Close Date Expand Location Next Open/Close Previous 0.5 of 5 stars 1 of 5 stars 1.5 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 2.5 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 3.5 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 4.5 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars Repeat Slide Current slide

Inefficiency by Design

How my web site’s lack of a CMS has made me more prolific.

There is a popular myth in geek circles which claims that the QWERTY layout standard for Latin keyboards was actually designed to slow down typing, since early typewriters were prone to jam. While this is a misunderstanding (jams were caused by the mechanical proximity of common letter pairs, not the speed of typing), it has occasionally made me wonder: could technological shortcomings that ostensibly get in the way of the user experience actually, ultimately, be good for the user?

Over the years, I’ve used several different content management systems for sites I designed for clients or for myself. But lately, I don’t seem to have the curiosity or patience to learn new CMSs or even to integrate my designs with ones I’ve used in the past. So when I was redesigning my personal site last year in the hopes of getting back to writing regularly, I decided I would launch without a CMS and make updates to the site the old-fashioned way by hand-editing text files. For me, the long-term inconvenience of this relatively archaic method was preferable to the short-term inconvenience of dealing with CMS integration.

As a result, when I post a new piece of writing on the site, I usually need to update about five to seven text files with varying degrees of hassle and redundancy. This probably sounds like a nightmare to anyone who has ever had to manage a web site in any capacity; this kind of inefficiency is antithetical to the goals of modern computing. But the year I’ve spent publishing with this system has been my most prolific one yet, even more than those halcyon days when the site was running on a robust CMS and the blogging zeitgeist was in full force.

There are two specific, external factors that have had a substantial impact on my site’s recent fecundity:

  • The Pastry Box Project, a blog that collects the wisdom of thirty-one influential web professionals, which asks that I submit something once a month.
  • Letterboxd, a social site for film buffs whose thoughtful design has encouraged me to write frequent short-form film reviews.

In the last year, 83% of the posts (and 73% of the word count) on my site were republished content I created for The Pastry Box Project, Letterboxd, and a few other external sites, so I clearly have publishing systems other than my own to thank for the lion’s share of the writing I’ve done. Still, I’ve grown to enjoy using my site’s laborious non-CMS, and I think it’s encouraged my writing in its own way.

For one thing, there’s a hand-crafted element to working in static text files that’s very satisfying. Marking up the semantics of my writing in its native HTML environment feels like a more personal endeavor than typing into a WYSIWYG interface meant to shield me from the complexity hiding beneath it. For another thing, the sizable inconvenience of editing several files for every site update makes each post feel more consequential, which has paradoxically made my approach to writing both more and less precious: I take extra time to make sure everything is just right before publishing and I rarely get bogged down in minutia-driven revisions after. So once something is done, it’s done, and I can move on to the next thing.

Creating a system that increases the work necessary to complete a task is understandably rare. But in this case, I’ve found the extra work to be more rewarding than the sensibly efficient alternative. Whether or not my non-CMS is comparable to the differences between manual and automatic transmissions or artisanal and manufactured products, there can be benefits to adding complexity to our relationships with the things we create and consume. So I’ll be on the lookout for other areas where inefficiency is my friend.

All posts in this series

Near and Far

Communication methods have changed, but the fundamentals remain the same.

The whole of communication technology is merely an extension of pigment on surface, the fundamental technique of indirect language transmission. Radio and television and computers do more work for us, sure. They parse ideas into shapes and colors and sounds. But there is nothing they can do that can’t be recreated with a lump of mud and a fertile imagination, a method as viable today as it was five thousand years ago.

The only thing… See more →

Go to this post

Calendar Living

The inner workings of my new time management system.

Inspired by Daniel Markovitz’s Harvard Business Review article “To-Do Lists Don’t Work”, I have been “living in my calendar” for a few weeks now. While I’m still a long way from becoming as productive as I’d like to be, I’m definitely getting more done, and I’m also getting a clearer sense of my capabilities (read: my ideal productive self may as well have been born on Krypton).

In a nutshell, my (evolving) process works like… See more →

Go to this post

Self-Aware Statistics

Questioning the value of personal data.

Personal statistics fascinate me, and in the information age, I’m collecting a ton of them. Last.fm keeps track of what music I listen to and when I listen to it. Letterboxd does the same for movies, and the tagging system I’m using within it tells me how the movies were formatted, where I watched them, and more. Goodreads and Instapaper keep tabs on my reading, Foursquare and Tripit chronicle the details of my travels, and… See more →

Go to this post

As Much Trouble as It’s Worth

A quick thought about design as sleight of hand.

In an article for Smithsonian magazine, renowned magician Teller (of the duo Penn & Teller) offers a handful of guiding principles for altering an audience’s perceptions. This one is my favorite:

Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.

This is the stuff great… See more →

Go to this post

Make It Bigger

A rich life can be a complicated one.

I first gained access to the internet on the cusp of adulthood, a few months before I graduated high school in 1994. In the years that followed, it steadily gained presence in my daily life, and in tandem with higher education and venturing timidly into “the real world”, the internet helped expand my universe far beyond its humble origins.

Today, I live in a major metropolitan hub, have personal and professional relationships on almost every… See more →

Go to this post

Slow Motion Spectacle

Progress takes time.

We notice the sort of design that demands to be noticed, and make the mistake of proclaiming it to be some kind of “game changer”, glossing over its functional failings in favor of its unique approach to a problem. But the truth is that the game is much more likely to be changed incrementally, by design that doesn’t call attention to itself. When we wake up tomorrow, we won’t be greeted by a new and… See more →

Go to this post

Cultural Cannibalism

Concerns about remix culture’s critical mass.

Ours is an age of cultural cannibalism. We have rather suddenly gained very convenient access to nearly the whole of human history’s significant creative output, and we are remixing it with careless abandon. We have introduced The Beatles to Jay-Z, Jane Austen to George Romero, and Abraham Lincoln to Bram Stoker. If something gets a modicum of attention online, it can count on being Photoshopped, captioned, auto-tuned, GIF’ed, pickled, bronzed, or arranged for ukulele and… See more →

Go to this post

Outsourcing

The audience-generated promise of Beck’s Song Reader.

Last month, I expressed some concerns about remix culture and the questionable value of much of its output. Shortly thereafter, as if in response, the juggernaut of skewed pop music known as Beck revealed that his next album, Song Reader, will be released exclusively as sheet music.

The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart… See more →

Go to this post

Geico Geico Geico

Advertising’s grim hold on our digital economy.

A bout of insomnia last summer led me to sign up for a free trial of Hulu Plus, which would let me use my iPad to catch up on episodes of Bob’s Burgers I had missed earlier in the season. When I inevitably failed to kill the subscription before the negative option billing kicked in, I decided to make the most of the month I accidentally paid for by devouring the entire combined run of… See more →

Go to this post

Inefficiency by Design

How my web site’s lack of a CMS has made me more prolific.

There is a popular myth in geek circles which claims that the QWERTY layout standard for Latin keyboards was actually designed to slow down typing, since early typewriters were prone to jam. While this is a misunderstanding (jams were caused by the mechanical proximity of common letter pairs, not the speed of typing), it has occasionally made me wonder: could technological shortcomings that ostensibly get in the way of the user experience actually, ultimately, be… See more →

Go to this post

Obstruction by Design

We always talk about design getting out of the way, but does it ever make sense for design to get in the way?

I have an information retention problem. I absorb a lot of it, all of which is presumably stored somewhere, but not nearly as much of it remains available for unassisted recall as I would like. Not surprisingly, the stuff that is best remembered has been reinforced, usually through some kind of repeated application or extensive immersion. In other words, if something is retained in my long-term memory, I probably had to work for it. Fair… See more →

Go to this post

The Loss of Matter

A rallying cry for our underserved senses.

I recently saw the band Swans live for the second time. They were promoting a stellar new album (The Seer) which essentially encompasses all of the varied and challenging music that bandleader Michael Gira has made under a few different monikers over the last thirty years. In the two years since I saw them last, I had gotten to know their oeuvre better, and coming to this show with a more educated ear paid off.… See more →

Go to this post