Dave

The joy of plain text

These days, I write pretty much everything in plain text. This is driven by two main things:

  1. Annoyance
  2. Paranoia

How I write pretty much anything of any length (blog posts, reports, proposals, longer emails) is to write them in a text editor – I’ve settled on WriteRoom – using the Markdown markup language.

I then also preview them in Marked so I have an idea of how they look when published – which I do by either copying the HTML into a WordPress post, or exporting a PDF to send on to someone else.

I’m sure you can get equivalents to these tools on other platforms like Windows or Linux, if you need to.

Using Markdown in a plain text document provides the answer to both of my issues I mention above.

My main annoyance with word processors is the lack of control over what they are doing, particularly with regard to formatting. In most cases, complexity gets in the way. Ever been editing a Word document, and find you can’t change the way a bit of text is formatted?

Maybe you’ve found yourself in the wrong section, or maybe the styles are broken from when someone else edited the document before you. Who knows? It’s annoying.

Far better to be able to see the source of all this formatting, which is what MarkDown provides. Obviously I’d much prefer using WordStar under CP/M but that’s probably not possible these days.

Markdown is a super simple markup language that means you can make words italic or bold just by wrapping them in asterisks, or you can set heading levels by using hash symbols. Even inserting links is an easy process with square brackets and parentheses.

Plus, plain text is a super portable file format – it can be opened on any system in pretty much any editor. This answers my paranoia problem. Nobody can stop me opening or sharing my work!

Adrian Short wrote a nice piece a while ago about plain text and how wonderful it is.

You can write plain text in any text editor or word processor. You can read plain text in any text editor or word processor. There’s no formatting to get screwed up. No-one owns the format. It’s completely interoperable. You can send plain text to anyone knowing that they’ll always be able to read it, no matter what computer they’re using or which software they’ve got installed.

Yeah!

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Here’s something new for you, dear readers

As always, I am trying to be helpful.

No, really! I am.

So, here’s a new thing. Every so often I will answer some questions put to me by visitors to this blog.

All you have to do is ask a question, about a topic big or small, in the comments below.

Then, once I have come up with an answer, I’ll record a video or something and publish it here on the blog.

It could be about anything to do with online innovation, so could be external digital engagement, or internal online collaboration. Something small like what sort of content to use to engage people on Twitter, or something big, like the best way to implement a strategic approach to social media in an organisation.

So, go ahead! Ask a question in the comments, and then I’ll pick one to answer in a few days.

Public service messages with a smile

I’ve been a bit serious lately on the blog. Sorry. Here’s a bit of whimsy to lighten the mood.

Worcestershire County Council have produced this video to inform the public about what they are doing about pot holes. As you’ll notice, they haven’t gone for the usual talking head interview approach.

I rather like it – and I do think that to make the most of the internet as a marketing channel, more humorous stuff like this is needed.

Here’s another great example, this time from Lincolnshire County Council, using the fairly new short video service from Twitter, called Vine. Click it to watch if it doesn’t play for you.

Open or closed – does anything online ever last?

It’s only now, a couple of weeks after the announcement, that I feel I can talk about the demise of Google Reader. Up til now, the whole thing has just been too upsetting. Reader is the site I turn to first in the day, before email or Twitter, and the one I check last as well.

I have about 600 odd feeds pouring into my Reader account which I skim through everyday – some I read in their entirety every time, others I’m happy to just dip into now and again as the fancy takes me. It’s ok – RSS isn’t email, you don’t have to read it all.

Reader is also an important part of my publishing workflow. A lot of people find the links I tweet and the regular posts of links on this blog to be helpful. That’s all driven by Reader and by the stupidly simple act of clicking once to ‘star’ a post. Then, thanks to IFTTT, they get sent to my blog and to Twitter, like magic.

Reader was an app that used RSS feeds, an open standard – excellent! It’s because of this that we can move our subscriptions to one or more of the many possible replacement services that exist or are springing up.

What’s more, Reader was also an API that other apps could hook into. The most used purpose for this was to synchronise the read status of feeds between apps – for example between a desktop and a mobile interface.

For instance, on my laptop I use the Reader web app, but on my phone I use Reeder which always picks up where I left off thanks to Google’s API.

The trouble comes because people came to rely on Google’s Reader API to deliver a service, and development around similar services just stopped. So when Google decided to take their ball home, it meant nobody could play with it any more.

Still, the fact that RSS and OPML are open standards means we have other software options to move our feed lists to, and while they may no longer rely on Google’s vast infastructure and databases, they ought to work well enough to meet most of our needs.

But the point is worth making again – we can only do this because the open standards existed and we all use them – deliberately or not.

The second point is that even when a piece of software like Reader operates using these standards, if people come to rely on them, then control is surrendered in exchange for convenience. That’s fine, as long as we know this is happening and can take steps to regain control when it’s needed.

So, I’m not saying that we should all stop using other people’s services, that we should abandon convenience in favour of control. Just that we should have back ups in place – of our content, sure, but also backup plans so that our activity can carry on even when our favourite tools disappear, as they surely all will do.

We held the latest UKGovCamp at IBM, a venerable old technology company. Will Facebook last as long as IBM? Will Google? Will Amazon?

Best be prepared by assuming probably not.

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