Writing

There are 46 posts filed in Writing (this is page 3 of 5).

How to organize information for use

Ken Smith had two recent posts (“For the team” and “Or maybe not“), discussing the ideas of forming a community, collecting information on a topic, processing information as a group, and providing a summary of that information. I think the collection and processing tasks are attainable and occur on a regular basis. The task not being performed well is the curate/share/maintain steps.

As an example, I started collecting information on the topic of personal book lists in a Github repo. I provided a chronology of recent posts on the subject, collected tools and techniques, and also created some tools of my own. The recent Github repo for Drummer stuff would be another example, as well as other “awesome-fill-in-the-blank” sites on Github. A mega example of this is a tech guide put together by Stephen Downes on resources for creating an online community, class or conference. 

Perhaps the main thing is to start a “beach-head” of some sort where people can collaborate, then publicize and support that beach-head. Thoughts, anyone?

(cross-posted from my Drummer blog)

A first look at Bookdown for book publishing

I recently completed the first draft of a book using Google Docs (subject is how to create a social media presence through your own web site and newsletter), but when I saved a copy as a PDF, it did not look as good as I would like. I had been considering trying out Scribus (an open source desktop publishing tool), but had read about the Bookdown toolset when I was looking at some resources on the R programming language. This weekend, I decided to install the toolset and see how much effort that took and what the results looked like.

The creator of Bookdown has written a book on how to create books with Bookdown, so I thought I would start there with the Get Started page/section. I downloaded a repo from Github containing a demo book. Next, I downloaded and installed RStudio, which is supposed to be used to create the book. In the process of installation and startup, I found out that I needed to download and install R as well – ooops! Funny how this was not mentioned in the Get Started page….

The next step was to install the bookdown package using the R IDE. However, there was a popup asking if I wanted to set up a separate library. I clicked “No” and tried to install, but got the error message that the R library was not writable. After some searching, I found this Stack Exchange post that addressed this problem…again, interesting that this was not in the book.

Finally, I got the bookdown package installed, opened the demo book, and was able to build the book in HTML form. The console displaying info on the build process showed some errors in generating ePub and PDF versions of the book. The Get Started page indicated that another toolset (TinyTek) was needed for the PDF output. I used the Windows batch file to install Tiny Tek, and went ahead and restarted all the apps (R, RStudio). I then rebuilt the book, it took 1-2 minutes to generate the demo book in PDF form. It had a few pagination problems, but looked ok. Overall, I spent about an hour working through these steps. I will explore it some more, but will also check out Scribus as well. To me, I would have to go through some effort to convert my book draft to R Markdown. If Scribus could create a book with less work, I might head in that direction.

 

 

How I am getting things done on Christmas projects

TL/DR version: make a short list, break tasks down, prioritize, be gentle with yourself

Full version:

My company has a holiday shutdown at the end of the year, and I usually take enough vacation so I get a two week break – nice! In the past, I have tried to take advantage of this time to do lots of things, but ended up not completing a lot. This year, I decided to change how I approached this opportunity:

Step 1: Make a short list of projects to accomplish

After reviewing the things I might want to do, I settled on two large tasks that I had not made any progress on in the last month. One was a writing project to document the tools and processes I used to create and publish the Portland Protest News website. I had an outline that was several months old, but had not made time to get this done. The second task was starting to read How to Engineer Software by Steve Tockey. I had watched some videos of him talking about the use of semantic modeling, and was intrigued enough to buy his 1100-page book. However, it has been sitting on my desk for almost a month, and I had only opened it once.

Step 2: Break tasks down

For the writing task, I decided to go for a daily word count of 500 words per day, following Jeff Goins’ Three Bucket System for starting a writing habit. For the reading task, I set a goal of one chapter a day. With these constraints, I hoped that I could fit these in around holiday activities and still feel a sense of accomplishment.

Step 3: Prioritize

I worked to try to do these as soon as possible each day. That did not always work, but knowing that these were my most important items to get done helped me to maintain focus.

Step 4: Be gentle with yourself

If there was a day where I did not get both tasks done (or maybe none!), I decided that was going to be ok. After all, this was a vacation, not a job!

Results:

I have completed my first week of vacation, and managed to write at least 500 words each day. I completed 5 chapters in the book, so there were two days I did not complete my reading task. But that’s ok! I feel good about what I have gotten done, and managed to fit in a few more things (like this blog post).

I hope this is helpful – let me know what you think about my method!

 

I am back

For my five loyal readers, I wanted to let you know that I am returning to active posting on this site. I have been spending the majority of my writing time on my Portland Protest News site, but I am drawing that to a close. Another obstacle was a unforseen hospital stay a few weeks ago, but I have pretty much recovered from that, so I think it is time to jump back in. I have a few posts on the 1999 blog tool to get out, as well as some other items of note, so sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride!

I like hearing from other bloggers about why they blog…

This blog post is dedicated to why you should have your own (independent) blog.

Ton, I am replying to your post, I had been keeping a daily journal of what I was doing, but your description of  a day log includes a little more, I am going to try that this week.

Another great post from Josh Bernoff on breaking a big project into manageable pieces.

 

Starting off the year 2020 – My Three Words

As I came to work this morning, I began to think about how to start the New Year. Over the Christmas break, I did some listening/reading at Sean McCabe’s website on writing (It All Starts With Writing, podcast episodes 39, 139, 303). I would like to do more writing in 2020. I also listened to an Akimbo episode on “showing your work“. Harold Jarche (Seek-Sense-Share) and Dave Winer (Narrate Your Work) are other views on this topic.

Other thoughts that I had:

  • If you keep doing the same things, you will get the same results
  • Failing to plan means planning to fail

After this reflection, I think the three words I would like to guide my year (following Ron Chester’s example) is – Read Write Help.