Wealthy dirtbags with shitty politics
Hi friend,
Fucking Trump, man. What is even left to say? Shitty way to start a year.
It’s not a good time to be on Twitter anymore. It wasn’t 5 years ago, either, but it’s really bad now. I am giving extreme side eye to people who still have accounts there. What, precisely, are they waiting for?
I don’t want to wallow this year, I want to make shit. I want to write more and share more and put more good thinking and good writing and useful ideas out into the world, and I want to help other people do that too.
So I'm making something new. I'm a bit self-conscious about it, being honest, as it's not in my pre-established-domain-expertise comfort zone of UX and content strategy. But YOLO, as we once said, in the before times.
It's called: Self-Platforming for Writers, Designers, & Creatives.
It offers tips, tools, and encouragement to help people like you share more often about your craft and projects on your own platforms and channels — independent of social media, employer blogs, and/or services run by wealthy dirtbags with shitty politics.
There's a live webinar on February 3 to start things off. The webinar + recording is the initial offering, and it will continue to grow into a full toolkit. I've already added guides on:
Why you need a domain name, and how to choose and register one
Recommendations for email newsletters that aren't obsessed with invading the privacy of your readers
Simple, put-'em-right-to-work tips on noticing your process so that you actually have stuff to write about!
I was motivated to create Self-Platforming for at least three reasons:
1): Actually good writing about design and creative processes gets buried by the algorithms.
It's hard to find good stuff, and it's hard to ever find it again after the first time. There was a lot of slop even before AI, and it's only getting worse now.
Selfishly, I want more good stuff to read, and I want to be able to share it with people like my students and coaching clients, and I don’t want to have to generate impressions and ad revenue for fascist shitheads while doing it.
2): If you don't own it, you can't keep it available.
A few weeks ago I was preparing for a new UX writing class for the University of Rhode Island. I'd gone back to materials from a course I ran just under a year ago, and was dismayed to find that many of the articles I'd quoted from and linked to were already dead and gone from the web. Not even the Internet Archive had saved them.
Whether it gets nuked by a service shutting down, a website changing their strategy, you changing jobs ... if you can't keep it available, it doesn't become part of the body of your craft and field. And that sucks, because your work matters, and should be part of the whole.
3): I think I know how to help?
This is stuff I've been thinking about and engaging with for a long time. Having had a blog before they were even called blogs, I am almost certainly one of the first few hundred (dozen?) people to have had this thought: "Shit, I haven't blogged in a while, what should I blog about?"
I think a lot about tools, methods, and habits for writing and publishing online as an individual creator. Which means I also know all of the hard stuff, too: I know the obstacles to sharing your work because I've run into them. I know how to procrastinate on this stuff because I've done it. I know how we can talk ourselves out of sharing, because I do it to myself. I know all the wrong things to spend money on, because I've spent it.
I've made a lot of mistakes, and I've learned an awful lot, and I think I have good instincts and good advice to share about sharing online.
So! If you’d like to join the party, consider this your official invitation. There are sliding scale seats for folks who are tight on funds, and the standard seats are still quite a good deal, IMO, at just $95 USD. I hope to see you there.
Until next time,
Scott