Over the weekend I read this great collection of advice for writers by Anne Lammot called Bird by Bird. The goal of this short little book is to help young writers learn more about the design and publication of fiction but, aside from the self-help format, what really caught my attention is this extract about...

Over on A List Apart Allen has written an interesting piece about how to make sure that the aging content on our websites isn’t left out to pasture unnecessarily. ...for years, we’ve neglected the disciplines of stewardship—the invisible and unglamorous work of collecting, restoring, safekeeping, and preservation....

Reading is designed to alleviate our curiosity. We all want to know what’s in our neighbors’ pockets, how they style their hair, how much time they spent on the rusty machine in their garage, or how long and serious their last relationship was. So once in a while, if we're lucky, a good novel might begin to soothe...

Whilst you’re writing it’s entirely possible to throw everything away and start again if you don’t like how things are working out. If the tone is too harsh or your voice is too light, a quick adjustment can tighten the bolts. Likewise most of those cheesy phrases or clichés are likely to be cast off during the...

From a distance across an ocean, across a network, what inspired me about Chloe was her unrelenting curiosity and kindness. Through her writing I began my little hobby of making playlists every month whilst thinking about owning, as she put it, those representations of me on other services. We exchanged a few...

It’s been one hell of a gif-fueled ride, but today is my last at Erskine. When I joined almost two years ago I thought that Git was an English slang and I didn’t know anything about Sass, JavaScript or responsive design. Fresh out of university I hadn’t worked in the field at all, I hadn’t spoken at any conferences...

In a short story called ‘To Reiterate’ from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis the author wonderfully describes her personal experiences of reading, writing and traveling whilst also taking apart dumb quotations and pithy statements in perhaps the best way possible: Michel Butor says that to travel is to write,...

For the longest time I’ve taken the sidelines in most arguments, both online and in daily conversations with strangers. I believed that trying to correct the facts or convince people of my own argument was futile and, in some ways, kind of self righteous. It wasn’t a case of being quietly smug though, I just...

Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian: How to ward off atrophy and routine, you ask? Well, I can give you a small and perhaps ridiculous example. Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day...

Madness, Rack and Honey is a collection of lectures by the poet Mary Ruefle in which she contemplates the various struggles surrounding her art, and gosh darn it if this book isn’t endlessly quotable. I haven’t been able to put it down since as Mary eloquently captures, in so many ways, what it feels like to write...

Lately I’ve been reading a fabulous string of novels yet it’s made me feel a little guilty about ignoring the more science-oriented and fact-driven prose out there. So I’ve been making my first tentative steps into the field of physics with a book by Neil deGrasse Tyson called Death by Black Hole. It’s not so much a...

Earlier this week I headed off to the Future of Web Design conference in London to give a talk about systems, language and maintainable interface design which was adapted from an essay I wrote back in December called A Visual Lexicon. Overall it was a fantastic event with some wonderful talks about JavaScript...