{"id":284,"date":"2005-06-13T05:39:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-13T05:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/WebDev\/Blogging\/friction.html"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T04:00:00","slug":"friction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/2005\/06\/13\/friction\/","title":{"rendered":"Friction"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’re a regular reader, you haven’t really been reading me regularly for a while now. This is because I haven’t been writing<\/em> here on the site regularly for some time. The home page displays 10 articles at a time; as I’m writing this (prior to posting this), the oldest article is from March 22. Today is June 12; I’ve only managed 10 articles in the past 3 months.<\/p>\n

This weekend I’ve been reading Joel On Software<\/a><\/cite>. While I’ve read a number of Joel’s more frequently linked articles on his site<\/a> (from which the book is culled), I’ve not read alot of his material, so picking up the book seemed like a good choice. I always prefer hardcopy for extended reading. One of the topics he expounds on at great length in the book is the need for writing good functional specs. I found this interesting, as I’ve recently been battling my inability to write at work- not on specs, but on documentation. Joel gives this advice:<\/p>\n

\n

Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the more you’ll be able to write. If you need to write specs and you can’t, start a journal, create a weblog, take a creative writing class, or just write a nice letter to every relative and college roommate you’ve blown off for the last 4 years. Anything that involves putting words down on paper will improve your spec writing skills.<\/p>\n

(from Painless Functional Specifications – Part 1: Why Bother?<\/a><\/cite>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And of course, he’s right. That’s one of the reasons I started this weblog. And yet I don’t write enough. I attribute this largely to friction – things that make the act of writing a blog entry more effort then necessary. <\/p>\n

One example of friction is the posting interface- when I first started the site, I posted everything via a simple web form, which was functional but it required me to pick a category before<\/em> writing the entry. This doesn’t sound like much friction, but friction is cumulative, and every little bit hurts. Also, editing large amounts of text in a browser edit box isn’t really alot of fun. Worst of all, I couldn’t begin a draft and leave it till later to finish – I could only post completed works. <\/p>\n

Last December, I started using<\/a> Michael McCraken’s Blapp<\/a>, a dedicated OS X editor for Blosxom weblog posts. It lets me write locally, see a preview of my post using my own templates, I can write the entire post before assigning a category, and I can save my work without posting it. This all amounts to lower friction, and it has made it easier for me to write for this site. <\/p>\n

Another source of friction is inertia- the less often I post, the harder it is to get around to posting. To that end, I’m going to challenge myself to post here more often. After the November Blogging Challenge<\/a>, I’m not going to try and hold my self to a post a day. Instead, I’ll shoot for a post every other day.<\/p>\n

Another source of friction has been concern over content; I’ve often tried to keep my posts to a certain technical scope (which at other times I’ve ignored wholesale), to this end I’ll try and loosen up what I post about. A special case of this problem is a certain aversion I have to the release early, release often<\/em> mindset- when I have a project in mind that I might want to tackle, I have a need to get a certain amount of progress under my belt before talking about it. In my defense, this site contains a number of examples to the contrary- things I’ve posted with “more info to come later” which never came. Nonetheless, I’m going to try and follow Les Orchard<\/a>‘s example, and post about whatever I’m currently tinkering with, even if it won’t come to fruition.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’re a regular reader, you haven’t really been reading me regularly for a while now. This is because I haven’t been writing here on the site regularly for some time. The home page displays 10 articles at a time; as I’m writing this (prior to posting this), the oldest article is from March 22. […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jclark.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}