The Local Yarn

∞ · Wed Dec 12, 2012

I’ve been writing on this site for about fourteen years. Fourteen years. That’s 45% of my life so far.

I was seventeen when I put up my first web page as a place for people to download my free software and read my amateur attempts at satire. I’m thirty-one now. I don’t write code much anymore, my perspectives on many things have rotated anywhere between 180-270 degrees¹, and my practice of writing has changed quite a lot.

In all that time, this site’s design has changed only twice, the last time being in 2004. It was a good design, too, by all accounts, But by 2011, what with the passing of time, the appearance of some new realities and the fading of old ones, several good reasons for a redesign had piled up, and we began work on it.

Jessica and I were married about a year and a half ago, and being married has turned out to be the best development in my life so far — in my pursuit of the crafts of writing and publishing no less than in many other dimensions. Jessica is a musician and a painter, and our marriage has been, among many things, something of an artistic greenhouse for us both. I felt it was essential that this site reflect the creative side of our partnership.

In that greenhouse, my experiment with podcasting bloomed, a couple of little book projects were begun, and my interest in all forms of web publishing has branched out into more nooks and crannies than may be ultimately sustainable.

What you see now, more than a year after beginning, is the result that attempts to address all of these developments. Jessica and I worked on every detail of this redesign together in stolen moments over the past year. We’ve renamed it The Local Yarn, by which we intend to allude to a slower, more rural pace of life, and the simple pleasures of conversation and storytelling².

The way the site organizes its articles has further evolved along the lines it’s been following for years: that of a fine serial publication (the kind you hang onto for years because it’s too nice to throw away). I have repurposed blog-style ‘categories’ into ‘series’ — collections of writing which have their own titles and personality. And although I no longer separate articles into artificial ‘issues’, there’s still a book-style keyword index to scroll through.

Several small paintings are used in various places as spot illustrations, with more on the way.³ All of them, including that one in the masthead, were done by Jessica. Her paintings have also provided a warm and engaging colour pallette which we are using to complement the text.

Which, of course, brings us to the text. I’ve slowly come to realize that I value an appeal to the imagination at least as much as (possibly more than) an appeal to left-brain’d reason. We wanted this site to present imaginative writing in a way that readers of old books would find familiar and believable. The body text is set in Kepler, which was designed in the tradition of the classic modern typefaces used in many of the books you may have read as a kid. The masthead and top-level headings use Livory, which has a rustic, calligraphic feel.

Finer Points

The following details may be mainly appealing to those who take an interest in the finer points of web publishing.

The web as a medium has changed quite a lot in the last eight years. When I last redesigned the site in 2004, I followed the best practices in use at the time⁴; and now, eight years later, I finally feel that web standards have again evolved to the point where implementing the latest round of them will actually improve the reader’s experience.

People now read web content on smartphones, tablets, and ebook readers, in addition to computer screens, and the new design makes sure to accomodate all of them gracefully, using the Skeleton CSS framework. The margins and type proportions also change at set intervals depending on the width of your screen, to maintain a line length of roughly 12-16 words (or 7-10 words on portrait mobile screens). Many ‘responsive’ designs, even text-centric ones, seem to miss this aspect of typography, and leave the font size too big for mobile devices.

The front page now displays only links to, and not the full text of, recent articles. This is because of another change in traffic patterns since 2004: it’s no longer common for people to arrive at a site through the front page. If someone visits the site for the first time, they’re almost always following a link to a specific post that someone shared on a social network, or that they found on Google. If anyone even sees the front page of a site, it’s almost always due to some form of personal curiosity — either they did a search on the person’s name, or were referred by a business card or email signature, or they found a specific article and followed the link to the front page. That curiosity is much better satisfied by devoting more of the front page’s space to an overview of everything on offer, rather than to whatever is most recent.⁵

I used to hesitate to post anything, even writing I felt particularly good about, because I knew it would also have to do double-duty as a first impression for new visitors, possibly for several days or weeks. Now, curious visitors can get a quick feel for the breadth of different writing I enjoy publishing, no matter what happens to be at the top of the stack.

I still use the excellent Textpattern as the core content-serving engine. A lot of great new CMSs have been developed since my last redesgin, and I shopped around a good deal over the last year. Many of them try to simplify the writing aspect of blogging by letting you publish straight Markdown files, and by using a flat file structure instead of a database, but this approach always seems to result in a net increase in workflow complexity. Textpattern and Textile may no longer be the best tools for writing, but in my opinion, the best tool for writing isn’t a CMS, it’s your text editor. Your CMS should be a publishing tool, not a writing tool, and Textpattern excels at this.

Coda

Finally, there is one editorial change. The 68% Vitriol policy, neglected now lo these many years, is formally rescinded.

I have a lot of ideas for the future of The Local Yarn, but I’ll save those for when they are ready to roll. Meanwhile, if anything seems broken, please get in touch.

— JD

∞ · Wed Nov 28, 2012

If you have a website where you post new content pretty regularly, especially articles that are at least a page long, you should consider finding a way to make your content available on Kindles, iPads and other eBook readers.

Before getting into the methods available, think for a second about the people who would use this service. They represent a special class of reader: those who not only read your site on their laptops, but would find it enjoyable and convenient to have it delivered to an expensive device optimized for extended, away-from-the-desk reading. In other words, these people see value in your writing that others do not. To the degree that they actually exist as part of your audience (a big question), you should really consider finding some way of recognizing that value, and Kindle/ePub publishing is one good way to do that.

Problem Space

Allowing readers to subscribe to an ebook-friendly version of your site’s content presents three main challenges:

1. Your content needs to be converted ePub and mobi formats, in addition to whatever format(s) you use when writing and publishing on your website. Ideally, it would happen automatically when you hit the “Post” button.

2. New content needs to be delivered to subscribers; again, as publishers we want to do as little extra work as possible, so this should happen automatically. Also, it’s extremely convenient for subscribers to have the new content be downloaded to their actual iPads and Kindles without any extra steps, rather than simply being notified by email that something new is out there waiting to be downloaded.

3. You need some way to track and manage subscriptions and payments.

I’ve looked at all the options out there, and here are my findings.

Amazon Kindle Publishing for Blogs

Amazon has a service especially for blogs, which allows people to subscribe for a small fee through the Kindle store, and have your content delivered right to their Kindles automatically as soon as you publish it on your site.

Pros:

• Delivery is fully automatic and goes directly to readers’ devices.

• Conversion is fully automated from RSS feeds; no extra work for you as the publisher.

• Subscribers lists and incoming payments are fully handled for you.

Cons:

• Amazon gives you near-zero visibility into your subscriber base, and the reports they make available to you about earnings demonstrate a frustrating poverty of information.

• Amazon does not allow you to set the price; they almost always set it at $0.99. Additionally, they charge 70% of the subscription price as their take. There have been reports in the support forums of blogs having their price lowered without warning, as well as of payments being sent sporadically.

• The formatting performed by Amazon is fully automatic, but it’s also fully disastrous. There’s no published spec or even a set of guidelines for optimizing your site’s HTML to ensure a good conversion. In my tests using this site, which is formed of fully-validated HTML5, whole sections of articles were randomly reordered, and headings were orphaned from articles by page breaks on nearly every article.

• This service provides no support for non-Kindle devices, not even using Kindle apps for iOS or Android.

• You’re sending subscribers away from your website and onto a third party in order to complete the subscription process. This isn’t usually a big deal — even the New York Times has to use the Kindle store in order to offer Kindle subscriptions — but it’s worth mentioning. It’s conceivable that in five years Kindle publishing will have improved on this, and readers’ expectations could be very different.

Free third-party services

If you provide a decent RSS feed, you could direct your readers to use a third-party service to get your site on their e-readers.

There are a couple of options for this:

• Combining an Instapaper account with an IFTTT recipe. This method supports iOS, Kindle, and Android.
• Kindlefeeder (supports Kindle only)

Using this approach fulfills our ideal of requiring little to no time investment, and creates no need to add extra conversion steps to your publishing workflow. Your subscribers simply manage and fend for themselves.

On the other hand, by going this route, you are effectively asserting that your content has zero economic value, even to those special readers who might find high value in a better solution. You’re saying “I know you won’t pay for a better reading experience, so here’s a hacky way to do it for free.” Ask yourself if that’s an good message to send to your particular readers.¹

Leanpub

Leanpub is a service particularly aimed at ebook writers and writers with blogs. They allow you to take Markdown-formatted text and easily repackage it as an ebook. You just save your book in a Dropbox folder, click ‘Publish’, and Leanpub produces ePub, mobi, and PDF versions of your book automatically. Their model is for authors to publish books at an early stage, and allow it to build up a following as successive sections are being released.

Leanpub can be a very workable option for the kind of periodical content we’re talking about, but I should note that it doesn’t have a ‘periodical’ paradigm; it’s completely geared towards books. In order for Leanpub to work as a method for subscribing to your site, you would essentially have to publish your content as an ebook covering a given period (e.g., one year), and republish a new version of that book at set intervals, such as every month or quarter. This also means there is no ‘subscription’ element in their model: no option for monthly charges or automatic renewals. You would need to have subscribers manually ‘renew’ every year by purchasing the next year’s ‘book.’

Pros

• The conversion is fairly easy, and produces three versions of your content, so it will work and look very decent on pretty much any device.

• Customer and payment management built in. There’s a good balance of reader privacy with publisher insight: readers can opt-in to receive additional email updates, or to share their actual address with you, the publisher.

• Leanpub passes you a whopping 90% of the payments collected by subscribers (less $0.50 per transaction), and it allows them the option of paying more than the suggested price.

Cons

• Again, you’d have to be fine with working around Leanpub’s lack of a “periodical” concept: publishing your content as an ebook, and likely having to require yearly (or semi-annual), up-front, non-renewing subscriptions.

• The conversion does require additional steps to be added to your publishing workflow. If you already compose your writing in Markdown format, creating an ebook version with Leanpub shouldn’t be that difficult, but it’s still not automatic. In addition, you may find yourself investing extra work in adding ‘finishing touches’ to the ebook publication (covers, forewords, etc).

• Subscribers do receive email notifications of new editions, but content is not delivered to their device directly; they need to click a link in the email in order to open the dashboard where they can download the file. There are, however, buttons in this dashboard which iPad and Kindle users can use to have the file sent directly to their devices (via a Readmill account or their Kindle email address).

• Leanpub creates a PDF version of your content over whose appearance you have very little control.

• Again, perhaps not a big deal at this time, but it’s worth noting that you’re sending readers off-site to a third part to complete the subscription process. Leanpub presents much better than Amazon’s Kindle store listings, however.

Self-managed conversion, email, & payments

It is conceivable that you could handle all of this yourself by combining off-the-shelf software and services with intermediate- to advanced-level technical skills.

For example, you could generate ePub and mobi files using a combination of either Sigil or pandoc and Calibre. For detailed notes on other methods of conversion, read Pat Shaughnessy’s post My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips.

For email deliveries, you could buy and install Sendy on your server, or use MailChimp; and finally, create a payment gateway with Stripe and a custom spreadsheet to handle subscriptions.

These are examples that you can use to get started, but I should note that I’m not fully confident they would even work, mainly because it’s unclear to me whether any services (including Sendy and Mailchimp) would allow you to attach ePub or mobi files to your mass emails.

Assuming you were able to get it to work, it would look like this.

Pros

• Ongoing fees would be very small. On subscription payments, Stripe would charge 2.5% + $0.30 per transaction. Outgoing emails are $0.10 per 1,000 using Sendy; Mailchimp is free up to 2,000 subscribers, but after that it costs between $8-$20 per month per 1,000 subscribers (depending on the plan, possibly less if you have more than 10k subscribers).

• You have complete control over formatting of your ePub and mobi files, and a fully branded subscription experience.

Cons:

• Managing subscriber payments, device preferences, and support requests, could be a nightmare.

• Manual conversion of content becomes its own full-blown publishing exercise in addition to your web publishing workflow.

Revenue Comparison

Suppose we consider a hypothetical blog that has 2,500 subscribers willing to pay the publisher’s ideal price of $24/year ($2/month). Of these, let’s say 70% are Kindle users and 30% use either iOS or nook. Here is the actual revenue that would be realized from the available options:

• Amazon Kindle Blogs: $6,237 per year. Only Kindle customers are served (1,750 of the 2,500), and Amazon controls the price, setting it at $0.99 instead of $2.00 per month. Readers experience poor formatting and irregular delivery, which might affect subscription turnover.

• Leanpub: $52,750 per year². Readers are notified by email of new content, which they must download to their devices (again “Send to iPad” and “Send to Kindle” links are provided).

• Self-managed: $57,507. ($60k less $2,490 in Stripe transaction fees — assuming no chargebacks — and $3 in email sending fees.) For the extra $4,757, you must provide your own subscriber support and develop a manual conversion process for ePub and mobi files. This option may not be able to provide automatic delivery to reader’s devices.

But perhaps 2,500 premium subscribers seems a bit lofty? What if we drop down to only 100 subscribers per year, with the same proportions & ideal price?

• Amazon: $249
• Leanpub: $2,110
• Self-managed: $2,300

The Future

What’s obvious in all this is that there’s no neutral architecture or channel for distributing subscription content to ebook readers. Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Apple each have their own file format, their own own stores, and their own separate delivery mechanisms for getting content onto their reader devices.

It doesn’t have to be that way, however. On the web, there are independent standards that have been developed and defended through advocacy, and as a result, anyone can put up a website on any server, and all people need in order to read it is the site’s address. Reading ebooks could be just as convenient.

On March 26th, 2011, Apple updated their podcast RSS feed specification to include support for ePub files as enclosures. This means that you can now create an “epubcast”, essentially a web address that readers could use to subscribe to ebook-formatted content, in the same way that you can create a podcast for people to subscribe to MP3 audio content.

It’s not clear yet what Apple plans to use this for. One possibility is that Apple could make it possible to publish to the iOS Newsstand with an epubcast, rather than forcing publishers to write their own apps.

But it’s easy to see the potential of the epubcast. If CMSs would begin offering automatic conversion to ePub files, and if (unlikely as it is) iPads, Kindles and Nooks would all support ePub and allow you to subscribe to publications using the epubcast format, we would see a boom of new content for tablets and ebook readers, and it would be vastly simpler to get that content on our devices. Web publishing, and publishing in general, might even undergo the biggest renaissance since the invention of the web.

∞ · Tue Nov 27, 2012

∞ · Tue Nov 27, 2012

In January of 2011, our wedding was approaching, and I took on the project of letterpress-printing our invitations.

I printed exactly one hundred invitations on Crane Lettra paper, using a Vandercook letterpress and rubber-based inks, over a period of three weeks.

The typefaces used were a mix of old and new. The main text is set in Monotype Bembo, a 1929 revival of a face cut in 1495 by Aldus Manutius in Venice. Our names were set in Maestro, a recent typeface design by Philip Bouwsma of Canada Type in Toronto, whose characters are modeled after the work of Arrighi and the Italian chancery cursive of the early sixteenth century.

∞ · Wed Oct 3, 2012

Yesterday I put the last few touches on the new Howell Creek Radio website. I also moved all past episodes, comments and show notes over to it and removed them from this site. Any attempt to access a podcast-related web page or MP3 file will now redirect you to the new location.

First things first: if you’re in any way subscribed to Howell Creek Radio, or if you were depending on your JDueck.Net RSS subscription to keep you informed of new Howell Creek Radio episodes, you need to read this announcement to make sure you don’t miss anything, because new episodes will no longer be appearing at the address¹.

I’m really proud of the new site. Although it’s not exactly a triumph of design², I’ve put a lot of effort into making it look good, and into the finishing details that make a difference in its actual use. You can now play episodes right from inside the browser on smartphones and tablets. It serves extra-crisp graphics to Retina displays and it also plays very nicely when you add it to the home screen on an iOS device. Finally, I’ve done lots of coding and updating behind the scenes to ensure that I’ll never have to shift things like this again³.

You can also subscribe to the podcast via email on the new site, which I almost feel is the best method of all, surprisingly enough. The emails themselves have been redesigned and look really nice, and with them I include a list of interesting online reading that I’ll update every month.

The podcast began as a kind of cathartic writing experiment in 2008 and quickly became my favourite creative outlet. Due to the way podcasting works, it’s near-impossible to accurately count subscribers, but episodes are now downloaded several hundred times per month, using 30-40GB of bandwidth. At the end of 2011, Jessica and I agreed this project was worth watering and growing just to see where it would take us. The new site gives it room and stability enough to be sure the experiment won’t end prematurely, and we’re excited to see where it goes from here.

I will say, the archives of this site look pretty decimated without the podcast episodes; in a way, though, it also feels cleaner and more focused.

∞ · Mon Aug 13, 2012

I’m here to announce that I’ve just released the zeroth edition of my first book project, Noise of Creation.

It’s kind of a big project: the finished book will include exactly one thousand chapters plus an extensive appendix! It’s not a novel or even a collection of short stories. It’s more like a postmodern devotional that happens to be based on the 1852 version of Roget’s College Thesaurus. You should read all about it on the book’s page at Leanpub. I won’t duplicate all of that information here except to say that:

1. It’s a serial, meaning I’m still writing and publishing new chapters as I go (probably for the next several years). Charles Dickens created and sold his books the same way, incidentally, and Leanpub allows authors to do the same with electronic books.
2. At this point, it’s also free. If you download it now, you also get all future editions of the ebook for free. After the first one hundred chapters are finished, I’ll set a minimum price for any future readers.

I decided some time ago that I would probably use my first and middle names as a pen name if I ever published a book, mainly because it sounds nice and it’s easier than “Dueck” to pronounce and spell correctly. It does seem a bit pretentious, especially since this book is just an experimental project rather than, you know, an actual novel or something; but it’s probably better to have it in place now than to try and wedge it in later on.

At this point I’ve completed only twelve of the one thousand chapters (one for each of the twelve disciples, let’s say — and I’ll leave it up to you to pick whether that includes Judas or Matthias). My overambitious roadmap currently includes a possible Kickstarter project for the complete, lovingly-typset six-volume print edition, but only after the writing is complete. For now, I’d love for you to download it, receive email notices of new editions as they come out, and tell me what you think of the writing so far.

The cover design was also my own work. The font is Subtle Sans by Atle Mo, with the kerning of each letter minutely tweaked to get those exact intersections between the letters. I took the photo in Welland, Ontario in June 2012.

∞ · Mon Jul 30, 2012 · 1 Notes

At the opening ceremonies for the 2012 Olympics in London, Kenneth Branagh appeared on stage in the character of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a famous British engineer, and delivered these lines to the world in his grandest style¹:

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

The lines are originally spoken by the character of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

It seems this bit of Branagh’s wrought all manner of confusion among viewers and journalists. Many people wondered why he was dressed as Abe Lincoln. USA Today also cited Shakespeare expert James Shapiro as being confused by the choice of lines, and by their juxtaposition with Brunel:

“The lines are quite beautiful, and I guess they wanted to rip them out of context and talk about how magical a place the British Isles are.” […] Brunel standing on a hill in the countryside, delivering the speech to a bunch of wide-eyed Brits, had “absolutely no relationship” with Shakespeare or the Tempest.

“Why give him the lines Shakespeare wrote for a half-man, half-beast about to try to kill off an imperial innovator who took away his island? I don’t know,” Shapiro said.

I see this reaction as further evidence of the modern trend towards “de-dreamification” of thought. These ceremonies were not supposed to be an academic lecture or a master’s thesis. This is theatre — and, like all theatre, essentially more like a staged dream. In dreams, connections are not made by logical and categorical connections, but by shades of emotion. In dreams, we layer on things that seem disparate but that share an emotional connection — it is this type of thought that allows us to make leaps of artistic and creative intuition.²

So what we see here is actually an extremely poetic and dream-like layering of elements: Shakespeare’s words, combined with the character of Isambard Kingdom Brunel — the man who built the Great Western Railway and several revolutionary ship designs — in the context of the British Isles just before the Industrial Revolution. Instead of being a dull recitation, the words are injected with a wild, new meaning by setting them this way. (I have my own thoughts on this but I’d love to hear yours in the footnotes.)

Tom Gliatto almost figured it out when he said, “In his movies he loves to jam together styles and images and effects, and so he did here. This was Trainspotting minus heroin.” He meant it as a slap, but, coming from a critic, it actually proves both that Boyle nailed his desired effect, and that Gliatto wasn’t in the mood (or just doesn’t know how) to dream.

Although it ended in a regrettable muddle about the internet and pop music (much like a real dream might), Branagh’s bit, along with several similar combinations, made the ceremonies enjoyable and memorable.

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