Port Watchers № 2
Happy November! This month always brings one of my very favorite and most joyful activities: not writing a novel. Sitting on the sidelines for NaNoWriMo — tinkering and playing video games, sipping coffee and looking out my window during the extra days off — is pure luxury. (I am a one-time veteran of the event.)
Public obscurity as creativity hack
For a year now, I’ve had a secret website for my writing and programming notes: ideas for things to make and write, as well as ideas that are just ideas. Anyone in the world could read it if they knew the address, but they don’t, and it isnt linked from anywhere. Somehow this makes me enjoy using it much more than I would typing into a private file.
I need my note-taking tool to be accessible from any computer, without installing anything, and without needing to sync anything when I’m done. Crucially, I need it to be accessible from work. We all know how contrary our brains can be. When I get to my office I’m freshly rested and have just had my coffee and a half hour to myself in the car. Of course my best ideas are going to come to me then, when I should be doing something else. To slip over to my secret website and make a deposit is the work of an exhilarated, transgressive moment. (Besides, my brain, in much the same spirit of rebellion, often stubbornly focuses on my work when I’m in bed trying to sleep; my employer owes me for this.)
Am I going to tell you where this website is? No. But I have made a copy of it and will tell you where that is (it is here), so you can try it out and use it, if you wish. This public copy has all my hours of customization, but with all my writing and clutter moved out, ready for a new occupant. I’ve called it Rising. Like bread rising; a baking metaphor.
Rising is just a customized TiddlyWiki. Think of it like an index card file. If you have a new idea, you write it on a new card. If you’re going back to work on something, you get out as many cards as you need and spread them out. The cards can link to each other. (The TiddlyWiki calls the cards “tiddlers”. I prefer to call them cards.)
TiddlyWiki has been around for several years, and there are plenty of templates out there based on it. I made this one because I wanted something simple, warm enough (visually) to invite input, and that added just the lightest facilities for grouping cards and adding new cards to those groups.
The setup instructions are on GitHub.
If you follow those, you’ll be hosting and accessing this template through GitHub Pages
exactly the way I do. If using GitHub scares you (understandable), you could just download
the index.html file from there, set up a free account at tiddlyhost.com, create a new site, and use the “Upload” button
to replace the new site’s contents with Rising’s index.html. A sane person
would do this. I just use GitHub Pages because, well, it felt sneakier.
TiddlyWiki markup is odd. I don’t like it that much. But I put up with it for this purpose. The thoughts I type in there are in their earliest, worst form; they are being captured, not typeset. In fact, once I have copy/pasted them into wherever they will ultimately be published, I usually delete them right out of the note-taking site. If I were to embark fresh on making such a tool today, I would probably look at basing it on FeatherWiki, which is similar to TiddlyWiki but uses Markdown for formatting.
New fonts
Dave Foster recently released the very beautiful Taurus Grotesk, which has just gone on my “coveted” list. Scroll down past the type samples to the section titled “Design Notes” for a lovely, illustrated account of the font’s influences and design process.
I made the mistake at first of thinking the font used for the copy on Taurus’s page was Taurus Grotesk, but it isn’t! That font is Marre Sans, and I like it very much as well. Taurus Grotesk is approachable but formal; Marre Sans is formal but quirky. Both are worth your consideration.
The blogging salaryman
Weird show recommendation: Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman on Netflix. I don’t know what to call this show (no one does). It like a live-action anime written by the Tokyo tourism board. The protagonist is an office worker who secretly posts on an anonymous blog about local artisinal desert food destinations. Watch one episode, I dare you.
That’s all for now! More soon, but not sooner than a month from now. Replies with links of interest always much appreciated.
— Joel