Category: y

Republished from the May 28th 2018 Newsletter.

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of what social networks reward lately. On twitter it’s very easy to see something come into view that you’ve never even considered before. That can be a good thing, or be horrifying. Regardless, our (my) tendnacy to slam on the RT button has a social and mental cost: when someone else sees that how is that going to change their day? Oftentimes I’ve moved on a few minutes later, but if the network works how it’s supposed to those characters keep moving through it and have an effect on other people’s days.

I’ve stopped myself short from sharing a lot of the things I see that “surprise and disgust” me lately. Mostly because I recognize what the emotional whiplash feels like to me and I don’t like it. Especially when it’s about something I have no power to do anything about then it becomes outrage for the sake of outrage. Yes, there is much to be outraged about! That’s okay! But stewing in it hurts.

Anyway, please think twice before giving megaphones to things that “surprise and disgust” you:

Chris on Twitter: “Oh look! Can we please stop “hate linking” now?… “

Newsletters

Ed’s newsletter is four hours late this week, but still good!. I liked his comments about respecting public comment time at the City Council meetings. It’s the least our council can do.

Hate Linking

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of what social networks reward lately. On twitter it’s very easy to see something come into view that you’ve never even considered before. That can be a good thing, or be horrifying. Regardless, our (my) tendnacy to slam on the RT button has a social and mental cost: when someone else sees that how is that going to change their day? Oftentimes I’ve moved on a few minutes later, but if the network works how it’s supposed to those characters keep moving through it and have an effect on other people’s days.

I’ve stopped myself short from sharing a lot of the things I see that “surprise and disgust” me lately. Mostly because I recognize what the emotional whiplash feels like to me and I don’t like it. Especially when it’s about something I have no power to do anything about then it becomes outrage for the sake of outrage. Yes, there is much to be outraged about! That’s okay! But stewing in it hurts.

Anyway, please think twice before giving megaphones to things that “surprise and disgust” you:

Chris on Twitter: “Oh look! Can we please stop “hate linking” now?… “

Volante

New track by Menevado!:

GDPR and Trust and Ads

Marcel Freinbichler on Twitter: “Because of #GDPR, USA Today decided to run a separate version of their website for EU users, which has all the tracking scripts and ads removed. The site seemed very fast, so I did a performance audit. How fast the internet could be without all the junk! 🙄 5.2MB → 500KB… https://t.co/PsB77zjB4B”

There’s a number of sites that have stripped down version that—turns out!—are both easier to read and load considerably faster. NPR has a text only version of their site that admirably basic. There’s no header tags even, they replaced them with <p> tags, which is…bold (and inaccessible): Text-Only NPR.org.

Publishers could sell simple display ads (think a static image that is linked to a unique URL) on these refreshingly calm versions of their sites, but the trust between publisher, reader, and advertiser is so misaligned that I’m going to guess they won’t try.

Imagine if, generally speaking, the reader knew that: the ads on the site were relevant to the site, definitely didn’t include tracking scripts, and didn’t measurably slow down the site they were trying to visit. If that was the case, I bet fewer people would be running ad blockers.

You could still track an ad’s effectiveness with unique URL’s supplied to the publisher, but there’s no way the ad network would trust that those wouldn’t get abused.

And the publisher has so much else to think about, so why not just outsource the pixels to an ad network and get a check every now and then?

All that combines to bring us to where we are today. Since no one trusts each other we rely on analytics to “prove” that everything is working, which then ushers in a race to the bottom for who can manipulate the data quickest to get their stats up higher, which then creates a market for more and more tracking, which is how we got to here.

The Bygone Era of Twitter

Twitter once was very inane and innocuous and that was wonderful”

Go see what twitter used to be 10 years ago. No, it wasn’t perfect, but in general it sure was a lot more boring and less harrowing.

She Dwarf

My friend, Kyle, creates a webcomic called She Dwarf. It’s extremely good and you should be reading it. He’ll be at Heroes Con Jun 15-17 in Charolette, NC. If you’re there go see him!

Always Making Mistakes

Always Small, Always Better, Always Wrong | GeePawHill.Org

GeePaw wrote a great piece on change that came to me right when I needed it. Especially this line:

“always wrong is the discipline of making mistakes, keeping your energy and your spirits up as you discover every day that you’re not done making changes. i often tell geeks, don’t worry so much about whether you’re about to make a mistake, because i can pretty much guarantee you that you’re about to make a mistake.”

I tend to stall on projects when I can’t see how the end result will be “perfect” (for whatever value of “perfect” I have in my head). And then when trying to execute and something goes wrong it can be difficult to not catastrophize. Maybe the whole idea was bad because in step 3 I hit a snag? Maybe steps 4-10 aren’t worth it and we should just go back to the original way we were doing things. He goes on to say:

“making decisions knowing with confidence that you will make them differently again later.”

I’ve been trying this on for size in the past week or so and it’s been helpful for managing my expectations.

Republished from the May 28th 2018 Newsletter.

Marcel Freinbichler on Twitter: “Because of #GDPR, USA Today decided to run a separate version of their website for EU users, which has all the tracking scripts and ads removed. The site seemed very fast, so I did a performance audit. How fast the internet could be without all the junk! 🙄 5.2MB → 500KB… https://t.co/PsB77zjB4B”

There’s a number of sites that have stripped down version that—turns out!—are both easier to read and load considerably faster. NPR has a text only version of their site that admirably basic. There’s no header tags even, they replaced them with <p> tags, which is…bold (and inaccessible): Text-Only NPR.org.

Publishers could sell simple display ads (think a static image that is linked to a unique URL) on these refreshingly calm versions of their sites, but the trust between publisher, reader, and advertiser is so misaligned that I’m going to guess they won’t try.

Imagine if, generally speaking, the reader knew that: the ads on the site were relevant to the site, definitely didn’t include tracking scripts, and didn’t measurably slow down the site they were trying to visit. If that was the case, I bet fewer people would be running ad blockers.

You could still track an ad’s effectiveness with unique URL’s supplied to the publisher, but there’s no way the ad network would trust that those wouldn’t get abused.

And the publisher has so much else to think about, so why not just outsource the pixels to an ad network and get a check every now and then?

All that combines to bring us to where we are today. Since no one trusts each other we rely on analytics to “prove” that everything is working, which then ushers in a race to the bottom for who can manipulate the data quickest to get their stats up higher, which then creates a market for more and more tracking, which is how we got to here.

Shorter and “late” (you may have your money back) this week. Lots going on personally and professionally and my normal slot I reserved for writing got subsumed by other tasks. Better late than never though. Writing newsletters serves as a great way to think longer-than-social-media thoughts each week; an invaluable exercise in these trying times.

Other newsletters

• Ed’s vacuum/2018-W19.md at master · vielmetti/vacuum · GitHub
• Patti’s Newsletter for May 13, 2018 – Hanging Out with Teacher Patti
• CivCity – Every Day’s a Prom for Local Civics!

D&D Gazette

Last week I released the Ypsi-Arbor D&D Gazette Issue 1!

I had modest traffic goals in mind before launch. Due to some timely retweets it ended up seeing about double my goal of “wouldn’t it be cool if 100 people saw it?!”. With any creative work there’s always the worry that it comes out and fails silently, but people said nice things and seemed to enjoy it!

I did many things wrong with promotions though and will hopefully explore all of that in a separate blog post about the whole thing. For now? Go read it!

Biking

I’ve been biking more than driving this past week and really love gliding past the very long line of cars on Packard in the evening. Our route in and home is mostly bike lanes except for a few small sections where it becomes “sharrows”, which is a word I just learned that I find to be a bewildering answer to bike infrastructure.

Sam generously loaned me his cargo bike to try out with the toddler. We tried it for a few trips and while it’s not quite right for us, it is an incredible piece of purpose-built machinery. The question of “how do I move more than just me on a bike?” has resulted in all sorts of neat contraptions I’m only just becoming aware of.

We were talking about a get-together for families who bike to show off their setups and let others try them out. A decent setup for biking with a kid can quickly blow past the hundreds of dollars range and go into the thousands. If you’re commited to replacing a second car with biking it can be hard to know which of many viable options is best for you. Getting a chance to try it out is key.

If a meetup like that would be of interest to you, contact me! Or, if there’s a group in town already doing something like that, tell me about it!

Menevado

Steve published a new song called Unknown Radius last week. I like it a lot and am flattered that he used a picture of our cat, Susu, as the cover:

kems on Twitter: “My latest features @chrissalzman’s cat Susu on the cover. I saw this on his Instagram as I was combing through unfinished tracks, and it inspired me to finish this one. It works for me as the soundtrack of a cat experiencing the world from a windowsill.”

He’s been doing a song a month this year and they’re all quite good. Go listen to Menevado on Spotify.

Landscaping

One part of home ownership I vastly underestimated the time cost of is landscaping. I finally mowed the lawn yesterday and wished I’d done it a week earlier. The previous owner liked to garden and plan small spaces around the yard and I’m very thankful she did. These are very cool and we’re slowly learning what we need to do to maintain them—or which ones we want to redo. I’ve resigned myself to the lawn being a 5 year project to get to “yeah, that’s about what we want”.

Or, we’ll replace it all with a rock garden.

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.

Republished from the May 7th 2018 Newsletter.

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.

Republished from the May 7th 2018 Newsletter.

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.

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.

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.

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!