From the blog

Essays on writing

on the craft of writing and rewriting.

July 22, 2022

The metaverse is already here, on Spotify.

A persistent, consistent experience would change digital work. The rest can wait.

It's the tiny things you miss the most, the things you take for granted until they're gone and you're surprised by how handy they were. As it was when I started a new Apple Music trial, lured in by the human curators and…

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July 6, 2022

Log In is more popular than Sign In: The UX Microcopy Survey

How 100 SaaS tools tell users to join, check pricing, get help, see legal stuff, exit, and more.

Is it Log in, or Sign in? Contact Us, or just Contact? Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, or is Legal alone enough? Pricing, right? Not Price? Sentence or title case? Or all caps? Much like the wording on exit signs an…

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June 17, 2022

AI is for brainstorming. Writing is for humans.

The robots are here to save you from busywork. That's it.

You might find it in yourself to write 100 unique product descriptions, coming up with something unique to say about each almost-the-same-yet-slightly-different product. Your resolve may also quaver at the prospect of pa…

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June 10, 2022

Write documentation first. Then build.

The best way to build a great product is to write the whole idea out first.

VisiCalc started as a reference card. The Nest thermostat started as a press release. AWS, seemingly, started as a 128-word memo. “Writing is a way of finding out,” wrote Kettering University’s Marvin Swift in Harvard Bu…

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June 3, 2022

Trash the thesaurus. Dig into the dictionary instead.

You don’t need a better word. You need a refined meaning.

Have a good day!, you type, but that’s what everyone else says, and there’s got to be something better. So you turn to the thesaurus. Have could be own, keep, maintain, utilize, occupy. Good, in turn, could be fine, qual…

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June 2, 2022

The best ways to back up your largest files

Amazon S3 vs Google Cloud vs Backblaze B2, for normal people.

Storage is cheap. Now, anyhow. It took long enough. The first consumer 1TB hard drive cost $399. Now, for a third of that price, you can get a 6TB external hard drive or a 1TB SSD. That’s a good thing, when your average …

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May 17, 2022

Writing is photography with a pen

On perspective.

Here stands a tree. For now, that’s all you’ve got. A solitary tree, standing alone above the fray, an icon of individuality. Or one tree among many, a pillar of community or a young sapling in the shadow of those who ca…

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April 18, 2022

Kirby's Sonja Broda on Proofreading

“I rely on a good night’s sleep to put some distance between me and my text.”

Writing doesn't start when you put pen to paper. It starts back in the lab, where you research and find out what works, documenting your progress along the way. Then it's pen to paper to tell others how to do the same th…

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April 8, 2022

A writer's guide to Google Analytics 4

The Google Analytics you've used for years is going away. Here's how to adapt to the new version.

It’s been the constant companion of bloggers for over a decade and a half, the analytics tool from Google that told you how many people visited your site. And now it’s going away. Not Google Analytics itself, that is, bu…

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March 30, 2022

Google Docs still doesn’t fully support Markdown

Markdown as shortcuts, not Markdown as formatting

A year before the Writely team released what would become Google Docs, two years before the search giant started building an online office suite, John Gruber wanted a simpler way to write. Writing blog posts in HTML, cop…

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Write. Rewrite. Revise.

Reproof is the app to write until you get it right. Free forever for 10 documents. $10 a month or $99 per year for unlimited documents.

Start writing

Essays on writingwriting

The metaverse is already here, on Spotify.

Log In is more popular than Sign In: The UX Microcopy Survey

AI is for brainstorming. Writing is for humans.

Write documentation first. Then build.

Trash the thesaurus. Dig into the dictionary instead.

The best ways to back up your largest files

Writing is photography with a pen

Kirby's Sonja Broda on Proofreading

A writer's guide to Google Analytics 4

Google Docs still doesn’t fully support Markdown

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Write. Rewrite. Revise.

Essays on writing

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