for documenting learning
    8. Reduce database calls with hardcoding things that won’t change in your own child theme
    9. Create defaults and new widgets for WPBakery’s Visual Composer
    10. Interact with WordPress via the REST API. Visualize posts with D3?

  • JavaScript Learning Project Ideas

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    A la James Altucher’s Ten Ideas a Day

    1. Daily quote feature with quotes from the Leonard Read Almanac. 
    2. Build a searchable page to go along with the almanac. Realtime search by date and topic. 
    3. Musicfor.work – take people’s Spotify inputs, sanitize, save, and display. Basic first, categories later. 
    4. Cocktail visualizations 
    5. Page that shows window width, window height, resolution, etc. 
    6. Header title typewriter 
    7. More Sol LeWitt art
    8. Interactive scrolling articles a la Pudding.cool
    9. Pre-made chart template with an online data editor
    10. Common features of JS explained and real examples of use
    11. D3.js snippet and/or boilerplate collection 
    12. What seeds to plant based on time of year and location
    13. National park photo map pulling in from Instagram
    14. Book filtering for my blog’s book notes
    15. Evernote lite: Collections of editable notes if logged in, viewable but not editable if not logged in. 

  • Good test for determining whether or not I’m actually hungry: Would I eat a carrot right now? If not, I’m probably just craving something sweet and I should drink some water instead.

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    I’ve been feeling stuck with some creative issues at work and decided to try a new tactic today: 

    • I spent 30 minutes digging into what specifically I was stuck on instead of just the general “I’m Stuck.” 
    • I picked one of the items on that list and turned it into a question. 
    • I wrote that question down and repeated it in my head a few times. Then I grabbed my notebook and a pen and went for a walk. 
    • I thought about the question while I walked and stopped along the way to write down what I was thinking. The ideas started flowing and I got a whole notebook page down about that particular question. 

    I go for a walk every day, but I usually listen to a podcast instead of using it to focus on a particular question. Defining the question beforehand and leaving my headphones at home allowed me to focus without my mind turning to whatever the podcast was about. 

  • The biggest advantage of a microblog: Lowering the posting barrier. I can post whatever I feel like instead of trying to make it “worthy.” I can get my ideas out with less anxiety. As I get into this mindset, I bet it will make putting stuff out elsewhere easier, too.