year in reviews | Chris Aldrich

Read A Year in Marginalia by Sam Anderson (The Millions)

The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain. ❧

This is a phenomenal way to do a look back at a year in reading. I’ll have to consider how to pull it off for myself this year.

Read My personal roundup of 2019. by Rachel Andrew (www.rachelandrew.co.uk)

Twenty years ago I saw in the Millennium, at home recovering from flu. My daughter was a toddler, I had no money, and was just beginning my career in web design. I had no idea what building websites would lead to, or what the web would look like 20 years on.

Some great lists of CSS related resources linked here.

Replied to In the year of our blog 2019 by

Clint Lalonde (EdTech Factotum)

Thought I would join in the year end fun with Tannis, Martin, Tony and others and put together a year end review kinda blog post. Funny. I’ve been blogging about edtech since 2007, and I don&…

Most of the convo, if any, seems to happen on the socials vs comments left on the blog these days. ❧

The sad part of this is how painfully limiting the conversation can be on social with the character limitations and too many issues with branching conversations and following all the context.
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 12:51PM

By the numbers ❧

I’m curious what things would look like if you similarly did an analysis of Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Where are you putting more time? What’s giving you the most benefit? Where are you getting value and how are you giving it back?
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:01PM

I still find blogging one of the most professionally satisfying things I do. It is a powerful thing to feel like you have a voice. ❧

–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM

2020 will also bring a more concerted effort on my part to both amplify the women in my network who blog, and both comment and refer back to their blogs. To use what they write as a starting off point for my own posts more. ❧

–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM

And I am planning on cutting back on my personal use of social media (easier said than done) and want to try to return to using my blog more than Twitter for sharing. ❧

certainly a laudable goal!

It helped me a lot to simply delete most of the social media apps off of my phone. I scribbled a bit about the beginning of the process back in November and there’s a link there to a post by Ben doing the same thing on his own website.

More people are leaving social feeds for RSS feeds lately. I’ve recently started following Jeremy Felt who is taking this same sort of journey himself. See: https://jeremyfelt.com/tag/people-still-blog/

Kudos as well to making the jump here:

Taking a bit of a Twitter break. I’m going to try to stay off until the new year, but likely lack the willpower to stay off for more than a few hours. Wish me luck!

….but silently. Not via reply to to this tweet. Cause that’ll just suck me back into the vortext.
— Clint Lalonde (he/him) (@edtechfactotum) December 19, 2019

In part, it’s what prompted me to visit your site to write a comment. (Sorry for upping your cis-gendered white male count, but 2019 was a bad year, and hopefully we can all make 2020 better as you’ve indicated.)
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM

Some thoughts about Media Diets prompted by Paul Jacobson

Replied to Keeping track of my media diet by

Paul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)

This idea of tracking my media diet really appeals to me:

Just like last year, I kept track of almost everything I read, watched, listened to, and experienced in my media diet posts.
Jason Kottke

I follow a few people who do this too, sometimes pretty publicly. I’m not sure that I’d want to share everything I consume, but I do like the thought of capturing, and aggregating everything.

I’m just not too sure how to pull it all together, if I were to do this.

There are a few parts to having a media diet:
1. keeping track of it all quickly and easily;
2. going back to contemplate on it and deciding what may have been worthwhile or not; and
3. using the above to improve upon your future media diet instead of consuming the same junk food in the future.

I try to use my own website (cum digital commonplace book) to collect everything quickly using bookmarklets from the Post Kinds plugin or RSS feeds from popular media-related websites (GoodReads, Letterboxd, reading.am, etc.) in conjunction with IFTTT.com recipes to create private posts on my site’s back end. Naturally, not all of my posts are public since many are simply for my own reflection and edification. Usually logging the actions only takes a few seconds. Longer reviews and thoughts typically only take a few minutes if I choose to do so.

The hardest part may be going through it all on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis to do some analysis and make the appropriate adjustments for the future. (Isn’t it always sticking with the adjustments that make it a “diet”?) Fortunately having all the data in one centralized place does make some of this work a lot easier.

Having lists of what I read online has definitely helped me cut out all click-baity articles and listicles from my information diet. It’s also helped me cut down on using social media mindlessly when I think about the great things I could be reading or consuming instead. Bad national news has also spurred me to read more local news this year as well. Those interested in some of these ideas may appreciate Clay A. Johnson’s The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Comsumption, which I read several years back.

I experimented with eating and drinking posts early last year too, and the nature of posting them publicly was somewhat useful in losing about 10 pounds, but the work in doing it all did seem a bit much since I didn’t have as easily an automated system for doing it as I might have liked. Now I do most of these posts privately. Definitely having the ability to look back at the ton of crap I’ve eaten in the past week or month does help with trying to be a bit healthier in my choices. I look at posting photos of my food/drink to my own site somewhat akin to dietitians who tell people to use a clean plate for every meal they have–the extra work, process, and clean up makes it more apparent what you’re doing to yourself.

As I’ve written before about posting what I’m listening to, showing others that you’ve spent the time to actually listen to it and post about it on your own site (even with no commentary), is a great way to show that you’ve got “skin-in-the-game” when it comes to making recommendations. Kottke’s awesome recommendation about listening to the Seeing White Podcast has way more value if he could point to having spent the multiple hours listening to and contemplating it, the way I have. The situation is akin to that headline and link my friend just put on Twitter, but did she think the headline was cool or did she actually read the entire thing and wanted to recommend her followers also read it? Who can tell without some differentiation?

Lastly, I keep a “following page” of people and feeds I’m following on a regular basis. Put into broad categories, it makes an easy method for periodically pruning out that portion of my media diet using OPML subscriptions in my feed reader.

In the end, what you feed your body, as well as what you feed your brain, are important things to at least keep in the back of your mind.