sacha chua living an awesome life

I’ve been rereading more than ten years of my blog posts, rating each of the entries on a scale of 1 to 5 based on how significant the memory was to me. I started blogging in 2001, although really, that was more like 2002 – mostly notes from class, Emacs Lisp adventures, and other things I wanted to remember.

I was eighteen years old and taking my bachelor’s degree in computer science at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, firmly convinced that I would teach in the Philippines all my life and grow old in an apartment with a cat or two. My plans have changed a bit since then. I moved halfway around the world for my master’s degree, enjoyed working in the IT industry, got married, and started my own business (four months ago!), picking up three cats along the way.

It hasn’t been easy rereading my blog posts. I winced at memories of ex-boyfriends, mistakes like sending people a ton of mail, and the chapter drafts for the Wicked Cool Emacs books (I turned the project over to Ian Eure, but he seems to have been busy with other things too). I missed the earnestness of my declarations of teaching and of not joining the brain drain. I miss having close, close friends and spending time with my family without a departure date looming on the horizon. Some things I do better than my past self, and some things I do worse. I don’t play the piano or sew the way I used to, and my blog posts remind me of what it was like to have fun with those skills. I knew things before that I’ve forgotten since, and it’s interesting reading them in my own words.

Still, it’s been a great experience rereading all of my old posts. Writing and reading help me remember the good stuff vividly. Eventually I’ll get the hang of refreshing my memory, and then I won’t forget so much of the things I’ve learned along the way.

I’m planning to collect the highlights into an e-book so that it’s easy for you to read through things as well if you want to. In the meantime, let me share a few numbers.

I rated 1439 of 6054 posts (24%) as interesting and worth going back to. That’s probably too many to include in one e-book (well, maybe just the long version), but maybe I can focus on the posts rated 3 to 5. I’ll need to go over the posts rated 2 to 5 and re-rank them. I’m pretty good at saying, “This was definitely significant to me: 5!” and “This was a highlight, but it’s not too important: 2”. The rankings in the middle are a little more difficult. What makes something a 3 versus a 4? What can I demote or promote among the 2s and 5s in comparison to other highlights?

Some more context for numbers: In the early years, I used Planner Mode for Emacs to capture quick snippets about life. Many of these notes weren’t particularly for public use, but they weren’t confidential, so I included them when I figured out how to add blogging capabilities to Planner Mode and again when I converted my blog to WordPress. In 2003, I graduated from university. In 2004, I went to Japan for a six-month technical internship. In 2005, I went to Canada for my master’s degree. I graduated in 2007 and started working at IBM, writing a lot about what I was learning along the way. In 2010, W- and I married. I also started trying to limit myself to one or two posts a day. In 2012, I left IBM in order to experiment with business, and I’ve been writing about what I’m learning there too.

I like getting a sense of the kinds of posts I find myself still enjoying after years. I want to write more of them, and I want to have more of the memories and experiments that lead to them.

Figuring out an easy way to export filtered blog posts might take time, but I’m looking forward to putting together something that I can re-read on my Kindle and share with other people to make reading my blog easier.

It’s amazing what you can learn from yourself when you’ve forgotten. I hope many people will be able to look back at their own decades of writing someday.

I’ve been blogging for almost ten years. I started with notes from my university classes and snippets of open source code, and became comfortable enough to share decisions I’m puzzling through and things I’m learning about life. There’s a lot of stuff in my archive, and I want to be able to review things again.

Categories would probably make this easier, but I use categories liberally and sometimes inconsistently. I use them like tags, quick keywords that I add so that people might explore a category and bump into other posts. I probably should split it out so that I assign posts to one category and leave everything else as tags. Someday.

In the meantime, it’s easy enough to maintain a manual topical index of my blog posts, and it’s a good opportunity to review what I’ve been writing as well.

I use Emacs Org Mode to manage a large text file divided into headings. Every month, I copy a list of titles into my topical index. I hacked Org-friendly output into my WordPress theme – you can see April’s blog posts as an example (sachachua.com/blog/2012/04/?org=1). I manually organize the list items under different headings, splitting off new headings when I can see a pattern. Working with two windows viewing the same buffer makes it easy to move information around, and org-refile is handy too. I use a checklist structure so that Org can automatically update the number of posts under each heading (C-u M-x org-update-statistics-cookies). When I’m happy with the structure, I use org-publish-current-file to publish it using the settings I’ve configured. The files are in my public Dropbox folder, so they’re automatically published to the Web. It takes me about 10 minutes to add a month of posts to my index and publish the page.

I like seeing how much I’ve written about different topics, and it encourages me to write and organize more posts. Maybe the index might be handy for other people too!

• Org source for my blog index
• Topical index as a webpage

UPDATE 2012-11-15: Here’s the video recap!

Designing Content So It Works

Carl Friesen, Global Reach Communications

Like these? Check out my other sketchnotes, visual book notes/reviews, and visual metaphors.

Here’s the text from the sketchnotes to improve people’s ability to search for it:

Designing content so that it works

Designing content so that it works
Carl Friesen, Global Reach Communications

Website for e-book on content design showyourexpertise.com

1 2 3 4 5

stories

The Trend
Client wants customized solution
Show that you understand their world

1. Trend & historic causes
2. current situation
3. Thoughts on developments, reasons
4. Recommendations

The How-To
1.
2.
3.

Example: trustees, communication process

must be:
Relevant + Realistic
not necessarily what you do, but what clients will find helpful

Helpful!
- process with steps or
- a list of success factors

1. outcome
2. supplies/equipment
3. steps
4. avoiding pitfalls/problems

The How-to-Work-With
How to get good results from working with you

cannot be self-serving
include info on saving money
1. wild success experience
2. factors
3. advice

The Case Study
Leading-edge thought & sound implementation
Trans-Canada highway story
Wildlife protection

Not about showing how clever you are!

Must have learning points THEY can use
Must be a story
Tell with the client credibility

1. Initial situation
2. Steps
3. Problems & solutions
4. Lessons learned

The Survey
Shows that you stay in touch
must be what your audience cares about

More useful with a trend

Distribute appropriately
Level of detail
Consider limited distribution
The Opinion
informed opinion, thought leadership
at no charge

Long form
-situation
-views on good & bad aspects
-recommendations

The Review
-New product/service
-What’s different
-Discuss good/bad

The Comment

Notes by Sacha Chua, @sachac, LivingAnAwesomeLife.com

I was thinking about information management and how I could get a better sense of what’s in my blog archive. I’ve written a lot over the years, enough that I’m surprised by what I find in here.

Topical index of blog posts from 2008-2012

I’ll add 2007 and earlier posts over the next week. I’m also looking forward to revisiting the map of things I want to learn, and consciously planning what to write.

To create this index, I used the Org-compatible output that I built into my WordPress theme (it outputs post titles in list format). I copied and pasted the list into an Org file, temporarily changed all the list items to headings, and used org-refile to move items under categories as needed. Afterwards, I converted the link headings back into list items and used org-export to export the HTML. The process was fairly easy, but it took me about four hours to process slightly over three years of blog posts.

(Click on the image to view a larger version.)

At today’s WordPress Toronto meetup, Andy McIlwain shared tips on brainstorming, scheduling, and sharing blog posts in WordPress. The lively discussion brought out lots of other tips, too.

The key thing I took away from the talk was that Evernote is awesome and that I should definitely look into it more. I’m also looking forward to checking out Content Rules for more writing tips and Plinky.com for blog post ideas.

After the talk, I had a fascinating conversation with Robin McRae and Ann Brocklehurst about information architecture and personal knowledge management. Lots to think about. Glad I went!

Check out Andy’s blog post below for slides and full notes. Looking forward to the next meetup!

Related links:

• Andy McIlwain’s presentation and notes: The Publishing Side of WordPress
• WordPress Toronto
• WordPress Toronto meetup page

Analyzing the text of my blog showed me that I use some phrases way too much. Fortunately, Emacs can shame me into writing better, thanks to Art Bollocks Mode. (Update 2012-06-16: I’ve forked it and cleaned up the naming conventions: https://github.com/sachac/artbollocks-mode)

Art Bollocks Mode monitors your writing and highlights words or patterns you may want to reconsider. It can detect repeated words which sometimes slip past proof-reading. It has a list of common passive verbs, making it easier for you to rewrite the sentences to use the active voice. It detects weasel words like “many” and “surprisingly”. It even comes with jargon catchers for art critics (“postmodern”, “ironic”, and so forth) – hence artbollocks-mode.el.

Whenever you use a phrase that matches its patterns, Emacs highlights it, turning it an ugly orange-on-white and underlining it for emphasis. You can still go ahead and write it, but at least the words jump out. Like this: it’s really pretty obvious…

I want to use it to write clearer notes and blog posts, so here’s how I’ve tweaked my configuration. Many of the items below are words and phrases I want to use less. Others are part of work jargon that I’m trying my best to keep out of my regular use.

(require 'artbollocks-mode)
;; Avoid these phrases
(setq weasel-words-regex
      (concat "\\b" (regexp-opt
                     '("one of the"
                       "should"
                       "just"
                       "sort of"
                       "a lot"
                       "probably"
                       "maybe"
                       "perhaps"
                       "I think"
                       "really"
                       "pretty"
                       "maybe"
                       "nice"
                       "action"
                       "utilize"
                       "leverage") t) "\\b"))
;; Fix a bug in the regular expression to catch repeated words
(setq lexical-illusions-regex "\\b\\(\\w+\\)\\W+\\(\\1\\)\\b")
;; Don't show the art critic words, or at least until I figure
;; out my own jargon
(setq artbollocks nil)
;; Make sure keywords are case-insensitive
(defadvice search-for-keyword (around sacha activate)
  "Match in a case-insensitive way."
  (let ((case-fold-search t))
    ad-do-it))

(Isn’t regexp-opt so cool?)

artbollocks-mode.el also includes some basic readability statistics like the Flesch reading ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade level. When I analyzed my blog contents without source code blocks (all the Emacs Lisp code snippets were throwing off my numbers!), it turned out that my blog hovers around 65 in terms of Flesch reading ease, or around the same as Reader’s Digest (as reported by Wikipedia). The Flesch-Kincaid grade level for my posts in 2011 was around 8.4.

I’d use artbollocks-mode.el’s tools for calculating word count and readability, except that Emacs ends up including source code blocks because Art Bollocks doesn’t know about Org Mode. I might be able to work around that by defining more advice or creating my own functions that extract the relevant text into a temporary buffer before determining the text statistics. I can leave that for another day, though.

I’ll experiment with making it part of org-capture-mode for now. If I find that getting editing feedback distracts me too much from writing, I’ll remove it from the hook and toggle it when I’m ready. Here’s the code to turn it on automatically for org-capture:

(add-hook 'org-capture-mode-hook 'artbollocks-mode)

Thanks to dotemax for tweeting about writegood and artbollocks-mode.el. Onward and upward!

• Art Bollocks Mode
• Rob Myers’ Emacs-related blog posts

I’ve been reviewing my posts from 2011. I remember some of the highlights, but other posts trigger memories that had slipped past. This is good. This is the archive working as it should, giving me paths back into things I’ve learned and forgotten.

So I’ve been going back further in time. It turns out that Calibre makes it easy to convert HTML to other formats, including the MOBI format that Kindle uses. I had modified my WordPress archive templates to give me a bulk view that’s useful for copying posts into my archives. I added header tags for the different months, and copied the resulting HTML files (ex: 2011). Then I converted the files and loaded them onto my Kindle.

I’ve been going through my 2010 archive, and I’m surprised by which things resonate with me after this time. I flip past pages and pages about collaboration and presentations and all of these tips. The posts I linger over are the weekly reviews, where one-line mentions expand into memories. Sometimes I come across things I’ve written about life, and they flesh out the memories more. Not often enough. I’m going to write about life more.

Many posts are about looking ahead: things I want to do, sketches of success so I get a better idea of where I’m going. Other posts are about lessons learned. Work-wise, I’m pretty okay at remembering and applying what I’ve learned, or knowing where in my notes I can find things again – configuration snippets, techniques, and so on.

Life is fuzzier. I read my blog posts and wonder how I grew into or out of interests, how my days changed. This is probably what I should write more about: things I’m learning in life, and echoes of the present.

I write about things I’m learning at work because I think that might be useful to other people. I write for myself, too. What will I want to remember five years from now, ten, fifteen, more?

A cat, circling around, settling into my lap as my computer balances on the edge of my knees. This feeling of being in between spheres.