This is the first of starting back up my newsletter.

You haven’t heard from me in a while because I’ve been busy. Now getting to a point where I’m confident in starting this up again.

What’s changed?

The name, to Craft & Practice

I’m evolving 500 Characters.

Over the course of the 70 newsletters sent out in 2024, I found I was focusing a lot on, well, crafts and practices. It regularly covered developing my practice of writing to practicing my crafts in product, design, engineering, and management.

The host, to Buttondown

I’ve moved away from Substack.

I’m an advocate for an Open Web, and Substack is not that. It’s a closed platform that’s figuring out how to make more money. Also, it has a Nazi problem; it runs deep. Also, the company’s okay with that. I don’t want to hang out at a bar full of oligarchs and fascists.

The practice, towards digital gardening

I’m becoming a digital gardener.

You’ll learn more about it, but it’s basically a different way of interacting with the internet. It’s building a website through an emergent process of cultivation, regular tending, and growing things over time.

Week Notes

Building my garden

This week, I was able to get RSS and JSON feeds up and running on my site. I now have three feeds based on the sort of content people may want to subscribe to, generated dynamically, and can grow in the future.

You can check out:

• All the content (/rss | /feed) where all the content from the other feeds come to you in one; merged.

• Just the links (/rss | /feed) where I cultivate my soil; things from others I’m reading, bookmarking, referencing.

• Just the journal (/rss | /feed) where I write posts of varying levels of completeness. Aiming for daily entries.

What else?

It’s been a while since any update. I’ve been focused on building my website. So, here’s a quick summation of where I am so far:

• Part of the IndieWeb: sending and receiving webmentions across the internet. Not doing anything with that fact yet, on the front end, but one step at at time.

• Tags, tags, and tags: Part of the emergent side of things, for me, was using tags. Now, if you click any of the tags on the site, you’ll get to posts that have those tags. Also, if you go to /tags you’ll see all the tags, with their counts of use!

• /about: I’ve updated and rewrote my About Page. It feels good and better than previous bits. You can check it out here.

• Light/Dark mode: my site now has light and dark modes.

• Porting posts from Substack: I have, probably, 2/5 of the posts ported from Substack into my site. 100% are ported to Buttondown, but I want to bring them into my garden.

• In development: There are quite a few different things I’m still building out.

  • /work — next on my list to take care of is documenting my career, and developing case studies and portfolios.

  • /essays — I’m porting my Chrysalis Essays over to start, have others in the pipeline.

  • /library — I’ve started documenting the books I’m reading, and quotes from them with page numbers.

  • /books — Started writing some of my books I want to write. Thinking of writing in the open, and developing chapters that way.

  • /photos — At some point, build out my photography portfolio and share that way.

Be safe; take care—and thank you for reading,

Jonathan