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.

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.

Just saw a a post on Threads from Figma… describe your creative process in three words or less.

My attempt: Steal, splice, iterate.

Maybe I should elaborate?

Steal: Be inspired. Steal ideas from others, but also from your past. At the start, or even in the middle of, a project I tend to ask myself two questions. Have I solved a similar problem in the past and has someone else solved it? If the answer to either of those questions is yes or maybe, then I look at those projects through he lens of the one I’m working on.

Splice: This is where I take what I’ve discovered when looking back at what has been done before and splice in new thoughts and ideas.

Iterate: This is pretty self explanatory, but essentially I spend the rest of the time repeating the process until I come to a point where I have something that is hitting the problem head on and the design is coming to a resolution.

I’ve seen a few posts from people sharing where they’ve been and thought it was interesting. So I’m sharing the countries I’ve been too as well:

• Denmark 🇩🇰
• France 🇫🇷
• Switzerland 🇨🇭
• Israel 🇮🇱
• Italy 🇮🇹

I’ve also stepped foot in Belgium and Luxembourg but they were both on the way to Switzerland so I don’t count them.

When I was growing up we had most of our family holidays in the UK and I think I’ve visited nearly all the counties in England, most of Wales, and a couple in Scotland.

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.