Resources for writing

In organizing information for use, writing skills can be particularly helpful, especially in trying to summarize topics. Here are some resources I recently came across:

How To Make Notes and Write by Dan Allosso and S. F. Allosso – Learn to make effective notes on sources and your interpretations, then turn those into clear and compelling output. This link is to a website version of the book, an ePub version can also be downloaded.

The Documentation System from Divio – A theory of documentation composed of four types (tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation) with excellent explanation of the differences and examples on how to create these four types of documentation effectively.

When Dave Winer wrote about his recent trip to Utopia Bagels, I decided to take a look at Portland and Salem (Oregon) to see if there were any bagel shops of note, and found this Eater.com list of Portland shops, and one shop in Salem. Yummy times ahead!

Resources for explainers

In an earlier post, I mentioned work that Jay Rosen and his Studio 20 journalism program did in 2010-2011 on the subject of explainers (a form of journalism that provides the essential background knowledge necessary to follow events in the news). Here are links that I did not include in the post:

PressThink: National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News – Jay Rosen’s initial post about the “Giant Pool of Money” podcast that helped explain the sub-prime mortgage crisis, contains analysis of why it was excellent, and pointers to explainers (2008) 

PressThink: John Ashcroft: National Explainer – why US Attorney General John Ashcroft felt justified in only talking to television news, and not print news (2003)

PressThink: Normalizing Trump (2017)

Explainer.net: The Explainer Awards, a look at the best explainers on the net (2011)

Resources for organizing information

I have compiled some links on how to better organize information:

Lifehack.org – Use the LATCH principle (Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, or Hierarchy), Mind Mapping, Create Lists, Create Collections, Place Priority on Key Information

The Visual Communication Guy – Gives examples of using the LATCH principle listed above

UXPin – How to Organize Information Effectively: What You Can Learn From Information Architecture 

  • Create systems for classification, labeling, navigation and search
  • Information architecture is affected by content, context, and user
  • Article continues by providing more specific example

ASBMB.org – How to gather and organize information

  • Describes a method to assist someone performing research to write an academic paper

A talk between two users

I had a great discussion today with Frank McPherson about OPML, OPML includes, my OPML Includes test app, and our joint experiment in using drummer.this.how to show included files. We agreed that to view updates in drummer.this.how for an OPML file that includes another OPML file, the master OPML file has to be opened in Drummer and refreshed to see updates. In my test app, when a user goes to the app URL, they will get the latest updates for all included files. This will also occur each time the test app is refreshed in the browser.

Another subject we discussed was how a user could know if updates had been made to one of the OPML files. The JSON object for the included OPML files contains the lastModified element from the head of the OPML file, so this date/time could be displayed like in the drummer.this.how app for any or all of the included OPML files. Frank wrote about having each top-level headline as an item in a RSS feed (one way to provide notification of changes). I could envision an app that could look at changes in an OPML file and create some kind of item using the namespace feature in RSS. It is an area worth exploring.

I also spent some time today looking at Dave Winer’s update to the outlineBrowser toolkit. I downloaded his personal site repo and set up a test site using my Oregon elections OPML file, and the rendering/navigation looked good. I am going to work on trying to incorporate these latest changes into my OPML Includes test app.

Continuing experiments with OPML files

I reviewed Frank McPherson’s OPML experiment file, and saw that he suspected that updates to included files would not be visible unless the file was re-opened in Drummer. I decided to give this a test by adding another heading in my test file with some more text, then reloaded Frank’s test file. I did not see the new content. Next, I added Frank’s OPML file being viewed with drummer.this.how to my OPML Includes test app, and was pleased to see that I could view all of the new text in my test file. Another good result from this test is that the OPML Includes app was able to read the content of Frank’s file as an include file, and of my test file, so includes within an include file are brought in using the includes feature of opmlPackage. Excellent!

What to do when Fitbit Versa is too dim

My Fitbit Versa has been dim for a long time, so recently I decided to figure out if I could change settings, or if I needed a new Fitbit Versa. My initial search turned up a lot of hits basically saying to bring up the Settings app on the Fitbit Versa and change the brightness. When I tried that, I found the selection was disabled – what’s up with that? I then found this thread on the Fitbit community, found my solution 10 comments down on the thread:

My Brightness setting was dimmed out. I found I had “Sleep Mode” on. When I turned off “Sleep Mode” I was able to change the brightness of the Versa screen. I turned on a set schedule for sleep mode brightness that is separate from “Sleep Mode”. By turning on “Sleep Mode”, that means “Sleep Mode” is always ON (and dim) until you turn “Sleep Mode” off. 

That was the ticket!

Followup on Org Mode and Indexes

I was glad to see that Frank McPherson looked at Org Mode from my earlier post, and had a good observation about being able to assign priorities to a task in a todo list and to visualize that in Org Mode. I have not used agenda mode to view Org files, so I was not aware of that limitation. Overall, my use of Org Mode is pretty basic.

Frank’s recent post on indexes (aside: I like that term better than “indices”) provides a lot to consider. I think the ability to have items smaller than a whole OPML file included in other items as Frank describes is would be a terrific feature to have in an information product. The subject of indexes is also an important area of work, in that it represents the distilled experience/knowledge of the index creator. Brad Enslen and Joe Jennett have been working on individual indexes/directories. and Brad’s manifesto from 2018 called on other web users to create their own indexes or directories.

Perhaps another term that could be used is “resource pages”. To me, that is what the “awesome-X” Github repo README pages for Emacs and Drummer represent – a collection of resources, in an organized presentation (grouped by topic, for example). Frank’s technology page and Ken Smith’s page on resources for writing better op-eds are good examples.

More thoughts on organizing information for use

I recently created a web app to use the opmlPackage NPM module from Dave Winer to display the contents of four OPML files at one time. The app uses the includes feature, which can read other OPML files from a single OPML file and save the content locally for processing. I created four OPML files myself for this test app, but the four files could have been created by anyone. 

So the main benefit of the OPML Includes site is that it can display multiple outlines (which can be edited by multiple people, not just one person) and have the content refreshed whenever someone goes to the site. If the content is changing on a frequent basis, this could be an easy way to see the updates. If the content is fairly static, it may not be significant. In that case, single page apps could be used to view the outlines separately, so perhaps there is not much benefit in using the includes feature in opmlPackage.

Ken Smith has had some thoughts about potential uses:

“And I’m still musing about uses. About the slide down into the archive problem of blogging and social media, and maybe using the app as a partial remedy. Keeping the good stuff in view, and adding to the good stuff over time and linking the good stuff to a wider circle of relevant content. Taking the web part of the web seriously rather than letting the slide down into the archive turn it all into ghostly memories.”

Again, an OPML outline, rendered using existing tools, could provide a way to collect that information in a single document. In 2010, Jay Rosen’s Studio 20 journalism program at New York University partnered with ProPublica to research the area of “explainers”, or explanatory journalism at a site called explainer.net. The site is still available on the Internet Archive. I think that this is a method of addressing the “slide down into the archive” problem, but it does take effort. Someone has to create such an explainer, and then monitor the Web for items related to that topic, read and curate them, and add them to the explainer as needed. The main problem is someone has to have the desire and interest to collect information on a topic and share that information. If there is no one with that interest, no tool for collecting and displaying that information is going to be of much use.