Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Write from the Beginning

I need answers. Not right now, but definitely later on.

I've an idea in my head to turn my Grass Roots Productivity series into a book. This involves what many in the trade refer to as 'writing'. Therein lies my first problem.

Where do I begin?

For my only attempt at NaNoWriMo I just wrote a short introduction to a story. Each subsequent day I wrote more and more. No planning, no outline, no overall story to start from. Needless to say I struggled some days and faired better on others.

Is an outline really necessary though? I don't know. I've never written an actual book before. Some people say just write, others say outline first.

I suppose at the end of the day what I have as a first draft is not going to be the finished article and it will need to be read, edited and reviewed a number of times before I publish it. I'm not looking for a the winning recipe to writing a prize winning novel. I'm looking for practical advice to starting a book.

  • Do I outline the book?
  • Do I just write to see where it takes me?
  • Do I build on my existing blog posts?

I've got too many questions and no answers. Bugger it, I'll draft an outline and start writing from there. I need to start somewhere.

One aspect of freelancing that I didn't expect to be much of an issue was that of justifying buying new equipment. I already had a pretty nice setup when I started. A MacBook, an external monitor and a working keyboard and mouse. That was all I needed to get started. I didn't worry about replacing the equipment over time, it just never crossed my mind.

Then last year the MacBook started to grind down with the amount of use it was getting on a daily basis. Tests ran slow, there was little free disk space left and at the back of my mind was the thought that the MacBook was already about five years old. What if it just died on me?

So I headed down to the local Apple store and done a check over the specs of the MacBook Pros and found myself a suitable specced Pro at a good price. I had only just received payment of my first invoice and already I was spending some of it. In my head though I knew I was justified in buying a Pro. My little black MacBook was not consistently handling the amount of work I did on a daily basis. Beach balling was a common daily occurrence, so a new laptop made sense.

In the last couple of weeks though my Apple keyboard of four years has started to show signs of wearing down. Certain keys sometimes need a double press to respond. I've tried shooting compressed air in at these keys but they're still sometimes unresponsive. Time for a new keyboard.

I was simply going to replace the keyboard I had for another one of the same model. The Apple keyboard is nice but I sometimes find the compactness of it just a bit on the small side. It was time to look elsewhere and one keyboard that did catch my eye was the Logitech K811. A similar profile to my keyboard, illuminated keys and it let's you switch between three different bluetooth devices.

The only problem was the price. At just under £90 it is easily the most expensive keyboard I have considered buying. It seems a lot of money, but then I remember thinking that about my Apple keyboard which was also more expensive than a standard keyboard.

What I keep forgetting is that a keyboard is one of the tools I use on a daily basis. I use it for the whole of the working day and if I'm to consider keyboards in a higher price point then I think I am justified in spending that little bit more to get a comfortable keyboard that let's me work fluently through the day.

I would love nothing more to splash out on a new massive screen, an array of new hard drives, a new router and lots of other goodies, but these are really nice to haves. The essentials that I need such as a laptop, monitor, keyboard and mouse are the essential tools that make my working day a lot easier. It's these tools that I should consider spending a bit more of my budget on should I need too.

Social media is killing social media

In the quest to find news users for people to follow in my Netterpress newsletter, I started putting together a few scripts that would poll new accounts created on App.net and update them over the course of the week. I only filtered for accounts categorized as 'human'. I figured that this would limit some of the spam accounts I would get. At the end of the week I would sort the accounts by the number of posts made for each account and then starting hand checking each account from the top of the list looking for interesting users to include in the Netterpress newsletter.

A sound idea in theory, but when it came to checking the accounts, I was disappointed to find that most of the active accounts at the top of my list were in fact spam accounts or valid accounts entirely powered by automated feed tools. There only a handful of actual human accounts in the fifty most active accounts that I looked at last night.

I've never previously done this on other social networks like Twitter or Facebook, but given my experience on Twitter in the past it's hard to be surprised by this.

Social media is it's own worst enemy in my eyes. The very tools that make it easy for us to post from one location to different networks are the very same tools that are used to automate the posting of irrelevant and unsolicited content.

The barrier to many social networks is nothing. All the networks I have heard of are free. Even App.net has a free tier for anyone to join. It's that free entry that makes it so appealing for many, but to others they see an opportunity to post irrelevant content.

In App.net's case, there is a growing number of feed accounts appearing on the platform. While that's okay for feeds that deliver valuable content, there's no getting away from the fact that people will setup accounts to deliver unwanted content, regardless of the social network you use. It doesn't matter what social network you are a member of, there will always be spam accounts trying to dilute the pool of valued content.

I'll be checking through the data over the weekend in preparation for the next Tuesday's newsletter. Hopefully I'll be able to pull together a list of some new users to recommend to others for the next edition of Netterpress.