Thord D. Hedengren

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Tag: reading

  • You don’t have to read everything

    You don’t have to read everything

    I’m not the only one with an overflowing Instapaper (or Pocket, or whatever) queue. A lot of people save more articles than they have time to read, and even if they don’t, they want to read more articles than they do. It’s not that hard to understand why, because there’s a lot of content published every day, on so many sites, or even in print, and the notion of being able to read everything you think you want to read is ridiculous. You can’t.

    Let me say that again: You can’t read everything you think you want to read.

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  • Writing and reading

    One thing that’s painfully missing from my Enjoyable Things (yep, it’ll most likely end up being a series of posts) January 2015 piece, is books read. Or stuff read at all really, because there hasn’t been as much of that going on as I’d wanted. My Instapaper queue hasn’t been this long in years (seriously), and although I read fiction every day, the sessions are short and abruptly stopped by the fact that I’m already pushing it in terms of hours slept per night.

    Reading needs to be scheduled, that’s the case for a lot of us. How often do we find the time to read even longform articles? Not as often as I’d want at least, which probably is one reason why short posts are the norm online these days. Well that, and the need for a ridiculous quantity of posts, rather than of words neatly strung together. If you want your site to be successful, publish 20+ pieces per day, that’ll keep ’em coming. That’s the general advice at least, and it works, assuming the posts you do publish isn’t too atrocious. Luckily those “rules” don’t apply to a personal site like this one, because you come here for my charming wits, or… Or I don’t have a clue, some of you are clearly here for my books, but the rest? There’s probably help for you out there, I guess, but I’ll have you here as long as you’re willing.

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  • Multiple pages are a thing of the past

    If there is something I truly loathe when browsing the web these days, it is multiple pages. I don’t care about pop-ups, because the web browser solves that problem. I don’t care much about Flash because I can just install an extension to disable it, or just not use it at all. I don’t even care about overlays anymore, because sites using it for commercial messages in an obtrusive way just shouldn’t be visited.

    Multiple pages are a whole different beast. There is no way to get around this monstrosity if you want to read a long article. Click the “next page” link and see the site reload, that’s all you can do about it. (more…)