WEB
I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, but I do try my best ever year to find ways to improve myself. This year I have two main goals: to learn more and to write more. I feel like there’s just so much out there to learn and I want to push myself to absorb more of it. There’s been lots written about learning in public so I think it’s my turn to give it a try. That’s why I'm going to be committing myself to a challenge: 30 days of writing about what I’m learning. 30 Days, 30 Concepts, about a 100 words each.
The reason I picked an “X days” challenge is because I’ve been amazed by what others have accomplished with this constraints. From things like #100DaysOfCode or how @adacito wrote 100 words for 100 days, it's clear forcing yourself to do something helps you get better. Especially with the added social pressure. Hopefully, one day, I’ll get to writing everyday, but as I work my way up those goals, I want to start a bit smaller. That's why I chose 30 days. I’m determined not to give up halfway through, I truly want to see my goal to its end.
It’s more than just forcing myself to write though. I could probably do that on my own, but I think posting on my site is going to help me with another challenge of mine. I really struggle with knowing when to hit that publish button. Every sentence feels like it can be edited a bit more, every phrase a bit more perfectly crafted. I want to hit every note, make you feel what I want to feel, but knowing when to let go and let your writing off into the wild is hard. With this challenge, I’m forced to publish whatever I have. Of course, it’s going to go through a short, but intense editing process, but the clock will be ticking. That added element of tension is exactly the pressure I need to get things out the door.
So what exactly will I be writing about? Well the beauty of the world we live in is how much content we have. In fact, sometimes it can feel overwhelming how much stuff is out there. I’m going to be covering tidbits from all sorts of topics from computer science and algorithms to math and some history too!
I hope that once I’m done with this challenge it’ll give me even me even more to write about and really help get my creative juices flowing. I plan on writing a follow up post once I finish it. Wish me luck and see you on the other side!
I think what makes the web such an interactive and captivating platform is how much potential it has. It started off as a way to share simple documents across a network, and it’s evolved to be so much more than that. With this expanding essay “experiment” I’ve created, I’ve taken a look at how essays or articles could potentially be explored interactively. Before I explain it, check it out in the link above, then come back here. I’ve picked up a lot of inspiration from a lot of different demonstrations like these. The idea definitely did not originate with me, but I feel like I added a couple of twists so I can do my part to help these sorts of ideas progress! In my demo, we start off with a short little essay. As the reader clicks on different highlighted words, the essay expands before your very eyes! I added short, medium and long buttons depending on whether you want to explore the essay in a more interactive fashion or simply see the end result once everything is expanded. In one of the examples I linked above, it starts off with a few words and each time a word is clicked, more words are added. What I thought what interesting about that implementation is that you could add more data to a single word, so you might click the word “I” multiple times and get multiple different phrases out of it. In my system, you can do just that. In addition, from the second example I linked above, I like how the word you clicked would explain what type of expansion it would be. For example, if I wanted more exposition, I’d click the word that said exposition. In the other system, there’s no way to know what sort of extra information you’re going to get. My expanding essay doesn’t work exactly like the other examples I linked, and that’s the whole point! I wanted to explore this format and add my own little personal touch to it too! I wrote a small little markup language to create these interactive text documents. I tried to make it as easy as possible to use. Essentially, you wrap words with square brackets and separate the text from the button with a vertical bar. So if I wanted to add exposition to this sentence I’d write something like [exposition| here is where I explain more...]. If you want a word to be able to be clicked multiple times you simply add the extra text in parentheses like so [exposition| here is where I explain more (even more words of exposition)]. Now what makes this little markup language a lot more powerful is the ability to nest as many of these little pieces of markup as you want so you can create lots of hidden content that needs to be clicked a lot in order to get all the information. That’s it! I hope you enjoyed this little demo. I think there’s lots of potential with how this format could be made even better and I’m not saying everything should be written like this, but I do think that it’s important to explore new ways to present content.