The Personal Website of Jeremy Boles

I’m doing some writing on an old netbook like it’s 2009.

I Built a Blog and Forgot to Write

It’s easy to lose sight of why we’re doing something when the thing we’re doing is complex.

I spent a good chunk of my day writing about a long walk I took, so I figure I might as well get a second walk in.

Reading my own writing aloud brings up childhood trauma about being made to read in front of the class.

The Proportional Web

Oskar Wickström applying Bringhurst to the web: rem proportions, justified text with actual hyphenation, one typeface doing all the work. I tried the vertical-rhythm half on my own site and backed it out; the per-element discipline cost more than it returned.

justif - publication-grade text justification for the web

This is a neat project that brings Knuth-Plass justification to the web.

Recreating the Canon Cat document interface

Alexander Obenauer on rebuilding the Canon Cat’s document interface. The bit I keep coming back to is from the Cat’s own How-To Guide:

When our designers created the Cat they threw out all the junk that makes computers clunky and held onto the personality and immediacy of a typewriter.

I spent the rest of my day honing the atlas articles and revisiting old ideas and trips. I had a lot of fun reminiscing about my trip to Tanzania in 2014.

I’ve spent my morning staring at a terminal, porting old wiki entries I’d collected over the years into my atlas. With any luck, that section of my website will be live soon.

Emacs Writing Machine

It’s validating to see that other people are having this problem too, and working with old computers to help them write.

I’ve been having a difficult time slowing down and getting some writing done, but this morning I closed everything except for Vim and collected my thoughts about the thing I've been working on over the last few weeks.

I spent all morning writing about some of the programming I did last week. It was great to collect my thoughts, but all I have to show for it is a jumbled mess of words at this point. It’s going to take quite a bit more work to get it to a point where I’d want to put my name on it.

Writing is hard.

I had a no-judgment realization today that I spend far more time planning to write or building tools to help with writing than I do any actual writing.