WordPress Gutenberg is reinventing the WordPress editing experience, but it won’t be easy. Here’s why it’s worth it and what it means for page builders.
WordPress Gutenberg is reinventing the WordPress editing experience, but it won’t be easy. Here’s why it’s worth it and what it means for page builders.
Seth Godin, marketer supreme, also has commented recently on quality. In Quality and Effort, Seth relates a story about creating systems to avoid bad experiences for users. In his first iterations, the result was pretty good, but not perfect. He describes how he changed the system of creating quiz questions/answers to have half the team create the questions and the other half try to come up with better answers and pay a bounty if the new answers were more correct than the original.
The result of the new system? Zero error for the next 5,000 questions.
My last example is Philip Crosby, author of Quality Is Free and Quality Without Tears. His main definition of quality was conformance to requirements – the product or service should meet or conform to whatever requirements are set for that product or service. Another part of his quality system was that processes should be done right the first time, that there should be zero defects in the process and the product/service. Many companies and industries resist this level of quality. but Crosby points out that many companies have zero defects in their payroll operations. To quote from Quality Without Tears, pp. 75-76:
Payroll doesn’t make mistakes.
Is that because they are such dedicated souls? Certainly they are, but the importance of the work does not necessarily raise performance standards. If that were so, one would think that people working in space exploration would never err. However, you can get used to anything, and bad performance standards occur eventually.
The reason that payroll does so well is that people just won’t put up with errors there. They take it very personally when something is wrong with their paycheck.
So, in this example, the expectation/standard is “zero defects” – no errors.
As a software engineer working in the aviation industry, where we have many processes and checklists, I work to create software and artifacts (requirements, tests, etc.) without defects, but most of the time, my fellow workers and I manage to make a few mistakes along the way. Maybe it is time to see if we can construct our systems to prevent such errors. It’s worth a try!
The idea of microblogging on my own website is something I’ve been kicking around for years. Instead of posting short pieces of text to Twitter, longer pieces of text to this blog, and photos to Instagram, why not just post all of that stuff here? I could still cross-post to other sites if I wante…
The best time to blog is when you have something to say. If you have something to say, the writing will be easy. For me, these things usually come from a personal experience, anything from a simple observation to a full-blown epiphany. Write about it in the moment, if you can.
Oh IndieWebCamp. You come with a few things you want to for your own website, then you do some completely other things, and after that you leave with an even longer list of things to do for your own website.
This year is marked as the ‘Year of the Reader’, and indeed, there was a lot of Reader t…
Is there any good way to follow writers on a bunch of diff websites, so anytime they post a story I see a link or something in a single feed?
This resulted in a series of over 40 replies with recommendations for feed reader apps and generally using RSS. I added my own reply for rivers of news.
Next, a post from Cal Newport (saw this via Brad Enslen):
As any serious blog consumer can attest, a carefully curated blog feed, covering niches that matter to your life, can provide substantially more value than the collectivist ping-ponging of likes and memes that make up so much of social media interaction.
Wow! This from a person who acknowledges that he does not participate on social networks, but lets it slip that he uses RSS!
Case in point: I’ve never had a social media account, and yet I constantly enjoy connecting to people, and posting and monitoring information using digital networks.
Finally, Brad Enslen has a series of posts dealing with blogging, social media and RSS:
What do you think?
Google Reader five years dead
Five years ago, on July 1st 2013, Google killed their Google Reader. It was then probably the most used way to keep track of websites through RSS.
RSS allows you to see the latest articles from a website, and thus makes it easier to keep track of many different blogs an…
If you missed it, here are slides with links and resources for my IndieWeb and WordPress presentation at WordCamp Riverside 2018. Video coming soon. Thanks to everyone who came and participated. I’m happy to answer any additional questions.
Wow! Audience is fascinated by @ChrisAldrich and his pres…
I’ve spent some time this morning thinking about the deplatforming of the abhorrent social media site Gab.ai by Google, Apple, Stripe, PayPal, and Medium following the Tree of Life shooting in Pennsylvania. I’ve created a deplatforming page on the IndieWeb wiki with some initial background and h…