Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Use your own ”printing press” from time to time

posted this on and tagged it with Blogging Social Networks WordPress

I think Dave Winer really nails it with this quote and elaboration:1

A.J. Liebling said, famously: ”Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” That’s so true, and with blogging everyone can own their own, and therefore be free. However, we’re trading that in for a bit more engagement.

– Dave Winer. (2015)

I will link to this post on twitter so likely most of you who read it will find it there. You’re likely tweeting quite a lot yourself, and that is a good thing. I don’t think you should stop tweeting, and I’m pretty sure Dave doesn’t think that either. I am, however, saying that you should also use your own ”printing press” from time to time.

Use your blog for some of your writing!2 Don’t have a blog? Get one!

I have a lot of bad things to say about WordPress, but if you want an easy-to-setup, easy-to-manage blog you should give it a try. (This site is a WordPress site.) It’s optimal if you self-host it. That way you definitely own every word on it.

Don’t feel like self-hosting? Get an account at WordPress.com. Yes, you are using somebody else’s ”printing press” but at least that somebody is somebody who is dedicated to open publishing and to ensure that you own what you write and that you can write whatever the hell you want.

Afraid that nobody will read what you write if it’s not on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or [insert whatever]? Write in on your blog and then link to it on your social networks of choice?

You can even use a tool such as Dave’s Radio3 that allows you to make a link blog, or a list of short status updates, and simultaneously publish to Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and an RSS-feed. It’s a great tool that I use for most of my tweeting these days. That way, what I tweet also ends of as link-posts or status-posts here on the blog as well.

But what if I really don’t like WordPress?

There are other options, for both self-hosted and hosted solutions. If you decide to go with a hosted one, the most important thing is to make sure that it has a clear and easy way for you to export everything you write in full fidelity.

  1. I should admit that I’d never heard of neither Liebling nor the famous saying before. ↩
  2. If you find yourself writing more than two consecutive tweets about the same thing, maybe it is not something that you be tweeted. Maybe it should be written as a blog post instead. ↩
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Markdown (The Greatest Invention Since Sliced Bread)

posted this on and tagged it with Blogging Markdown WordPress

Well, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but today (or yesterday since it’s passed midnight here) I did what I should have done long before and checked out Markdown. According to its creator John Gruber it’s

a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

It is both a way to write plain text documents so that their content is somewhat formatted and a tool to convert this text to xhtml.

The reason I checked this out today (or was it yesterday?) was an article in Macworld called Forget fancy formatting: Why plain text is best. It made some good points about why plain text is almost always better than something written in for example Microsoft Word or Apple Pages.

[Plain text is] timeless. My grandchildren will be able to read a text file I create today, long after anybody can remember what the heck a .dotx file is.

The article then mentioned some tools that was great for plain text writing, among them Byword which according to the article ”has baked-in support for Markdown”. I’d heard about Markdown before, mostly from Merlin Mann in the Back To Work podcast so now I finally made myself find out what it was. (Finding out was as easy as clicking the link in the Macworld article.)

The concept behind Markdown seemed really great, so I decided to try it, and to buy Byword. So far I’ve just made some test documents with the Byword/Markdown combination (as well as writing this blog post) and I must say it seems pretty great. I do a whole lot of writing in my work and most of it is just simple text documents that I’ve used to write in Microsoft Word (yes, I actually do like Word) but I guess the bulk of my writing this upcoming semester will be done full-screen in Byword using Markdown and then exporting the appropriate format. (Apart from xhtml, Byword also exports as .doc, .pdf, .rtf and Latex.)

One more thing

I also found out that although Markdown is written in Perl there is a php version and that version also works as a WordPress plugin. So this very blogpost is written in Byword, marked up (or down?) with Markdown and will then be pasted into a post in my blog, where you will read it.

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