Design decisions
thumbs up/down as a rating scale
I want to avoid just having a long list of items of everything I’ve ever consumed. Most of them are a “waste” of time. I want to instead only list the things worth recommending.
But wait, what if I want to dis-recommend something? Something I think is overrated (see: sort by controversy), and want to warn people off of? I guess I could only show things I dislike and things I really enjoyed. Seems like coherent approach.
what happens in real life stays in real life
Everything on the microsite would only deal with activities that happened on a screen. No biomarkers, personal milestones, or events with friends will be logged on here.
Something about trying to convert non-screen activities and happenings into computer bits feels off to me. I’ve never really liked photo or video either, except as a trigger for my own memory.
i only care about artifacts
Do I really care how many times I worked out vs. how fit I actually feel day-to-day? In general, I find that input isn’t worth attention, and I especially dislike when it’s fetishized in terms of raw hours or reps instead of quality of outcome.
I also don’t care about time, especially standardised time:
Our modern sense of time is homogenous. It divided and measured in “units” to be filled. Clock time. These time units have no meaning themselves. They are empty containers, filled with meaning by us, through activities we do within them.
Gordon Brander, Time consciousness
Hell-bent on standardization; on Cartesian deliverance. Time is the primary socializing tool. Indelibly imprinted and structurally biased. We are domesticated creatures of technical abstraction. If rationalism/reductionism is our religion, then time keeping is our benediction
Buried Inside, Time As Surrogate Religion
viewer-friendly
The goal is for everything to come together in a browsing-friendly way, presenting information that is, first and foremost, useful to the reader.
One of the best ways to make something nice to look at is to make it a picture instead of text. Luckily, I can get a lot of mileage from the humble screenshot since most of my work is visual.
What do I want to log?
OUT
- Writing
- Good tweets
- Shareholder letters
- joodaloop.com posts, including edits
- Essays
- Microsite creation and redesigns
- Updates to microsite content
- Client projects
- Launches
- Discarded concepts
- Personal project launches and updates
- Songs recorded
Metadata
- Category of artifact
- Word count
IN
- Books
- Movies
- Music
- Videos (Youtube, mostly)
- Internet writing
- Essays
- Websites
- Tweets
Metadata
- Author
- Personal affection (star)
- “Rereads”
- Heftiness/length (1–3)
Design ideas
Steal the “X days later” vertical spacer element from the Pinside forum interface.
I like the terseness of this title + description layout in Reimar Servas’ post bibliographies:
A few people with great media lists:
If you feel like commenting on this post, send me an e-mail at judah@joodaloop.com. I check all mail and respond within 2 days.
Info
Designing a visual log of my digital output and media intake.