Posts tagged “publishing”

7 February 2023

There and back again: a tale of two book editions

My first online purchase ever happened on September 5, 1999. I was in college at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, I really wanted to read Lord of the Rings, and after doing the math I realized that buying the book from this online bookseller in America called Amazon.com would be cheaper than buying it from a local bookstore—even when I took international shipping costs into account.

The book arrived a few weeks later, just in time for the summer holidays to start. I did very little that December that wasn’t reading Lord of the Rings. In fact, I distinctly remember missing the turn of the millennium because at 12:00am on January 1, 2000 I was deeply engrossed in the Entmoot proceedings to figure out whether or not the Ents should go to war against Saruman.

The book ended up traveling with me all over the world. To Australia where I lived for a few years, back to South Africa, all the way to the US, then back to South Africa again, and now here, in Portland, OR. It has served me well:

Robin Sloan has a new edition of his newsletter out. It’s called Crossing the Sunshine Skyway and it is wonderful, as always. Towards the end he links to Adam Roberts’s reflections on re-reading Lord of the Rings. It is long and it looks great so I saved it to read over the weekend. But then Robin says this:

I’ve just completed a reread of LOTR myself: a beautiful one-volume edition with Tolkien’s own (slightly wonky) illustrations included, plus some lovely rubrication.

He posted a photo of the edition he purchased and I was immediately smitten. It looked beautiful, and the idea of seeing some of Tolkien’s own illustrations as part of the story? Heck yeah! I decided that it was time. 24 years after purchasing my first copy of Lord of the Rings—and after many years of resisting lots of wonderful editions because I didn’t want to “cheat” on my original—I purchased The Lord of the Rings Illustrated By The Author. Robin only posted one photo in his newsletter, which made for a bit of a surprise when I received the book. It is so much more beautiful than I had imagined.

I am excited to embark on my own re-read of Lord of the Rings this year, something I’ve been planning to do anyway. And I don’t feel so bad about cheating on my 24-year old copy any more. I mostly feel grateful for the internet and blogs and newsletters and how they can help us find our people and make meaningful connections that sometimes end with a beautiful piece of art in our hands that we wouldn’t have known about otherwise. Maybe, at least sometimes, we can have nice things.

13 January 2023

Letting books talk to each other

I love this bit from Austin Kleon’s Letting books talk to each other:

If you read books on different topics and different genres and different formats at the same time, your brain can’t help but find weird connections between them.

This is one of my favorite things—not just with books, but with articles too. It’s such a good feeling when your brain makes those connections. I’ll add that I think this is what makes blogs like Kottke so effective and compelling. When you are able to find and share the connections between things, you have something special going on.

2 December 2022

So where should we post now?

I’m sure I am not the only one who is currently re-evaluating where I spend my time online. Two tangentially related articles gave me lots of food for thought on this topic over the past couple of weeks. First, Dave Rupert makes this point in It takes one person to knock down a silo:

Wherever you end up I want to offer an idea; you are the value. Your ideas, your insights, your compassion, your ability to help someone in need, your dumb puns and dank memes; that’s what’s valuable. This situation has me thinking hard about where I’m distributing my contributions, where I’m adding value (modest as it may be), and who is benefitting.

Second, Jamie Zawinski asks that we Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet (please read the whole thing, it’s great):

If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.

I like how these posts urge us to consider how, before Facebook and modern social media, the “social web” was pretty much just labors of hypertext love, loosely held together by the online equivalent of duct tape—RSS, trackback links, blogrolls, IRC, etc. I’m not saying we should go back to those old tools specifically (although ooh.directory—”A collection of 951 blogs about every topic”—is pretty sweet). But maybe it’s worth going back to why we invented those awkward solutions in the first place. We saw an opportunity to connect with like-minded people online, to form communities around niche interests, and to make our worlds bigger. Those are worthy outcomes, even if the solutions we had at the time might not be ideal any more.

So where should we post now? I’m going back-and-forth on that a lot. Depending on the day/time/mood, I either want to go all-in on this blog again, or revive Tumblr, or give Mastadon a solid try, or just double down on the newsletter… In short: I have no idea at the moment, but I know I want to keep writing, so I’m trying a bunch of things and hoping at some point I find something that works and that doesn’t make me feel gross. Wherever I end up, I hope that it’s a place like the one Dave describes in the post above:

I hope you’re somewhere that values your value. Somewhere where the stars, hearts, and thumbs up feel like authentic relationships. Give your contributions to someone or some place that appreciates them. In Biblical agrarian parlance, “Cast not your pearls before swine.”

22 May 2019

🎉 Elezea turns 10! Introducing memberships and a revamped newsletter.

The first article I published on Elezea was called The dangers of “test and learn”. It was about A/B testing, it was badly written, and it went live on August 3rd, 2009. Since then I’ve posted 1,282 links and articles on this site (that’s an average of 2-3 posts per week).

It’s ridiculous to think that Elezea is coming up on being 10 years old. It is not an exaggeration to say that it sparked most of my career development and helped me meet countless people who I now consider friends. Starting this site was one of the best decisions I ever made. I wish I could go back in time and choose a less impossible-to-remember URL, but such is life.

So what do I do now, after all this time? On reflection I realized all I really want to do is keep writing. I took a couple of breaks over the years, but for the most part, this has been one of the few constants in my life. And I’d like to keep that going in a sustainable way.

So today I’m announcing two things to help set this in motion.

For the past few years, the Elezea Newsletter has been simply a list of the articles that went on the site that week. That’s useful as a Twitter/RSS replacement, but not much else. Since my interests extend beyond the product management world into the broader impact of technology on our work and our lives, I am relaunching the Newsletter this Friday to include a wider variety of topics:

Useful articles and resources about product management and software development.
Resources for leading teams, and working better together.
Industry-wide product and technology news you should know about.
Book and tool recommendations.

If that sounds interesting to you, please sign up!

Monthly memberships

On the “sustainability” side of things, I decided to launch memberships to help cover the ongoing costs of running a site (and newsletter) like this. I have no ambitions for this to become my main job — I like my job! But I would very much like for the site to at least pay for itself in terms of domain, hosting, and subscription costs.

So if you’ve been reading Elezea for a while and have found it valuable, please consider becoming a member. It costs $4/month, and will help keep Elezea independent and free from advertising.

Whether you’ve been with me from the start, or if this is the second post you’ve ever read, I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you. Elezea is a small part of the internet, but it’s a big part of my life. And it’s your encouragement and support over the years that make it so.

Here’s to the next decade 🤘

(Now go become a member!)

8 May 2019

How news organizations are adopting product management

It’s pretty interesting to see how different industries are adopting the product management role. In Product teams have taken national news organizations by storm. What’s happening locally? Christine Schmidt discusses how product is impacting newspapers and magazines:

“Product managers are the ones trying to think holistically and bring people together on how to move forward with a big idea,” Becca Aaronson, Chalkbeat’s director of product, said. “Anyone in a newsroom can do product thinking. It’s really about trying to think holistically about the needs of the audience, the mission and business interests of the organization, and technically how you’re going to get things done and bringing that together in a holistic way to create a comprehensive strategy for your organization.”

26 December 2018

The future of books is how they’re created, not what they are

In The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected, Craig Mod writes that after years of believing books will fundamentally change in the digital age, it’s simply not happening:

I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice.

What has changed, instead, is how books are created:

Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

Or, more succinctly:

Our Future Book is composed of email, tweets, YouTube videos, mailing lists, crowdfunding campaigns, PDF to .mobi converters, Amazon warehouses, and a surge of hyper-affordable offset printers in places like Hong Kong.

28 March 2018

Easier blog post image management with Dropshare and Amazon S3

I’m always on the lookout for faster ways to upload and insert images into blog posts. It’s the part of the blogging workflow that I dislike the most. Up to now I’ve used a pretty convoluted combination of Amazon S3 buckets and Transmit. But over the weekend, while moving hosting providers1, I finally came up with a really simple image upload workflow that I thought I’d share in case it helps anyone else.

This workflow lets you drag and drop an image to a menu bar icon on your Mac, and then immediately paste a secure, custom domain URL for that image wherever you need it.

Step 1 - Create S3 bucket

Create an Amazon S3 bucket for your image uploads. It doesn’t matter what you name the bucket, but do not add a . to the name. This creates some weird SSL certificate errors later in the process that you don’t want to deal with.

Also make sure you set the bucket to be publicly accessible via the Permissions tab, otherwise you’ll get read errors for your files.

Step 2 - Create CloudFront distribution

Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution for the S3 bucket you just created, so that you can use a custom URL for your images, and make use of Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) capabilities.

When you go through the flow of adding a distribution for your S3 bucket, leave the “Distribution Settings” section blank at first — we’ll come back to that.

CloudFront settings

Step 3 - Add custom domain for your images

Back on the main Distributions screen, note the CloudFront domain name that was created for your bucket. It’s going to be in the format ***************.cloudfront.net. Go to your DNS provider and add a CNAME for the custom domain you want to use for your images.

In my case, cdn.elezea.com points to my CloudFront distribution at d26fqxuc6*****.cloudfront.net, which in turn links to the S3 bucket I set up earlier.

Step 4 - Add SSL certificate to CloudFront distribution

Now go back to your Distribution Settings in CloudFront. Add your CNAME information, and then click the button to “Request or Import a Certificate with ACM”.

This will take you through the process of generating a free SSL cert to be used with your CloudFront distribution. This is essential if you serve your site over https. If you don’t do this, your images will be served over http and you will get “mixed content” warnings when you embed images in your site.

Change your settings to “Custom SSL Certificate”, and you’re good to go.

CloudFront settings

Interlude - take a breath

If you’ve successfully completed these steps, here’s where you’ll be. Whenever you upload an image to your S3 bucket, you will be able to serve that image via your custom URL over https, and as an added bonus, you’ll be using Amazon’s CDN for super fast delivery.

Now we need to figure out the fastest way to get images into that bucket of yours.

Step 5 - Download and set up Dropshare

There are many sophisticated ways to manage your S3 buckets. But when it comes to uploading an image and getting a URL for it, I haven’t found anything that’s simpler than Dropshare.

In short, Dropshare allows you to establish connections to all your S3 buckets. It lets you upload files by dragging them to the Dropshare menu bar icon, and then the URL for that image is automatically copied to your clipboard. So to add an image to this blog post, for example, I just drag the image to the menu bar icon, then come back to where I’m writing and ⌘-V to insert the link. It couldn’t be easier.

I have a bunch of S3 buckets linked up in Dropshare:

Dropshare

In the case of the bucket I use for this site, note that I entered the bucket name, the domain alias (the CNAME you added earlier), and that I have the “Use SSL” box checked:

Drophsare

This makes the workflow for adding images an absolute breeze. Drag and paste. That’s it.

When you upload an image, Dropshare lets you choose the bucket you want to upload to, as well as if you want to add a landing page and/or use a URL shortener (which I usually don’t, but it’s nice to have the option).

Drophsare

Dropshare is useful for other things too. I have a keyboard shortcut that takes a screen shot, automatically uploads it to an S3 bucket, and copies the URL to the clipboard. That’s great for sharing screen shots in Slack, for example.

I’m not sure how many people have this need to shave a few minutes off their image workflow. But I hope this post is useful for the few of you who do obsess about things like this, like I do. And please let me know if you think this flow can be improved even more!

I’m now with DreamHost and much happier. ↩

26 March 2018

Craig Mod on the revival of print and why it’s important to go offline

Oh boy, where to begin with Craig Mod’s interview with Offscreen Magazine. I’ve been following Craig’s work for a long time, so I have an undeniable bias towards everything he does. But some of the things he says in this interview touched a deep nerve for me, as it relates to a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately.

It’s a long interview, and you should absolutely take the time to read it all. I’ll just post a couple of my favorite quotes here.

On the revival of print and other analog technologies:

I think books are the perfect disconnected objects. They require no energy. They offer a fully immersive, quiet experience for hours or days. The medium dissolves but never becomes translucent. It’s quiet, but present. An exceptional technology.

When you sit down with a book, you understand the parameters of engagement. You know how long the book is. The book isn’t changing as you read it. It’s a solid, immutable thing. You and the book are on equal terms in many ways, as least from a physics point of view. You know what’s going to happen, and the book abides by its implicit contract, which is to be a book.

However, in digital-land many spaces (apps, games) quickly turn into slithering creatures beneath your feet. You never know where you stand. Their worlds are optimized to pull you back in for one more minute, one more click. Over and over. Cascades of chemical reactions in your noggin’ tell you to keep going, just one more hit; I feel this persona of the addict very strongly when I am online or using certain apps or devices.

On your life’s work and what moves you:

Does affecting one hundred lives turn you on? A thousand? A million? A billion? Why? What does it mean to have a positive impact on a life? How intimate does that connection need to be? Understanding your scale — the scale that moves you — is critical to understanding with whom and how you should work, how you should live.

On always being online:

The default expectation today is “always available.” The systems we created are so frictionless that we haven’t noticed how insidiously over-engaged we are. Step by step we’re optimizing ourselves to “maximum” productivity without defining or thinking about “productivity” on a human scale. The digital world abstracts. One could argue most problems contemporary society faces are problems of over-abstraction. As an employer with a global workforce, you have no idea where your employees might be or what they might be doing, so you expect them to answer immediately. The concept of downtime is elusive.

And finally, on “edges”, a topic he’s written about a lot:

Edges ground us. Without clear edges we don’t feel like we’re in control.

11 February 2016

There's nothing wrong with reading ebooks

Paula La Farge challenges the idea that ebooks are inferior to physical books in The Deep Space of Digital Reading:

There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips.

Last year I went through a phase of reading physical books again, but I gave it up pretty quickly. There are two things about the Kindle platform that I missed too much:

The ability to highlight sections, share to Goodreads, and access those highlights any time at the hugely under-appreciated kindle.amazon.com (I tried the app TextGrabber for a while to turn passages from a book into digital text, but it’s just not worth the effort).
I can’t live without the X-ray function that lets you look up details about the book and its characters.

Anyway, one of the major academic complaints about e-books is that reader comprehension is lower. But, hey, turns out…

It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper. But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital devices than of the expectations that readers bring to them. Ackerman and Goldsmith note that readers perceive paper as being better suited for “effortful learning,” whereas the screen is perceived as being suited for “fast and shallow reading of short texts such as news, e-mails, and forum notes.” […]

If those same students expected on-screen reading to be as slow (and as effortful) as paper reading, would their comprehension of digital text improve? A 2015 study by the German educator Johannes Naumann suggests as much. Naumann gave a group of high-school students the job of tracking down certain pieces of information on websites; he found that the students who regularly did research online—in other words, the ones who expected Web pages to yield up useful facts—were better at this task (and at ignoring irrelevant information) than students who used the Internet mostly to send email, chat, and blog.

My guess is that a generation from now this simply won’t be a debate any more.

3 February 2016

Medium as RSS reader

Despite its ridiculous name I’ve become quite fond of the POSSE movement (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere). It’s pretty easy to hook up and automate, so I’ll just mention the basics (and then move on to the problem child):

RSS through FeedPress (they’re awesome).
FeedPress pushes each post to the site’s Twitter account.
IFTTT watches the RSS feed and pushes each post to LinkedIn.

I can add more things through IFTTT, but I think that’s all I need for now. Except for Medium. I really didn’t know what to do with Medium, especially considering this and this:

2015 was the year of Medium and Newsletters, but I feel like we should use 2016 to Make The Personal Blog Great Again™.

— Rian Van Der Merwe (@RianVDM) January 2, 2016

But then it dawned on me… Indie publishers have been thinking about Medium all wrong. We’ve been thinking about Medium as a thing that eats all the world’s content with zero regard for publishers. But Medium is, in fact, nothing more than a next-generation RSS reader. You can follow people and publications, and presumably things will then show up in your feed (it’s all a little confusing to me). That’s when I realized that I should treat Medium not as a publishing platform but as an RSS platform just like Google Reader (may it rest in peace) or Feedly.

So back I went to IFTTT, and did this:

Now every post on this site will automatically appear on Medium as well. So I guess my point is that if Medium is your RSS reader of choice, you can now subscribe to Elezea on Medium here.