Month: October 2019

I came across portable business-friendly phone booth-type things at the airport, the (hopelessly unspellable) Jabbrrbox. It’s an office with the form factor of a vending machine.

A coffee shop is not a bad place to do deep focus work like writing, but you can’t do business calls there. There is too much background noise, the environment isn’t businesslike, you come across as unserious.

I don’t know of any cafes which provide soundproofed phone booths. They wouldn’t make sense, given that the business is really about selling food.

So why not have standalone businesses which provide public phone booths? There would be a glass door. They would be soundproofed. There would be Internet for video calls. The provider would charge by the minute.

What does coworking have over cafes, anyway? Apart from phone booths, how is WeWork really better than Peets?

A blogger’s RSS reader should be directly integrated with their tools for writing posts. Anything you read should have a “Reply” button on it that can instantly generate a properly formatted blog post. That formatting should link to the original and either show a quote or put something meaninful in the link text. The cursor should be left in an edit field ready for blog writing.

WordPress should come with a feed reader.

The feed reader should be linked to an auto-generated blogroll. Anything the blogger subscribes to should be in the blogroll by default, with the option to hide links.

When I come back to my blog it is undisturbed. Like at home when I come back from work, everything is just as I left it.

Quiet is good in a Moleskine. But what if blogs for personal-level publishers like myself want to be social? A personal-scale social blogger should have a home screen of status updates.

Every time they open their blog they should have access to reverse chronological events. These could include analytics on views, added or lost subscribers, comments, pingbacks, links from third party blogs, or stats on posting frequency.

Gamification. Feedback. The variable reward to complement investment and action.

My train of thought is about how dedicated social networking platforms like Mastodon and Facebook can be replaced by blogs. I’m mulling over small practical things to make blogs a better tool for decentralized socializing.

I wonder if the developer community gave up too easily in the face of Facebook. Could relatively light tweaks to the blog technology stack add up to a much bigger community of personal networkers?

It’s possible to customize your WP install so that it is good for personal blogs, but that’s too much work for casual personal-scale bloggers. There should exist a pre-canned version with all the plugins and settings out of the box.

The title of this post would be a decent band name.

It’s not in the cliched “The FOO” or “Firstname Lastname” forms, but it’s still short and tight. It has a visual rhythm in the “Kn” repetition.

Tom 7 Radar asks Why do posts have to have a ‘title’? (31 Aug at 23:46)

My answer: because blog infrastructure assumes one exists, and without a title a post is wonky. No better reason than that.

And titles really really should be optional. Does every tweet need a title? Do Facebook comments need a title?

Needing a title is friction. Not needing one is an advantage for mersh social media.

If Trump were to be impeached and removed from office because of the Ukraine shakedown, Mike Pence would not become President, or at least not for long. He also participated in the wheeling and dealing, so would also be impeached.

Not that the Senate will do any of this.