“Blog Engine Revamp - Full Cirle”

Ghost 2.0 was just released. In a lot of ways, it is an excellent release. The entire engine is elegant and easy to use. I can absolutely see why so many people love it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t love it as much.

Here are the issues that I saw. I want to note here that these are issues that are tied, very clearly, to my corner case. I think that the Ghost developers are making a product that best suits a large portion of their user-base. They should. I am just not a part of that base.

Editor

The new editor is gorgeous. The dynamic cards absolutely add excellent functionality. They also make the editor far busier and much more clumsy.

Ghost claims that:

Ghost’s editor is still about doing one thing, really well: Writing.

I don’t think it is. I think the editor is more about providing formatting tools and rich content than it is about writing. From my own experience, the writing process was certainly degraded by the cards. The movement away from a simple Markdown editor (or at least leaving it as an option) definitely figured heavily in my decision.

Note, too, that in …

How to Contact and Comment

In my last post, I talked about why I block comments on most media sites. You might have noticed that I don’t have comments here, either. I know I only have a few readers (at best), and most of the comments I have received have been helpful and constructive. I don’t really need to block comments, but the truth is that I don’t find comment communication constructive or helpful. Most of the time, it becomes a chore where I monitor comments for automated spam. That’s the problem with a comment system. It encourages low-effort interactions that don’t tend to create any lasting connection. I don’t want that on my site.

If you have do have a constructive question or a comment, please feel free to email me. I like email because it remains in my email. I have a really high level of control, and email is deliberately, obviously, asynchronous. I am allowed to read, process and respond without fear of additional comments or explosions that derail entire conversations. In short, we can actually communicate. In the same way, that control means I don’t need to respond to trolls in my email. At …

The Internet is More than Social Media

I wanted to take a moment to talk about Brian Chen’s article, “The Internet Trolls Have Won. Sorry, There’s Not Much You Can Do.” in the New York Times. It’s an interesting piece for a lot of reasons, and I like a lot of what Brian and Dr. Papacharissi have to say. That said, I have trouble with an approach that accepts the status quo as inevitable; especially, when that acceptance helps to normalizes a reliance on corporate governance as the only possible way to fix the internet and networked communications.

Chen isn’t wrong. His article just appears assumes there is only one option, to continue using and relying on the problematic platforms developed by those corporations and hope they “fix” it for us. They won’t. The Internet trolls have “won” because the corporations that drive modern social media platforms make a ton of money off those trolls (see my Valve discussion) for more on that). Until they stop making money (this is something that Facebook may actually be grappling with) the trolls will win. Of course, they only win on those platforms.

If you rely on those platforms, you’re sunk. So you have …

Media Overflow

I spend a lot of time in front of a screen. I am betting most of us do.

We’re connected in some really incredible ways to a world of movement and information. The trouble is we have an overload. We know this. We’ve known for a long while, and yet we’re addicted to that same overload.

We’re gluttons for media, we crave input. We are children of the screen. Technology and media companies know exactly how to feed our hunger. They use it to keep drawing us back in, and by god do we keep coming back. Media saturation is our favored drug, and we suck it up wherever we can.

Should we turn it off, then? No. I’m not suggesting we disconnect. Our technology may not be politically neutral, but there are ways to tactically appropriate its power. We need to exploit those ways. Sometimes, indeed many times, this always-on connection can be a benefit. We can act and respond faster. We can connect with one another. We can plan and gather needed information in ways we never could have before. What I am suggesting is that we actually get tactical. We consider our …