I read this post during my lunch a couple of weeks ago, and it reminded me of why I wanted to start posting more regularly on my blog. I want to a place where I can write publicly to try and develop my prose.

One of my favourite ways of to relax is by reading. I enjoy a good book and relish the opportunity to sit in a comfy chair and immerse myself in whatever world the author has crafted—a world they bring to life with their words, but which I bring to life with my imagination. When I approach a book with this understanding, reading transforms from a solo pastime (as many people believe it to be) into a partnership. You become the reading half of a partnership that happens asynchronously with the writer. The writer brings their ideas to life in words, but as the reader, you bring those words to life in your imagination.

When I realised this was the case, writing became something far richer and the type of writing I wanted to create became more meaningful. I realised I didn’t want to write purely to communicate an idea, I wanted to write something that connected with the reader. I wanted my part of the reading partnership to be more enriching for both the reader and writer together. I wanted to learn to write as a craft and to create prose that was enriching to those who read it regardless of the topic.

To me this is what makes a good writer: a person who can communicate an idea, tell a tale, or spin a yarn in such a way that makes reading a joy. They turn ten minutes into two hours without you even realising it. A person who can use words to carry the reader away from the troubles of this world and into a place that lets their imagination run riot.

We live in a world so focused on producing more, doing more, being quicker, and being so productive that the artist gets lost. Writing becomes instructional and functional such that it loses its whimsy or poetic nature. We must communicate what we want in the quickest way possible so that our short attention spans can cope and we don’t move on before the meat of a message is communicated. Of course there is an art to writing in this way, but I fear we are forgetting how to write in the traditional sense of writing. In a way that evokes emotions and engages all our senses. The best stories are the ones that use language to engage more than just our minds. We can smell what the character smells, hear what the character hears, see what they see, and our emotions connect with what they feel. We become part of the story as we turn each page and move from chapter to chapter. That is the kind of writing I wish to create and that is the kind of writing I wish to read.

I sat and watched the world go by this morning whilst enjoying a delicious cup of coffee. It was early on a Saturday morning, but people were up and about, beginning their weekend—perhaps going to work or running some early errands. I like people-watching; it’s interesting to think what people are doing. Why is that man rushing? Why does that lady, bless her, look so nervous?

This morning, what caught my attention was the clothes everyone was wearing, and in an incredibly judgemental moment I found my self wondering: when did we become such slobs? I include myself in this, but no one looked like they had paid any attention to what they were wearing. I had grabbed my jeans, a t-shirt, and a sweat shirt. There was a lady who looked like she was still wearing her pyjamas, a man in clothes that were three sizes too big for him, a girl in clothes three sizes too small for her, and a man wearing mismatched shoes. Not one person looked like they had made any effort to ensure they looked respectable before leaving the house. We are, generally, an under dressed society.

Recently, I’ve been watching some period dramas—one set in Austria in the early 1900s and one set in Yorkshire in the 1920s and 30s. I’ve also recently seen videos of London in this same period, and the one thing which stands out above everything else is how well everyone is dressed. The ladies all look fabulous; today, they would look like they are dressed for a special occasion, but back then, it was standard attire. The men, likewise, are all well turned out. Suits for all, overcoats, hats, polished shoes, pocket squares—not an open collar in sight. Effort has been made all around, and it’s clear everyone has checked themselves in the mirror before they’ve left the house.

This speaks, to me, of a general common courtesy and respect for themselves and the people around them. I know on the occasions when I get to dress up, I feel good; it makes me stand taller and hold my head higher. People treat you with respect, and you are more likely to put in the extra effort to show the same back. The world today is different, but I can’t help wondering: if we all made a little more effort to present ourselves to the world in a more respectable manner, perhaps we would all treat each other with a little more respect and kindness.

I’m trying out a new way of getting myself back to blogging. I miss it a great deal but I always find myself not posting when I am not happy with my setup or design of my site. So I’ve decided to try out a new thing.

For a long time my social posting, or micro-blogging, has taken place on Micro.blog. I share small posts, photos, some links, whatever takes my fancy and whenever I feel like posting. It has worked well for me. It let’s me have my own domain (philbowell.me) and works with the wider web both through federation and because it’s a normal website. My main personal site, or Macro blog if you will, has been hosted elsewhere. Since Wordpress got complicated and became more a CMS than a blogging engine it’s moved around a few times. Not long ago I landed back on Wordpress in an attempt to find something familiar. It didn’t work and my blog fell quiet once again.

Life is seasonal and so is blogging or writing in a public space, but of late I’ve felt that itch to find a way to build a personal site. So I’ve decided to host my Macro blog on Micro.blog to see if it gives me the impetus to build something that’s my own again. I plan to spend some time writing here, trying to understand the theming engine and how I can build my own design. I want to add pages for things I use and read, maybe my portfolio can find a home here as well. I feel like this is a good fit for me at the moment. I have a fresh file in Figma which I’m slowly crafting a new design in, and hope to begin translating that to code soon.

I’ve started to try and customise things already, and for the first time on my blog I’ve switched to a one post a page system. I’ve seen it work well on other sites and I like that it makes each entry feel individual as well as part of a whole. Almost like chapters in a book (which might give you a hint as to the direction my design is heading). For now we will see how I get on, and hope that I have landed on a space that I can make my own.

I don’t do these posts very often. In fact, it’s been many years since I wrote something like this, but with WWDC starting tonight and Apple announcing lots of new software features I’m actually excited to see what they bring. I thought it might be fun to have a look at my wishlist and then come back and see what Apple did against it.

One Siri to rule them all…

It’s long driven me mad that Siri is different on all my Apple devices. I have iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and HomePod minis with Siri on each device having different capabilities is maddening. It stops me from using it as much as I otherwise would because it’s such a frustrating user experience. Hopefully with the new Siri that looks set to be announced that will change.

“AI” that’s intelligently integrated

I’ve played around with both ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini over the last year or so, and while I’ve found some utility with it, what I really want is for my devices to make my work easier not do it for me.

I’ve no interest in my computer doing my work so I can do the washing up, I want it to do the bits of my work that are dull and repetitive so that I am free to do the creative stuff I enjoy. Plan my day for me by looking at my tasks in Things and my calendar in Outlook without me having to do it.

A smarter Health app

As part of the AI that’s intelligently integrated, I’d love to see Apple bring together all the elements of the health app in a way that will help me get and stay healthy. I have a recipe app (Mela) with nearly 200 recipes in it, I try to track my food intake with FoodNoms, my phone tracks my movement, and my smart scales track my weight. Take all of this information, work out that I’m trying to lose weight, and build me a food and exercise plan.

A coherent sports experience

When Apple released their Sports app I was really intrigued, it’s full of promise, but in the UK it’s not so great. I get my news from The Athletic and Sky Sports News, I use an app for live activities when Forest are playing, and I have another app for F1 live activities. The Euros are coming but there’s no sign of it in Apple Sports. I would love for them to bring all this together. Have the Sports app do live activities for football, bring the news for the teams I follow from Apple News into the Sports app, and make it my hub for Sports.

Reimagine tvOS

This is a long stretch, but reimagine tvOS to make it more useful. I have an Apple TV in my bedroom and rely on my TV’s apps for the living room, but if they could add more utility to tvOS I would look to add one for my main tv. Widgets would be a good start, but really I’d like to see it be more intelligent too. I’m watching NCIS at the moment, surface the next episode without me having to go into apps to find it. Display the weather on my home screen and give me more home controls. Make it the hub of the home. Make Siri absolutely sing on it. Steal Amazon’s x-Ray and add it to all apps that use the built in player. Let me tell the Apple TV I have a PS4 and have it surface the option to fire it up.

These are all unlikely, but if I can have one tvOS wish for this year, it would be the ability to attach an apps profile to my Apple TV profile so I don’t have to select who is watching in every single app every time I open them.

A passwords app

Last week I finally got tired of 1Password’s Safari extension never working and decided to move all my passwords to iCloud Keychain. I’ve yet to work move the one time password codes over, and I’m not sure how I’m going to work with Chrome for the times I need it, but it’s already been a nicer experience. It would be great to have a dedicated app that’s not tucked away in settings for the times I’ need to hunt down a password. This one seems like it might actually happen this year, but then we thought that last year as well.

Those are a few of the things I’d like to see Apple announce tonight. I’m not expecting many of them to make an appearance, but it’s a fun exercise and it will be interesting to revisit it and see.

There’s a strange pressure that comes with blogging which is created entirely by me. When I first started blogging, I used to post whatever I wanted to, no matter what it was. It was easier, and there was a kind of carefree nature to it. Somewhere along the way, that got lost. Whether it was the disappearance of the personal blog or the pressure to write something that mattered, I’m not sure. All I know is that somewhere along the road I stopped posting because I didn’t feel like I had anything to say.

I recently saw a post on Threads, I didn’t save it, but it said this:

Why does no one like my art?

I don’t post on Threads, nor do I ever reply. I think I saw it through Instagram, but my reaction was a simple question: why does it matter?

I’ve always viewed art as something created for the artist, not for the audience. The great masters didn’t paint for other people; they painted because they wanted to. It was for themselves. They had a compulsion to create something, and they did it.

Over the last week, I’ve wanted to write a post on multiple occasions. Each time, I’ve started and then lost my enthusiasm for what I’ve been writing. This evening, when I sat down to write something, I didn’t know where to start. That Threads post came to mind, and I realised what I’ve been trying to write hasn’t been what I’ve wanted to. It’s been about trying to look good, to be professional, to be intelligent. The honest truth is it wasn’t me. I’m not saying I’m not those things; what I’m saying is I should write what I want too regardless of whether anyone likes it or not.

I could easily say, why does no one like my blog? But the truth is that it doesn’t matter. It’s my blog, after all, just as the art is the artists. We should create because we want to, not because we want others to like us.

Over the last year or so, if not longer, I’ve been dissatisfied with my writing and note taking environment. I’ve been using Obsidian on and off for most of that time, but consistently leaves me frustrated the setup, especially on my iPad which is where I do the majority of my personal writing.

In that time when I’ve not been using Obsidian it’s because I’ve been trying another app out. Most of the time those have not stuck and I’ve ended up back in Obsidian. Last week though, I came across a blog post which made me have another look at an app I’ve previously dismissed.

Bear is an app that I’ve been aware of but never really properly invested any time in looking at. I tried the early versions but at the time I was using Ulysses and the feature set of Bear didn’t warrant a change. Consequently Bear disappeared off my radar, but after reading the blog post by Robert Breen I realised that Bear might actually be the app I’ve been looking for. So I’ve downloaded it, moved all my notes across from Obsidian, spent a little time tidying up the app and recreating my file structure with Bear’s tags. It’s going well.

This all begs the question, what’s wrong with Obsidian. It’s popular and the people who use it love it, why have I moved on?

On the Mac Obsidian is fine, its theme makes it feel like it belongs despite some of the janky behaviour but on the iPad and iPhone it’s a completely different story. Opening the app on those devices usually met me with a screen telling me that Obsidian was downloading and indexing my files. It would often crash and when it didn’t it would freeze and be unresponsive for a long period before I could open or create a note. Bear on the other hand syncs quickly, so fast that it’s not noticeable, and I can open or create a note without losing my train of thought.

Bear’s shortcut support is excellent and seems to be on a par with the level of shortcuts support in my task manager of choice, Things. In contrast Obsidian requires a third party app, some configuration, and once working a constant question mark over whether the shortcut will work or fail. This opens Bear up to better automation and integration with other apps I use on a daily basis, it helps the app to feel like it belongs and that it’s a good citizen of the platforms in which it lives.

I’m still in the early days of making this move and we all know that the grass is always greener on the other side. We’ll have to see how I’m feeling in a few weeks time and whether the shine has faded, but first impressions are good and Bear looks like it could be a keeper.

This is a post which I’ve had brewing in the back of my mind since September. This year marks the end of my 3rd decade, September will be my 40th birthday the end of what has turned out to be quite a hard decade. A look in the mirror and I can see how hard it has been.

At the start of the year I weighed myself and had a little bit of a shock. My weight hasn’t just gone up, it’s ballooned and I am the heaviest I have ever been by a large margin. What’s worse is that I look at photos of myself and am shocked at the size of my stomach and my physique. One thing is clear. It’s time to change and do something about it.

This week I’m going to begin a trifecta of things. I’m going to start tracking what I’m eating and how much. I eat a lot of fresh food, but also a lot of convenience food, so that needs to change. My initial aim with tracking what I’m eating is to make myself more aware and then to try and make some more healthier choices.

Secondly I’m going to drink more water. I have a large water bottle that can hold two litres of water. I’m going to build a routine of filling that up first thing in the morning and finishing it by the end of the day. If I want something sweeter or a soft drink I will go for sparkling water and a slice of fruit.

Thirdly, I need to start exercising. I optimistically joined a gym back in September and have been a grand total of once a month since. I’m going to cancel my membership and use the money to subscribe to Fitbod instead. Then I am going to add calendar appointments for workouts throughout the week.

I’m sharing this in an effort to try and build a commitment with myself. I plan to share my progress each month with how I’m doing on each of these three fronts. If I can establish some good habits in the next month I will start to share some of the statistics around my weight, but for now this is all I’m comfortable sharing.

One of my aims for this year is to try and develop some more healthy foundations or habits in my life. For many years now I’ve wanted to blog more regularly like I did in the very early days of discovering what the small web could be. It was a place of individuals sharing their lives and thoughts on their own websites. Comments were on, people linked to each other, and a feeling of community developed.

In the years since my blog has been through many incarnations, it’s been Wordpress powered, Jekyll powered, Micro.blog, and back to Wordpress. But one thing for certain is that posting over the last decade has dwindled to almost nothing, but with the odd renaissance here and there. The desire to blog has always been there but for one reason or another never lasted, or more accurately I was never able to form it into a habit like I used too.

Over the last year I’ve noticed a significant change in what I call the small web. I’ve found a lot more personal blogs who post regularly and, most importantly, interesting content. It’s sparked my creativity again, and so I’m taking some steps to start again.

One of the barriers that I’ve struggled with over the last years is that I’ve wanted my blog to be too complicated. I wanted to have small posts to replace twitter, links to be bookmarks, as well as a place to share my work, and write longer posts like this one. What I’ve realised is that when I enjoyed blogging in the early days (2007ish era) it was a lot simpler. To begin with I had one post type and it was a lot easier and a lot more fun. I realised that I needed to return to that level of simplicity if I was ever going to form a new habit of blogging regularly. So that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve installed a new theme that takes away the temptation to try and add new types of posts and instead places an emphasis on writing blog posts. So that’s what I intend to do with more regularity.

I’ve begun the long process of adding in some of my old posts from previous iterations of this site. My apologies if this triggers a load of posts in your RSS. I’m working backwards, and I’ve now added all the posts from 2023 and 2022. It will be a slow process as I’ve decided to add each post manually, importing from the markdown file I have saved. Initially I am just adding the more formal posts but may go back and add all the link posts I’ve made at some point.

It’s been about one month since I restarted my blog back on Wordpress. I say restarted rather than moved because so far I’ve yet to add all my old posts to the archive, something I still plan to do, but which I’ve yet to find the time for.

The change was triggered by a combination of things, but the chief ones were ease of posting and familiarity. I used Wordpress for well over a decade on this blog and a number of other websites I’ve built over the years. I’ve had dalliances with other CMS’s but ultimately the ecosystem which surrounds Wordpress has pulled me back in. The apps I like to use to write are well integrated making it easy to post from my Mac, iPad, or even iPhone if I wish and it’s helped. I may not be posting quite as often as I wanted too when I made the change, but I have posted more to my blog in the last month than I did in the last year. As far as I am concerned that’s a win, and importantly the lack of friction has fuelled my motivation and desire to post more.

Combined with this change to my blog setup I’ve been making greater use of RSS over the last few months. In fact my use of RSS was one of the things that fuelled the move back to Wordpress. I’ve found myself returning to a habit I had many years ago. I would ease into my work day with a coffee and my RSS, saving longer posts to read later, reading shorter posts, and sharing the most interesting links through my blog. It’s a nice way to begin the day before a barrage of meetings, and a good way to stay on top of any industry related news. I’ve a feeling it’s going to stick around, and hopefully that means good things for my blog as well.

A few months ago I came across a blog that has been a mainstay in my RSS feeds ever since. I enjoy each and every post for the simple reason that it is the only place to find them and the thoughts of the author.

He is introducing a new series called People and Blogs which will run for at least a year. It’s a newsletter delivered every week with an interview of a person about their blog. I’ve signed up and hope to add some interesting feeds to my RSS off the back of it.

I’ve a long standing interest in the power of habits and what they can help us accomplish. Oddly I’d never considered the impact of bad habits, but in a post on his blog Chris talks about a recent process he went through in listing out his bad habits. It’s a really interesting idea, something I’ll probably give a go in the coming days.

I really like blog posts that give a behind the scenes for design changes. I’ve just written an internal post for my work on the reasoning I’ve made changes to a key part of our user experience.

This is an interesting look at the effect of a new icon design for Foodnoms has increased downloads. I wish more developers and designers would be this transparent about their work. It’s great evidence that shows how important the users are in our design considerations. No matter how well you know your users you don’t know what’s the most effective design until you speak to them.

When I started this site, I was just a 19-year-old looking to have fun on the internet. After all the twists and turns, I’ve come back around to a very similar place. Now, I’m a 31-year-old who’s still looking to have fun on the internet, share my thoughts and experiences, and make friends. That’s what this blog is for, and I’m really happy with where it’s landed.

Devon Dundee posting about his journey with his blog tells a similar tale to the story of my blog. Mine started when I was 20 and has been through many different iterations since. I recently switched back to WordPress in an effort to return to an easy way to post, have fun, and have a place to share that’s mine and no one else’s.

This is a fascinating read that presents the idea that calendars should be multi layered.

We tend to think of calendars as 2D grids with mutually exclusive blocks of time, but as this example shows, not all events automatically cancel each other out. Depending on their characteristics, they can be layered on top of each other. This means we manage time in three, not two, dimensions.

Think of a meeting you need to travel to. In your calendar will be an event for the actual meeting, but you need to block off time before and after so that no one else schedules something in that time. So really the unavailable time covers when you start travelling, the meeting itself, and the time travelling back. The total time makes one layer, the meeting is a second layer, and perhaps some tasks you need to accomplish in the meeting are a third layer. It’s a great concept and one I would love to see someone build an app based on it.

Back on Wordpress. It’s been a few years and many attempts to revitalise my blog, but I’ve decided to move back to Wordpress. The ease of posting from any device using apps has trumped everything else. Things will be a bit rough over the next few days and weeks as I get old posts back but stay tuned for more.

I’ve been looking at some of the things Google announced this week. Whilst some of the things are quite interesting – like the Pixel Tablet and stand – others are just plain puzzling.

I understand that Google was is trying to flex and show off their AI abilities, the new Magic Editor that they announced doesn’t sit well with me. I take photos to preserve memories. I can look back through my photo library and memories are triggered by the visuals, even the ones that are less than perfect.

Showing off the capabilities of their new photo editor, Google talked about how we want things to always look good. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s not how life is. Not every day is sunny and bright, but Google is giving us the ability to make it appear like it is. Take a cloudy overcast day, there may be some really fun things that happen but it looks a bit grey. Google wants to make it easy for us to edit that photo and make it sunny with ease. It creates a disconnect with reality. The images of our memories won’t match.

Social media already causes a lot of people to live their life in a highly edited false way. Making it easier to trick ourselves into remembering something in a completely different way isn’t necessarily a good thing.

This post was written when this blog was based on Jekyll before I moved back to Wordpress. I have kept it as part of the history of this blog.

It’s taken me a long time with lots of googling and trial & error, but I finally have tags working on this site.

Out of the box Jekyll provides a tagging function. You can define tags at the start of blog posts along with the other data you wish to add, but annoyingly Jekyll doesn’t automatically provide archive pages.

When I first built this version of my site I started to add tags to my blog posts. I managed to figure out how to display them on each posts page but that was as far as I got. I made a couple of attempts at adding the functionality I wanted to the tags in the form of a page for each tag that lists the post attached to the tag. I wanted people to be able to click on the tags at the bottom of the posts and go to the tag page, and I wanted to list all the tags in use on the site in the archive page.

Finally today I came across this list of Jekyll plugins. In the list was a plugin designed to generate archive pages for years, months, days, categories, and tags. With the aim of todays tinkering focused on getting tags working I limited the archive plugin to just generate the pages for tags. Joyfully it worked first time. It took me some playing around with the templates to get them looking how I wanted, but I had pages generated for each tag and links to each page from the bottom of the posts.

The final task was getting a list of tags on the archive page. It took a lot of googling and faffing but eventually I managed to achieve what I wanted.

Now I just have to spend a bit of time making sure everything is tagged up as I want before I can explore how to make use of the tags in other ways.

For the last few years 99% of my personal computing has been handled on the iPad Pro. For the most part it was ok. Sometimes I would need to jump through some hoops to do things and occasionally I would fall back on my work Mac. The only item that has suffered in that time has been my ability to work on my personal website.

I tried several times to build workflows in shortcuts to enable me to do what I wanted, but most of the time they were buggy or didn’t quite work how I needed them too. Sadly, the outcome more often than not, was abandonment and my site fell into disrepair and neglect.

At the start of 2023 I decided I needed to revive some hobbies. One of the biggest, longest, and most enjoyable hobbies I’ve had has been running my own personal website or blog. So I’ve dusted off my old MacBook Pro and begun to play around once again. It’s been fun and refreshing and I now find myself wanting to write more as well. Having a thing that I’ve built as a home on the web seems to make a big difference in how much I want to write things to publish.

Sadly, using my MacBook Pro (from 2015) has shown me why I wanted to replace it with my iPad. I like the flexibility of the iPad, I can draw on it, I can write on it, I can do nearly everything I want to on it, except code and build a website. But my Mac is showing its age. It can’t run the latest version of macOS which makes me nervous. It means it will stop receiving security updates and apps will eventually not be able to receive updates. I’ve already experienced a couple having to roll back to older versions because they won’t run.

As a result the Apple website has become a place I visit often. The new M2 MacBook Air looks very appealing, but it’s not cheap, and given the current climate, out of reach at the moment. So I find myself eyeing my iPad Pro again. Then I get frustrated that I can’t do what I want to on it, which, when you think about the fact it has been around for over a decade, is kind of crazy that the device is still so hamstrung.

I know that bemoaning the state of the iPad a common theme at the moment, but I’m genuinely frustrated that the device continues to be held back by software deficiencies and design. It’s more than capable of doing all the things I can do on my old MacBook Pro in terms of hardware, but it remains shackled with one hand behind its back. For now I will continue to tinker with my site on my Mac, and then find ways to write and post to this site from my iPad. While I do that I’ll sit in hope that Apple eventually takes off the chains of iPadOS.

I’ve been feeling the desire to create more since the start of the year. I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s a new year which often brings with it a fresh vigour or whether it’s seeing some people I know have their artwork displayed in a local gallery. It creates a spark in me. A desire to create things.

I’m inspired.

Except.

When I sit down with my notebook and pencil or my iPad and Apple Pencil I don’t know what to draw. I know I want to draw something but I don’t know what. So instead I turn to Ulysses and I write something. That’s fine, I enjoy it, but I want to draw something. I want to create something visual. Maybe I’m out of practice. I’ve spent so many years creating websites and designs for other people that when it comes to creating something for myself I have no idea where to start. I’m paralysed by the blank page. So I’m finding myself trying to research the drawing process. What can I create and how do I work out what I want to create? Maybe it’s a case of picking up my pencil and drawing, letting it wander around the page and seeing what emerges? At the very least it would be a start. Some marks being made. Let’s see…

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social media and the open (indie) web. As people are fleeing Twitter and flocking towards Mastodon in an attempt to find a new way of doing social media some of the things that social media gets right keep cropping up in my feeds.

The first is that social media made it easy to follow people. Mastodon is not intuitive in how it handles following people across it’s many instances. RSS is great for following individual blogs as long as you have the necessary infrastructure in place (an account to act as a sync service and some apps to read in), but even then it’s not always easy to subscribe to the RSS feed of a website.

Go back a decade or so and browsers were heading in an interesting direction. Safari on the Mac had RSS built in and Firefox had a feature called live bookmarks. Both allowed you to “bookmark” a website and the browser would automatically use the RSS link it found on the site and notify you when there was an update. To me this is the most logical place to integrate RSS or a “follow” button for the internet. What was missing was some king of home page or feed akin to an RSS readers or that of Twitter. Browsers of today offer a great experience for browsing the open web, or at least starting a Google search and going from there. What I would like to see is a browser that places as much emphasis on bringing a social experience to the open web.

Imagine this… you are browsing the internet and come across a new blog, you’d like to follow it so you click the follow button in the header of that website. The UI of the website reflects that and your browser adds the website as website to it’s bookmarks. You close the browser and go off to do something else. A while later you come back, click on your browser icon and instead of being greeted by Google you are met with a feed reader type UI that shows you recent updates from the sites you follow. This is your curated space but it’s all tracked and kept in sync by your web browser not a social network. I think that would be an interesting way of handling social stuff on the web, the browser would be your home and not just a gateway to everything.

The last few years has seen the prolific rise of the content creator the people who create content for other people to consume. I dislike this phrase. I don’t like it for a few reasons, but the primary one is I don’t consume content and I hate to break it to you, but neither do you.

If you read books they are written by an author, someone who has taken a lot of time and expended a lot of energy in dedication to writing. Yet we don’t call books content, we recognise them for what they are. Why then do we call blog posts or articles published on the web content? It takes just as much time and energy to write a series of posts on a blog as it does to write a book. Those people are not writing content, they are also authors they just happen to author a website instead of a book. So lets call them authors or writers.

The same goes for video. We don’t classify TV programmes and films as content, they are made by teams of people including directors, actors, presenters, writers, sound engineers, editors, and many more that I’ve missed. Why then are YouTubers classified as content creators? Are they not film makers? More often that not they do all of the roles that whole teams do for films.

Likewise with podcasts, another form of “content” that I “consume”. The skill and effort that goes into producing a podcast is the same as the skill and effort that goes into producing a radio show. We listen to radio shows just as we do podcasts, we don’t consume them. Why then do we not call the people who create them by the terms they deserve? The people who make radio shows are referred to as DJ’s, presenters, or broadcasters. Why do we not use these terms to talk about people who create podcasts? They may not broadcast their shows by a signal and mast, but they are still broadcasting their shows for all to hear on the internet (just as most radio stations do today).

I think it’s time we started to move away from the generic terms we use to define people who create and publish things on the internet and instead start using the respected terms we have been using for decades in the more “traditional” industries. It does a disservice to the skills of those creators when the vast majority are very talented people and deserve the credibility that comes with proper names for their professions.

For the best part of the last year I’ve been all in on Obsidian for my note taking. I’ve enjoyed writing in it, seeing it evolve, and playing with it’s theming engine (a bit too much sometimes) but recently I’ve been finding a few issues that have been getting under my skin. The experience of using it on my Mac is fine, in fact it works very well especially when paired with my large external display. When it comes to the iPad and my iPhone though, the experience is way too different. No matter how good the theme is something never quite feels right about the way the app looks and more importantly, the way the app functions.

Whilst I don’t want to confuse motion with progress, I’ve decided it’s time to try another app. One that I’ve found myself coming back to multiple times and have used for one off projects in the last 12 months. I’ve decided it’s time to give Craft a try for my note making. I gave Obsidian at least a 12 month run, so it’s time to give Craft the same.

There’s several things which draw me to Craft, most prominently is it’s native to all the platforms I use. I might be sat at a Mac all day while I work, but when I’m not I use my iPad as my personal computer and it’s during this time when I do most of my note making. Craft’s iPad app is excellent and I’m enjoying using it. The second thing which draws me to the app are it’s integrations. It works with Shortcuts with out me having to think of clever workarounds to do what I want. It has built in actions to send text to Things and Ulysses so I can turn notes into blog posts. Finally, it has many of the features of Obsidian that matter to me. I can connect notes together and see what is linked to it from elsewhere. I have templates for note types that I can easily use to start a new note. The only thing it lacks at the moment is some form of graph view so I can visually see connections between my notes.

I’ve still to decide where to do my journalling. I was using Obsidian for that, but again, for the reasons I’ve already outlined I don’t want to continue. It might be time to revert to Day One on my iPad, but I may also give the daily notes of Craft a try. This is after all an experiment in implementing a note making method in a new app. It works for some, the question is, will it work for me?

We’re a week into July now and my decision to write some personal objectives for the quarter to go alongside my work objectives is proving to be an interesting experiment. I’ve begun to try and build some new habits to help me achieve not just my personal objectives but also my work ones.

The first of those habits has been to set aside the first 30 minutes of my work day to read and write. After I sit down at my desk with a coffee, I check in on Teams and my email to make sure there’s no fires, and then pick up my book. I open Obsidian to the literature note for that book, pick up my pencil and begin to read. As I go I underline anything that stands out, and then when I finish a section I write a note in my own words that covers those underlines. It’s fast becoming one of my favourite parts of my work day and I’m noticing an interesting side effect. When my time is up and I move on to some design work, I’m more productive and able to more easily focus on what I’m working on.

I’m pleased that I’m starting to build this habit and the influence it is having on my working day. My next small target is to keep some momentum now that I have finished reading the first book of this new habit. I have the next book lined up ready.

Chris Hannah with an interesting post about writing at work. I go through phases at work where I will write a lot to help me clarify projects and make sure the problems we are trying to solve are clearly defined. Chris highlights a few other reasons he writes at work, with this one in particular standing out:

Gives the opportunity for more people to gain knowledge - Sometimes when you’re on a call or in a meeting, knowledge stays within small groups of people. But by having a written record, it allows more people (if shared appropriately) to also read it. For example, maybe a new employee wanting to know more about a piece of work/functionality, or someone on the same team that wishes to gain a better perspective of a bigger piece of work.

Sharing of knowledge is crucial in the workplace, especially in the world of hybrid and remote working. Conversations happen in private chats or small video calls and not always everyone who needs to be there is present. Some food for thought.