Realignment + Unoffice Hours webring 🎉
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Realignment
I put together my personal site quite quickly in May last year. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d use it besides logging thoughts and books: it’s expanded quite a bit since then.
One of the greatest additions has been Unoffice Hours. It’s let me catch up with old friends and have conversations with people I might not otherwise have met.
There have been smaller tweaks, such as the Reply by email button that was quietly added to articles a few weeks ago. Both of these things have sparked discussions in a way I’m incredibly grateful for.
Over the past month or so, I’d noticed a couple of other personal site things I thought could be interesting:
- Matt Baer’s Delete Your Facebook, which is a beautifully simple way to highlight issues with our most problematic social media platform
- Luke Mitchell’s Bookmarks, which lists discovered links and resources
With all of this in mind, along with some needed design tweaks and adjustments, the time had come to realign my site.
This realignment has allowed me to:
- Improve the typography, colour and tighten up the overall design
- Introduce new types: Relative and Relative Faux (a beautiful fauxnospaced font)
- Change to a simpler URL format
- Add About and Resources
Resources
If you’ll indulge some brief navel-gazing, the last of these is what I’m most excited about. I’ve populated it with a series of interesting links and miscellany I’ve been logging over the past year or so.
I’d previously collected these in Notion, but the app is so slow. It’s at least as quick to add them to site and build a useful, public collection of interesting things that can be easily browsed by category.
For instance, it might be useful to reference the latest reason not to use Facebook or learn new techniques for saying ‘no’.
Absorbing
Interesting links from the web.
Sendstack
This truly privacy-first newsletter is working toward early-access. Definitely worth checking out.
Bob Hoffman on Facebook
If you read only one link from this week, make it this. A dry-witted and brutal teardown of Facebook based on the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook files.
Facebook probably radicalised about 2 million QAnon members
Explosive stuff from Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor:
“Facebook’s research said 2/3rds of the time that people join an extremist group on Facebook is because of Facebook recommendation. Which means Facebook radicalised about 2 million people into QAnon and those are the people who did ‘Stop The Steal’ and the insurrection...they aided and abetted an insurrection.”
Newsletter schedule
Did I mention that these emails don’t track you? So I don’t know if you read it, how many times you read it or where you are: not that those stats are particularly accurate anyway.
I’ve been sending these emails at fairly random intervals – sometimes in the week, other times at the weekend. I know there’s a newsletter for every day of the week, and it can be difficult to read things during a work week.
So, what works for you? Do you prefer a midweek read or something over the weekend?
If you have an opinion, hit reply – I’d love to hear.
Scruples
We recently published the agreement we ask clients to sign, which might be of interest to any freelancers and consultants.
It’s plain-English and built on the foundations of Andy Clarke’s Contract Killer and Superfriendly’s agreement.
We hope it’s useful.
Unoffice Hours (Webring Special!)
I’ve been running Unoffice Hours since March, after reading about them on Matt Webb’s blog.
When I was realigning my site, it struck me that there are several people offering these. I know people I’ve spoken to have considered running Unoffice Hours, too.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a place to explore who’s running these?
There’s now an Unoffice Hours webring. Joining is super simple: add the links to your site then add your site via Github (or email me).
Visit the site for Unoffice Hours people and joining instructions:
If you have related links that might be of interest, or thoughts on any of these topics, I’d love to hear from you: just hit reply.
Until next time,
Dave