First, apologies. Not for this being the first bulletin for two years (I will come to that), but for the people who responded to the last one in September 2020 and never got a reply. Your emails have been languishing in my inbox ever since, ever-hopeful I might get my act together. Well, now, I have; or at least, I have once more. We shall see if this becomes a regular thing.
I am, actually, quite hopeful. This isn’t going to be a “everything’s different now, I’m sorted” kind of squirmy rationale, but rather, an observation on the state of online publishing. In my own case, I had multiple self-hosted and aaS Wordpress sites; I was testing out Medium; I had this very newsletter on Mailchimp. And meanwhile, LinkedIn was yoo-hooing for my time, as were several Facebook pages and online groups. All that notwithstanding that I write for a living, as a hobby, and as a raison d’être.
Note, this wasn’t people asking me to write stuff, I wouldn’t be so “don’t you know who I am” about that. Rather, the business model of all these places is that, to get eyeballs, they need user-generated content. Nothing new there, I know; but I would point the kind reader to the very real consequence of content-oriented paralysis, probably not all that different to the yoghurt-related stumblings we all experience in supermarkets.
All of this ably documented by psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book “The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less”. I have’t read it, truth be told, as there’s simply too many other books on similar subjects, and I wouldn’t know where to start. And equally, it’s one of those books that is so neatly summarised by the title that it doesn’t need to be read. Sorry Barry, and sorry too to the author of the 80/20 rule (though Mr Pareto is probably due a few royalties there).
In a Medium post on September 20, pretty much two years to the day that I wrote the last newsletter, I wrote, “Too many places to write, too many subsequent feeds, integrations and synchronisations to manage. In result, nothing gets done.” I realised that I needed to stop caring about where things were to be published (and such things as cadence, building audience etc), and focus primarily on the act of writing.
I’d love to say this came to me as an epiphany, as I sat overlooking a sunrise on a distant beach. The truth is somewhat more mundane: I was actually facing several database limit warnings from my hosting provider, as my main Wordpress site had been inundated with Spam and I hadn’t been clearing it out. For reasons unknown, any subsequent efforts to do so were unsuccessful - so I decided to export, delete, and re-import the lot. Little did I know that the various plug-ins I had installed over the years would conflict with each other: the import failed, and I was forced to think again.
Cue allegorical thought: whist I hadn’t been the smartest in not testing the import before deletion, for those who don’t know, this is a common cause of technological change in organisations large and small. We’d all love to think that IT strategy is set from the top for well-debated reasons, or let by smart engineers looking towards continuous improvement. Sure, these things happen, but equally often, IT teams are left scrambling to solve a problem caused by an inadvertent change, with consequences linked to unexpected dependencies. Truth, and as my old colleague and friend Tony might say, “It’s not the backups that matter, it’s the restores.”
So, I was stuck with a very large XML file, unreadable by Wordpress, and containing the past twenty years of my writings. Hmm. Fortunately the past couple of decades, fuelled by open source and more general online behaviours, have resulted in all kinds of scripting languages and libraries, available to even those with now-limited hands-on experience. In not many lines of PHP, I was able to extract the meaty parts of the XML file into separate RTF documents, which I then imported to my preferred writing tool, Scrivener.
Interestingly, they amounted to 480,000 words, which isn’t a bad corpus of ramblings. Equally, and when faced with having to post each one back online individually, I realised may of them didn’t merit publication - it’s not as if everyone wants to read about my re-installation of some early version of Linux, is it? And equally equally, I realised I finally needed to get on top of what I published where, so I could start writing again, rather than spending my time “maintaining content”.
So, gone was the self-hosted Wordpress (I created a new site and almost immediately got spammed - bye!). Gone also was the public Wordpress - I reused my script to pull multiple other articles into Scrivener. Gone was Substack, which I’d recently created with a misplaced notion that a new online destination might be just what I needed to get things going again. But in their place were Medium, which seems to be a reasonable place to host general content, LinkedIn for sharing more tech-related materials, and then a small, neat personal web site as a shop window, or mausoleum depending on which way you look at it.
And that’s that. As a result I’ve been able to re-upload about 100K’s worth of old stuff (of 480K: how’s that, Pareto?), sharing as I go on various socials, and now - phew! I can get on with writing. What about the internal choice, I hear you say? I was going to add something about the existential nature of what to write about, but even as I write this, I realise that is less important. By unblocking the pipe and letting the writing flow, that’s a large part of the problem solved. I’m not even going to worry about whether anyone wants to read it, not for now.
There - some allegorical thoughts, but most of all a release to get on with the job. I would add “extra-curricular” at the end of this missive, but it hasn’t really been very technical, has it? I will mention that, as part of this release of orthographical tension, I’ve taken the opportunity to start revising and uploading Smart Shift, my history of tech and its consequences, so watch that space; along with the decision to get other part-written and complete stories online. Hooks to all of these at my web site if you are interested.
There we have it, and thanks for reading,
Jon