Curating A Design System Newsletter

Some time ago I was going through the backlog of around 90 unread articles on Design Systems. About 80 of those were Medium articles and about 40 of those took me to either their user-hostile “you ready a lot and we like that” pop-up or their money-grabbing “you’ve read lots this month, pay us to read some more.”, it turns out that Medium only likes you reading things when you give money to do so.

Therefore I’ve started to add a little warning notice to each article that’s on Medium.

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Curate your own newspaper with RSS

I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here because I bet you’re reading these very words in a feed reader, but what Molly White has written here is too good not to share:

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

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P&B: Jeremy Keith – Manu

In which I answer questions about blogging.

I’ve put a copy of this on my own site too.

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Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected (Interconnected)

Ah, this is wonderful! Matt takes us on the quarter-decade journey of his brilliant blog (which chimes a lot with my own experience—my journal turns 25 next year)…

Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)

Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.

Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.

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The Free Web - The History of the Web

I am going to continue to write this newsletter. I am going to spend hours and hours pouring over old books and mailing lists and archived sites. And lifeless AI machines will come along and slurp up that information for their own profit. And I will underperform on algorithms. My posts will be too long, or too dense, or not long enough.

And I don’t care. I’m contributing to the free web.

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Our web

The web is what we make it.

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Write for yourself.