A journal experiment for the month of April in 2018
I am live-blogging my entire process and thought patterns around work this month. Follow along!
Posts:
- Wed at 07:34 - An update: one thing
- Sat at 01:14 - Closing projects from C to G
- Fri at 14:51 - Hoodies and website edits
- Fri at 12:46 - Learning to say no
- Wed at 08:41 - Issues with streaks
- Thu at 22:13 - Silent Book Club
- Wed at 16:49 - Maintainer Repository Audits and Open Collective
- Wed at 12:16 - Open Source Meetups in Montreal
- Wed at 11:31 - Why am I writing on this site?
- Wed at 11:27 - Planning better social media integration for posts
- Tue at 20:54 - The CBC and daily roundup
- Mon at 20:08 - Web development day
- Mon at 11:38 - The Litt Review
- Mon at 11:32 - April priorities
All content CC-BY-NC © 2018 Richard Littauer.
This morning I spent twenty minutes over coffee finishing up The Physics of Star Trek, a little book I’d been reading off and on for the past few months. Then, completely against my current process of ignoring my own process, I did what I ought to do: I sat down and immediately transcribed and wrote a review for the book. The whole process - light for this book, as I only took a handful of notes that weren’t worth transcribing to my electronic notes - took around twenty minutes, give or take. That’s from starting the review to sending it out on the website, on Buffer to Twitter, and through Mailchimp.
You can read the review, here.
In the process, I realised once again that I am under-utilising my programming skills and marketing skills. While this wasn’t a particularly illuminating review, it did reflect thoughtful content that I put out on a daily basis. I ought to be posting this to a few venues, every time. For instance, I’d rather my Instagram feed had all of the books I read and review on it - that more perfectly captures how I would like to be seen and perceived, and the kind of audience I want, than random photos of cats in windows. I should also automatically tweet and mail out my reviews, and this blog, instead of manually running the process.
I wrote up an issue on my knowledge repo, where I keep public processes and notes I’ve written up. Here’s the text below
Buffer is useful for Twitter, but it underperforms for Instagram, and it isn’t connected to other social medias.
When I post a book review using this process, I should also do the following:
Right now, I post only to Mailchimp and Twitter - the former manually, the latter through the Buffer API.
All of this is contingent on putting out high noise, medium signal messaging. Basically - if I write something, post it for people to see. I’m not entirely interested in high signal, low noise messaging: that’s what my weekly newsletter is for. Twitter is high noise low signal by default, so I can push everything there with impunity.
I’m not entirely convinced that my book reviews (among other types of content, like my 2018-april blog going on right now) are actually low signal, anyway. I know people enjoy reading them, and measures of signal seem arbitrary.
In any event: there ought to be a shell script or a webapp that I run which does all of this posting for me, or some way of setting up a non-brittle poster through various APIs and connected services - for instance, through RSS (something I’m having issues doing through the Jekyll RSS feed plugin).
This probably isn’t a solitary problem, and may help others.
This is related to my Jekyll scheduler, too. Right now, I have a backlog of book reviews to publish (and a massive backlog - around 40 books - of books to review which I’ve read in the past few months). I may be able to kill two birds with one stone, if I get the Jekyll scheduler up and integrate an API or automatic posting into it. Something to think about.