As a general rule, the things I write fall into two categories: long-form (for the medium of blogging, that is; the book is “long” in a very different sense), in-depth pieces which tend to be either tutorials on various aspects of working with Django or op-ed bits on web development and the Web in general, and short-form tidbits which mostly consist of a thought or two. Typically I never post the latter, because it always feels like a waste: if I could give it a more thorough treatment, I’ll hold it until I have the time to do so. In practical terms, that means I end up with a lot of short ideas and drafts which never see the light of day, which is just as irksome as not feeling like I’ve written “enough” to justify publishing something here.
Compounding this is the fact that lately the only long-form writing I have time for is the book, which has left me desperately wanting an outlet for things that aren’t the book. I’ve got a whole pile of draft ideas for longer entries that I’ll get around to writing once I’ve handed off to the printing presses, but even then I’ll probably end up scrapping a lot of them because there’s just not enough material.
What I want, and didn’t realize I wanted until just a day or two ago, is a medium designed for those sorts of quick thoughts. I detest the popular name for this, so I won’t use it; I’ll just say that I want something like it but with a moniker that doesn’t make me throw up in my mouth a little.
Now, the popular way to do this is Twitter, but I’ve been using Twitter for a while and I’ve decided that it basically sucks for this use case, since:
@ isn’t really a discussion, and can’t really be followed with any kind of coherence. I want real honest-to-goodness comments, all on one page.
Fortunately there’s an alternative: Pownce, which not only solves both of the above problems but is Django-powered to boot. Pownce can do a lot of useful things besides short-form text, but that’s the one I’m interested in, and that’s the one I’m going to start using, at least experimentally. So swing on over or grab the feed, and let’s see how it goes.
Longer bits will still appear here, once I have time to write them again, and when that glorious day comes I’ll also do some work to integrate my Pownce posts here as well. Just don’t expect any of that to happen much before the end of June…
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Yeah, I’m in a similar position these days. I just updated my Pownce settings to make my notes public by default, but I don’t seem to be able to update any existing notes.
Pownce probably does make a lot of sense for that kind of thing, and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for Pownce to promote itself as such an engine, as the general felling about Pownce in most people’s heads seems to be, “it’s a prettier Twitter” — when in reality, it’s quite a different beast.
Plus, I sort of hate it when people get chatty on Twitter (even though I’m guilty of it myself, as times). I very much wish people would stick to posting Tweets that actually answer the question, “what are you doing?” You can do it in a clever way, try to make people, laugh, etc. — but, please, answer the damn question.
I’ll say again, as a disclaimer, that I know I don’t always do this myself — but I wish I, and everyone else, did. I think it would make Twitter both more useful and more interesting.
Oh gee, now even James has been infected… I must soon be the last person on this planet who just doesn’t grasp this whole twitter or “microblogging” hype.
It may be too obvious but why don’t you just publish these snippets on this blog? Maybe in a separate section with a separate feed so they don’t add too much noise to the “real” articles? What does Pownce have that your blog doesn’t?
Maybe I’m just getting old…
Most notably, Pownce already has the feature implemented. My blog does not. So, just as I offload links to
del.icio.us, photos to Flickr, etc., I’m offloading smaller posts to Pownce.Another thing to track, I don’t mind reading short things here, I promise.
so your book….
Thought the same over the last weeks… Pounce seems to be a good tool for that kind of things.
pownce lack of unicode (utf-8) support :-( just try to post russian or other non-latin text. see examples on my pownce page
it is really strange because django and python itself is unicode powered
for now it is most big hole for me…