Writing

Ben Lindsay
• from
October 6, 2020
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The internet is a wonderful resource. One which I’ve used extensively throughout my life to learn most of the useful things I know today, soft skills aside. However, it’s been much of a one way stream of information for me, and this is something I want to change.

Recently I’ve been toying with the idea of making a Medium account to start writing more thought pieces and documenting interesting things I’ve built or learned. I’ve historically detested writing since leaving school, most probably because I was forced to write and I don’t enjoy anything i’m forced to do.

I got a bit into this with my friend Charles Bardett who is a very active writer, and has seen wonderful results using his personal blog to grow his own business - workshop tactics. Charles shared his blog with me, which he built using the Kirby CMS. I really loved what he did to make his site squeaky clean and simple in layout; minimalism is goals. But being me, I also wanted to add a bit of pizzazz to the whole experience....

Initially I was thinking of something wild an abstract, like stupid abstract. Blog posts floating around that you’d have to catch to read. But after absolutely zero process and a little sketching I had roughed out a concept of tinder for blog posts; where users can swipe left or right on a post to decide if they want to read it or not.

The swiping was really just me copying the features built into a lot of email clients for speed, where you can swipe on an email to complete some form of action, but the more I thought about it, swiping posts had a lot of potential. For one, stacking all of the posts you want to read for later can save a lot of that precious tab space we all crave, but you can also gleam a lot of user feedback about which blogs people are most likely to read based off their swiping behaviour.

I haven't done any of that yet so my site now looks kind of funny with posts that don't really look like posts. But I like it. It's very half done, really my style!

TLDR; I tried to make a medium account and ended up trying to make a blog hosting platform...

Update: Swiping blogs was a terrible idea and waste of time but I'm going to keep my site looking funny because I'm lazy and dEsIGn...

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