Brendon Cromwell

Our world is constantly bombarding us causing who we are to become fractured. We need to focus and work at being here now. It’s an action.

What a great little plugin. It replaces the condensed post screen with the normal post screen in “Press This” bookmarlet. I no longer need Shawn Blanc’s press this hack to use the linked list URL.

Via John Stansbury

Speaking of writing, one thing I’m still working on with my posting is what Mandy Brown writes about:

When I first started blogging, I told myself it was ok to post half-formed thoughts; a blog was ephemeral, reactive—the medium cared not so much about completeness as about timeliness. I still believe that to be true, but with one important modification: it’s not that a blog post has permission to be rough so much as that roughness is its natural state. Meaning, blogging encourages exploration and experimentation. In this way, blogging is the kind of writing authors have done for centuries but which usually remained hidden away.

I’m working through the roughness right now.

via (TBR)

Writing is a difficult action for me. I’m a perfectionist, and my ideas don’t come out of my head perfectly formed and ready for scrutiny. That said writing is an action one I don’t do for pleasure very often. Right now my desired world view and reality don’t line up. I want to be a creative person. Taking pictures, designing websites and writing words that people want to read. The reality is I don’t do any of those. Do you know what’s missing? The doing; I’m not doing what I want to do. That’s because I neglect to take the time to just sit down and do it. I’m the kind of person who needs a completely silent room in order to get “creative” things done. That’s how these words are getting written. My wife is away at the gym and my son is down for a nap upstairs.

So right now I am writing. And to be honest with you, the reason I am writing this post right now is because I wrote down a goal, in a notebook, to post one blog post this month. Here I am at the last day of the month. I’m a procrastinator, what can I say. Writing is a way to get the creative juices flowing. I need a creative outflow. I find creativity is like running; really hard to get going but once you hit your stride it’s easy. Doing creative things makes me want to do more creative things. So, I’m starting with writing. I’m making the promise to myself to write 2 posts a month and we’ll see where this journey take me. I know that in the back of my mind once this post is finished I’ll be able to give myself permission to work on other creative tasks, like updating the look of my site.

But for now back to my writing. I want to use vivid imagery to capture the minds of my audience. By capturing my audiences minds eye, I believe I can change the world, one word, one thought at a time. Words convey ideas, thoughts and emotions. The most powerful force for inspiring action is emotion. If I can make an emotional connection with my writing and get you to move to action then my job is done. The problem is non of that connection happens if I don’t write. I have a feeling there are a lot of other people out there who are like me. Why are they like me? Why aren’t they writing down their thoughts and posting them? I would venture to guess that it’s because they don’t have a way of capturing their ideas, growing and pruning them into finished posts. I like reading about other writers and creatives processes so i’m going to share my process here.

The Process

1. I start with one large Simplenote text file titled “BrendonCromwell.com Seedlings”. This is where I dump any idea I have that pertains to writing on this site. It’s written in markdown so I can easily read it. This is those little ideas that I need to feed and grow so they can become full-fledged articles.
2. Once an idea reaches a place I feel is mature enough I transfer it to it’s own note and prepend the title with a ¶.
3. Polish it some more then transfer it to MarsEdit.
4. Publish!

I know some time in the future I’ll look back at this post and have to write a new post about how I do things because I’ll get into this and discover new, better and different ways to get to the same goal; a publish blog post. I’m sure my writing voice will change, mature even, just like it did for Shawn Blanc. Shawn is a writer who I’ve been reading for two years now and has always been awesome and professional with words. He is definitely worth your time and attention. Until then I’ll be working on my next post.

I would counter the TSA Administrator John Pistole’s official response at the bottom of the NPR article with the article Jason Snell retweeted about the Israelification of the airports. If JOHN truly cared about our safety (and not what some lobbyist wined and dined him with) then he would fight to overhaul the way security is currently being done and do security the way they do in Israel. It would start with hiring highly competent TSA agents who care more about protecting the US then they do about humiliating passengers. In order to do this they need to pay more than minimum wage and it needs to be a good CAREER path.

Let me start out by saying I am not a designer, I am a tinkerer who is interested in building and designing websites. That is where I am coming from when I talk about Jeremy Keith’s new book HTML5 for Web Designers.

The book is small, has a bright cover and it beckons me to pick it up and thumb through it, even peruse, if I have the time to be thorough. It looks great and can be read in about an hour. But don’t be fooled by it’s size. It’s a great reference and a starting point to delve into HTML5.

The book does a wonderful job making the HTML5 spec easily understandable to a tinkerer like myself. Jeremy breaks everything down into digestible chunks and gives quality examples for the important parts of the HTML5 spec. Even with my cursory knowledge of HTML I am able to understand the everything Jeremy covers. He has structured the book in such a way that it makes the reader want to get out and start using HTML5. There is just enough information to understand what is going on and whet my appetite to get out an make great websites. I often go back to Jeremy’s examples and use them as the corner stone of what I’m trying to code in one of my tinkering projects.

Speaking of projects, the folks who brought us A List Apart started the little project of A Book Apart and they’ve done a great job with the design and format of HTML5 for Web Designers. It’s clear to me they sweated the details and it makes re-reading the book much more enjoyable. Mandy Brown does a good job explaining the steps they have taken to earn their readers’ trust. In my eyes, they give me more than I would expect.

On that note, here’s an aside about delighting your customer. The other day I bought Steven Pressfield’s excellent book the The War of Art in electronic format. Steven’s website said it would be on sale for $2 for only two days. When I got to the order screen I had to choose between epub and pdf. Don’t get me wrong, if I had chosen to buy both, $4 is a great deal but in my opinion that interaction didn’t delight me. I think he should have done one of two things; offer only one format or sell both formats together for one price.

Contrast that experience with A Book Apart. The day after I bought Pressfield’s book I received an email from A Book Apart stating they have added mobi and pdf to their electronic version of the book and if I would like those formats for free just reply to the email with my order number. I did and I was delighted.

Jeremy Keith, thanks for writing a wonderful, witty book on such a dull topic. A Book Apart, keep producing quality products, keep delighting me and I’ll be a customer for life.

P.S. – The three books on A Book Apart’s docket look just as wonderful as “HTML5 for Web Designers”. I’m especially looking forward to Responsive Web Design.

A sad day for the Mariners and baseball.

An updated version of the YouTube5 Safari extension linked to  on Daringfireball the other day. Works wonderfully.

A wonderful website. I can relate with so many posts. My favorite is bacon. (via Tiffany Wardle)