Author: chris

Shorter one today because we spent the weekend out in the sun at Camp Pendalouan celebrating my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s wedding. We had our wedding there 6 years ago and it was lovely to be back without needing to also do all the extremely fun and draining things one needs to do on their wedding weekend.

If you want to see a lot of pictures from this past weekend you can check out instagram feed. Lots of my cute kid AND a video of a tiny turtle in there if you need enticing.

Other Newsletters

• Ed’s Vaccuum Newsletter – Ed reminds everyone that the Cobblestone Farm Market starts back up this month. I’m a nice evening stroll away from that and looking forward to it!
• Patti’s Newsletter: Newsletter for May 6, 2018 – Hanging Out with Teacher Patti – I liked this tidbit “Best burn of 1898 comes from the Ann Arbor Argus who says that the fifth graders in Grass Lake have several ways to spell the word “icicle”, including “icesickles”, “icycycles” and “icecickles.” Concludes the paper–“that’s pretty good spelling for Grass Lake.” [ed. note: Grass Lake needed some ice after that sick burn!]”
• CivCity’s Newsletter: Time to Vote Local! – if you’re at all civically minded and in Ann Arbor you should subscribe to this! It’s a great overview of what’s happening in the city including the upcoming May 8th vote!

DTE Riverfront Development

DTE unveils plan for $75M riverfront redevelopment in Ann Arbor | MLive.com

This is great! I wish it was 500 affordable condos instead, but am happy to see SOMETHING done with that land. Lowertown has had two huge pockets of undeveloped and fenced off land since we moved here 9 years ago. Between the riverfront development and the project going in at Plymouth and Maiden Lane (1140 Broadway project) it’ll be a nice change to that area.

Vote Tomorrow, May 8th!

Please vote! Like, come on, this is the least you can do.

I’m guessing turnout will be low at this one because for most of the city it’s “just” about a tax thing. AnnArborVotes.org has more info on it:

Ann Arbor Votes

Spaces After Periods

There was a study floating around this past week about how using two periods after spaces was actually correct because they did a Science about it. Unfortunately, the study was about some specific circumstances where it might be true and then the “reporting” morphed that into “Always use two now!”

Turns out…

@VGR on Twitter:

“Most notably, the test subjects read paragraphs in Courier New, a fixed-width font similar to the old typewriters, and rarely used on modern computers.”

Practicaltypography.com has a great overview of all the other issues with drawing some vast conclusion on who is RIGHT forever and ever from this study:

Are two spaces better than one? | Butterick’s Practical Typography

“True, the re­searchers found that putting two spaces af­ter a pe­riod de­liv­ered a “small” but “sta­tis­ti­cally … de­tectable” im­prove­ment in read­ing speed—about 3%—but cu­ri­ously, only for those read­ers who al­ready type with two spaces. For ha­bit­ual one-spac­ers, there was no ben­e­fit at all.”

I agree with them that studies like this are important to do. They often don’t surface new information that typographers don’t already know, but sometimes they do!

More broadly: typography should always be about legibility first. Once that it satisfied we can have a number of fun discussions and arguments about the design of it. It’s gotta be readable though. I personally think that modern variable width fonts are very good at handling spacing issues automatically for you though.

Susu the cat

“We’re back home. The cat had her first weekend home alone after her sister died. She was soooo happy to see us. All the meows and purring.”

After CATACA died one of our main concerns was how her sister, Susu, would handle the transition. She’s mellowed out considerably, which was a surprise. It seems that in an attempt to assert who was alpha cat they were attacking each other more than we thought. They, sadly, never got a chance to really figure it out.

We were gone this weekend at a wedding and when we got back Susu greeted us more affectionately than I’ve ever seen her. We collapsed and watched TV the rest of the night and she was on top of one of us the entire time.

The Curse of Getting a Good Gmail Address

I have the gmail address for my first initial and last name. This is really easy to remember, easy to tell people about, and for some reason every other C Salzman in the world uses it when they sign up for stuff. The latest was getting Clay’s travel itinerary:

“I hope Clay Salzman didn’t need this itinerary email from his airline. He sure did send it to me and not him.”

I’ve gotten a lot of receipts for various things over the years. At one point I was getting emails in Spanish being sent to Carlos, who is apparently a businessperson of some sort. One time I got biopsy results for someone that I hastily replied back that they weren’t for me and deleted without looking at.

If you have a similar situation I’d love to hear about it. Emails you have received but really shouldn’t are my favorite genre of weird emails stories.

Rewarding Rage

This thread about how algorithms reward anger and outrage is worth reading:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how if you get angry, the internet rewards you. And how algorithms have undoubtedly been tuned to heighten this in ways we’ll never fully know. And even if we did know…

@histoftech on the rewards of public anger

Next time you fire up twitter take a look at how many tweets being shown to you are based around anger, outrage, and/or fear. Yes, the world is bad, but goodness, what the Algorithm shows us is something to behold.

Republishing from the April 30th, 2018 newsletter.

Everyone.

Everyone would do well to have that place on the internet they can put the thing. I’m a broken record, but twitter and facebook are not that place if you want it to exist in perpetuity (for certain values of perpetuity).

My favorite parts of the internet are the far away places. The clear passion project niches. Take this site for example:

action-transfers.com

Welcome to the one-stop destination for images and information about Action Transfers and Instant Pictures, and the home of SPLAT (the Society for the Preservation of Letraset Action Transfers).

You don’t know you need this site until you need it.

It also doesn’t map well to a series of facebook posts, tweets, or an instagram story. It likely doesn’t map well to most CMSes either. Yet the care that went into organizing it means that it can exist as a resource and a delightful thing to stumble on.

For the Ypsi-Arbor D&D Gazette I needed to match the fonts on the original D&D boxes (yes, needed). Kirith.com has already done the legwork here and has a fantastically compiled list of links for it:

TSR Fonts

On the homepage for that site is this statement:

”Couple of interesting facts. The site has averaged 120 unique visitors a day. ~1200 portraits were submitted to the Baldur’s Gate image gallery.”

Number of visitors is all relative. Some people would be thrilled with 120 visitors a day. Others would be panicked at how low the number that is. Your reach and your success is something you get to define. There’s a blog post on my website that I don’t care if anyone ever visits, but I’ve used it a few times while standing in Home Depot and found it extremely important:

Paint Colors · Chris Salzman’s Website

Having a URL for the paint colors for our house that I can call up on any device with an internet connection is an amazing ability. I think more people should have the ability to do that without getting flummoxed by technical jargon.

Republishing from the April 30th, 2018 newsletter.

Two of the other newsletters this week mention a problem that anyone who creates anything runs into: how do you make sure that everyone who should see it actually sees it? Marketing at its best is essentially finding an answer to this. A market for whatever niche content you’re producing exists. Finding the market and delivering the content to it constitutes a very hairy problem.

A poorly timed tweet or Facebook post means it vanishes in a sea of inattention. For example, I posted a link to last week’s newsletter on Facebook and almost nothing came of it. My first tweet about it garnered some interest, but as I remarked:

11am-ish on a Monday seems to be the perfect time to bury a tweet so it doesn’t get seen that well. Let’s see how 4:40 does.

4:40pm did a lot better.

The thing of it is though, that could just be for my followers, yours are different and might LOVE an 11am reminder. Chances are you need to do multiple nudges though due to the way that social media works right now.

This’ll be my sixth newsletter when it’s published. How many of you knew there were 5 others? I’m guessing some, but not all. And I’m also guessing at least one of the others would have been interesting to you (even if this one is not).

This is why despite the annoyances of it email is still very good at getting you a direct line to your tribe (in the Seth Godin sense). It’s one of the last places where we demand that it work as close to our mental model as possible. We don’t want the computer making every decisions about what to surface up at the top or remove from the list. From there, everyone crafts their own workflow for email to make sure they see what they want to.

Strongly linked to this is RSS. An RSS feed makes email marketing easier. This blog has an RSS feed and as of today I’m using mailchimp to send out new post updates over email. This should have been setup forever ago, but everything takes time!

Sign up in the sidebar if you’d like to get future updates! I’ll report back in a few weeks about which method is “working” in terms of making sure people who want to read this are able to read this.

Republished from the April 23, 2018 Newsletter.

The medium is the message and our mediums are shaping the messages we’re willing to share.

The allure of the algorithmic feed is that it shows more relevant information to individual users. However, it maps very poorly with how people WANT the services to act. For example, I want to see everything my wife posts on any of the services we’re both on. This is important because they are often about her, our daughter, or our family in general. As far as Content I’d Like to Consume this ranks up so so so high on the list that it’s shocking to me whenever the Algorithm doesn’t surface this content. Surely with all of that Big Data they could make that connection that, yeah, these two people enjoy each other’s company.

When you trust the algorithm you start to use the only signals you have from the service to inform that algorithm. If those are based on things like likes and retweets…well…guess what’s not going to show up as often? A tweet that is perhaps highly relevant, but didn’t get enough engagement to push it over the edge to appear in your feed.

Most of my followers and people I follow are (by design) people with sub-1000 numbers. They are likely to never see a tweet go viral and most tweets might go by “unliked”. Then they get suppressed and likely don’t want to tweet similar things again. Imagine a twitter that had more controls over what you see. Imagine if you could go back to a chronological timeline!

Republished from the April 2, 2018 Newsletter.

If I had a mission statement right now it’d be this: more people exhibiting more ownership over more of what they produce online. Right now we’ve swung almost entirely to allowing social media to own everything about our activity online: both in terms of consumption and production. Social media, however, interlaces consumption and production in order to extract the maximum value from the smallest interactions. I’m convinced that soon enough if you hover your mouse over a link for too long it could result in a post about how you’re interested in it blasted out to the world. Technically speaking that would be a very impressive feature! Shareholders love features like that because engagement goes up because everyone thinks that everyone else is doing more somethings on the site.

Your tools constrain what you’re able to create and how you create it. And the current landscape of widely available, easy to use, tools prioritize only a specific set of behaviors (primarily based around engagement). Imagine if instead of writing this newsletter it existed as a thread on twitter. I’m so tired just thinking of anyone trying to read that let alone writing it!

I’m all for the barrier to creation being lowered. I’m not for the control of the display of that creation to be ceded to a few large publicly traded companies. Again, I want more people to have ways to create and catalog the things they care about in their own space. Owning your own little corner of the internet allows you to do different things with it than trusting The Great Algorithm to sort it out for you.

Maybe you just really want to catalog the paint colors you used on your house so you can reference it later. Maybe you want to write a weekly newsletter. Maybe you want to have a place to post about your hyperlocal D&D zine’s progress. FB isn’t going to give you those tools unless there’s a measurable way for them to monetize it. And the second it’s no longer profitable for them you’re on borrowed time.

We have some good tools to do the making part, but we don’t have all the possible tools to do so. I want more ways to facilitate someone having an idea to the production of that idea. Ideally it doesn’t involve a lot of head scratching about terms like DNS, SSH, NPM, etc. No one in 2018 should have to understand server administration in order to have a website.

If this were a medium piece I’d now bring up how my startup is going to solve this. Alas, this is just a weekly newsletter. Talk to me in person if you’ve been thinking about these things too.