For comparison, here’s the “before” picture:

After (I tweaked the links, too):

If you’re already comfortable with HTML and CSS, it turns out to be pretty easy to make a hand-drawn website with highlights that appear when you hover over links. Here’s how!

Step 1: Draw the header image.

It can be more efficient to have one medium-sized image instead of lots of little images, and it’s easier to work with one image instead of many small ones. You’ll use CSS to split this up into rectangular regions later, so keep that in mind when designing your image and try to avoid overlaps.

I drew the main image using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, but you can use any image-drawing program. You can even draw it on paper and then scan it in.

(I didn’t end up using the Random Page! button, but that’s okay. =) )

Step 2: Add highlights.

I added another layer below my main layer and highlighted whatever I wanted to highlight, making sure things were separated by enough whitespace so that the highlights didn’t overlap into another link’s rectangle. If you’re doing this on paper, you can highlight on paper as well.

You’ll notice that everything is highlighted in this image. No worries! We’ll display just the appropriate part later.

Step 3: Set guidelines.

Setting guidelines using a photo editing tool like the GIMP will make it easier for you to select consistent rectangles. Here, you can see how I’ve set up my guidelines to make it easy to select a rectangle containing the “Home” link. You can use the rectangle selection tool to get the position and size, which you can find in the Tool Options window.

Step 4: Write your HTML and add IDs/classes to it.

Code your HTML so that the text makes sense, and then use CSS to replace the text with images and to lay things out for your intended design.

I added IDs and classes to my links to make it easier to replace the links with images later on.

<ul class="links" style="margin-bottom: 0">
<li><a id="home" class="replace home-design" href="/">Home</a></li>
...
</ul>

Step 5: Replace the text with your images using CSS.

There are a number of CSS text->image replacement tutorials out there. The general idea is to use text-indent to hide the text, and then use background, background-position, width, and height to display the right portion of your image.

This is where the guidelines from Step 3 come in handy. Simply make the position negative and use that as the background position, then use the size as the width and height.

.home-design { background: url(images/design.png) 0 0 no-repeat; }
.replace { white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; text-indent: 100%; }
#home { width: 96px; height: 40px; background-position: -81px -105px; display: inline-block }
.header .links .replace:hover { background: url(images/design-highlighted.png) 0 0 no-repeat; }

Tada!

Still have questions? Please comment below – I’d be happy to explain more!

Read the original or check out the comments on: How to make a hand-drawn highlighted web page header (Sacha Chua's blog)

Click on the image to view or download a larger version.

Feel free to share this visual book review! (Creative Commons Attribution – I’d love it if you link back to this site and tell me about it. =) )  It should print out fine on letter-sized paper, too.

Intrigued by the ideas? You can check your local library to see if they have a copy, or buy your own copy below.

Disclosure: I received a Kindle copy of this book for review, and I’ll get a small commission if you buy anything from Amazon using the links above.

Other sources of information: books.google.com, visualmarketingrevolution.com

I’ve been working on making my own sites more visual, so I’m looking forward to applying the ideas from this book. If you do as well, please share your stories!

Check out my other visual book reviews

Read the original or check out the comments on: Visual book review: The Visual Marketing Revolution (Stephanie Diamond) (Sacha Chua's blog)

The latest version (Artrage 4) introduces some interesting features that might help me with drawing. The Workbench and Toolbox combination will let me choose just the tools and colour samples I want to use, hiding the rest behind menus in a streamlined interface. I like the ability to save and load toolbox configurations. That will make it easier for me to save colour sets for recurring events or clients. There doesn’t seem to be a way to save the Transform tool as a preset, though, so selecting and moving things will take more clicks. (More on this later.)

I’ve also been looking for a way to project the drawing as a whole while I’m zoomed in and working on part of it. This will let people see the context without getting dizzy or distracted by the way I zoom in and out. Views allow you to “pin” a view of your canvas while you’re working on a different part. I tested it with an external monitor and confirmed that you can drag the view pin off your main Artrage window and onto the second screen, and that you can resize it to almost fill the screen. If I ever need to do projected sketchnotes (the request has come up once or twice, but in the end people opt to focus on the speaker), this might be a possibility.

It will take a lot more practice before I feel comfortable using this for real-time sketchnoting. There seems to be a little bit of lag at the beginning of strokes drawn in quick succession, even if I’ve turned smoothing off. Here’s a sample in Artrage 4:

and the same thing in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro:

Selecting and moving regions doesn’t feel as natural as it does in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, and that’s something I find myself doing often when I’m drawing a sketchnote. Artrage 4 seems more responsive than Artrage Studio Pro when it comes to moving things around, but the process of selecting, moving, and deselecting takes too much work. As far as I understand it, the steps in Artrage 4 Workbench mode are:

1. Click on the hard freehand lasso preset I’ve saved to my toolbox.
2. Select the section to move.
3. Click on the large tool icon and choose Transform.
4. Drag the image. Be sure to start dragging within the bounding box of the part of the image that has data, because it won’t detect it if you’re dragging from empty space that you’ve already highlighted.
   
   (outside the rectangle = won’t actually move things)
5. Click on Menu > Edit > Deselect all, or you won’t be able to draw outside the selected region.

In Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, I would:

1. Click on the lasso tool.
2. Select the area I want to move.
3. Move it or resize it using the puck that appears when I hover inside the selection.
4. Switch back to a drawing tool to start drawing anywhere in the screen.

There are keyboard shortcuts for Transform and Deselect all, but I usually don’t have keyboard access while I’m in tablet mode.

So Artrage 4 is probably good for me to use if:

• I’m drawing/painting for fun, because then I can slow down and I’m not worried about losing anything,
• I have a keyboard handy so that I can use the keyboard shortcuts to change tools,
• I need to project a separate view of my drawing, or
• I want to record a zoomed-out animation of my drawing over a guide drawing. (I suppose I could learn how to green-screen videos… =) )

I might revisit this for sketchnoting if I can stitch together some keyboard macros (maybe using a foot pedal or the Twiddler), but in the meantime, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro will be my workhorse. I’ll play around with Artrage’s drawing and painting support to see if I can build other non-sketchnoting artistic skills/techniques using that. Anyway, it’s good to see progress in applications!

Thanks to Luc Taesch for the nudge to check out Artrage 4!

Read the original or check out the comments on: First impressions of Artrage 4 (Sacha Chua's blog)

Since I already do weekly and monthly reviews, the easiest way would be to make those reviews available in a separate feed that people can subscribe to over RSS or e-mail. I’ve been using Feedburner as a way of making my feeds more browser-friendly and as a way to handle e-mail subscriptions. Although I’d been concerned about the long-term longevity of my feeds in case Feedburner shuts down, it turns out that you can set up your own domain name by following the instructions under My Account > MyBrand.

I set up my feeds to use feeds.sachachua.com instead of feeds.feedburner.com. That means that if Feedburner goes away, I just need to change my DNS record to point to my own server and write my own redirect rules. I wish I’d done this earlier! Anyway, if you subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/sachac , please switch to using http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac instead.

With the new feed URLs in place, I created Feedburner feeds for my weekly and monthly reviews. Category feeds are built-in, so all I needed to do was tell Feedburner to handle http://sachachua.com/blog/category/weekly and http://sachachua.com/blog/category/monthly . I customized each feed to include a short message pointing to the other feeds (Optimize > BrowserFriendly), change the URL, and enable e-mail subscriptions (Publicize > Email Subscriptions).

Then I modified my WordPress theme to include links to the new feeds. To make the feeds available from the feed icon in many browsers’ address bars, I added the following code to my <head>…</head>:

<link rel="alternate" 
  type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="Feed (~daily)" 
  href="http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac" />
<link rel="alternate" 
  type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="Weekly reviews" 
  href="http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac-weekly" />
<link rel="alternate" 
  type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="Monthly reviews" 
  href="http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac-monthly" />

Result:

I also added links to the feeds in my sidebar using the Appearance > Widgets > Text widget.

Now, people should be able to easily subscribe to whichever frequency they want. =)

On another note: I was surprised and delighted to find that many people wanted daily updates. Thank you! I’ll try to make my headlines useful so that you can guess right away if you would be interested in something, and we’ll see if I can write weekly review headlines with keywords as well.

If you blog a lot, I hope you find this tip handy!

Read the original or check out the comments on: How I use Feedburner to give people the option of different blog update frequencies (Sacha Chua's blog)

Want just the audio? You can get MP3s or OGG from archive.org.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Emacs Chat: Bastien Guerry (Sacha Chua's blog)

It’s a little intimidating doing something that’s very different from what I usually do, but if I focus on small ways to help, it’s easier. =) And then I can build strength and endurance and knowledge gradually, interleaving challenges with things I can do.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Slice of life: Home improvements (Sacha Chua's blog)

Blog posts

• Weekly review: Week ending May 10, 2013
• Cherry blossoms in High Park, and playing with digital watercolour in Artrage 4
• Stepping sideways into Alternate Universe Sacha
• Learning update May 2013
• From cats to keystrokes
• Poll: How often would you like to receive e-mail updates? Also, quantifying my blog posting history
• Thinking about what I want to do and where I want to go with this blog
• How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners

Accomplished this week

• Business
  • Earn
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 –
    • Sketchnote GIST tech conference
  • Build
    • Practise drawing for two hours
    • Set up virtual box
    • Learn about Vagrant, Chef, and Puppet
    • Add polls to my site
    • Add brief bio to my blog sidebar
    • Learn at Toronto Comic Arts Festival
    • Upgrade my Linode
  • Connect
    • Talk to Matt about what he can help me with
    • Talk to Shawn about sketchnoting FITC
    • Talk to ZoomToLearn about illustration
• Relationships
  • Get together with W-’s family
• Life
  • Collect 50 sentences for my Japanese-English deck
  • Set up my Ankidroid
  • Have dental new patient exam
  • Take notes on “Strategies for Reading Japanese”
  • Fix library renew script

Plans for next week

• Business
  • Earn
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
  • Build
    • [ ] Sketchnote a book
    • [ ] Choose a topic to package
    • [ ] Set up clean development environment for Quantified Awesome
    • [ ] Build interface for goals
  • Connect
    • [ ] Talk to Bastien Guerry about Emacs
• Relationships
  • [X] Help W- with setting up the post
  • [ ] Help out with Linden visit to Hacklab?
• Life
  • [ ] Play some more FF?
  • [ ] Return books to the Japan Foundation library
  • [ ] Plant zucchini, more bitter melon, bok choi, and lettuce

Time review

• Business: 53.3 hours (Earn: 18.6, E1: 15.6, Connect: 5.9, Build: 28.7)
• Discretionary: 30.7 hours (Social: 0.7, Productive: 14.6, Writing: 5.7, Emacs: 4.1)
• Personal: 20.6 hours (Routines: 8.4)
• Sleep: 54.0 hours – average of 7.7 hours per day
• Unpaid work: 9.5 hours (Cook: 5.1, Tidy: 0.5)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Emacs, drawing, and blogging: Week ending May 17, 2013 (Sacha Chua's blog)

You can find the image on Imgur and Flickr too.

Feel free to share, reuse, or modify this under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Enjoy!

Possibly counterintuitive point: It’s good to learn at least the basics of Vim. Despite the perception of a “Emacs vs. Vi” holy war (one of the classic battles in computer science), it makes sense to know both editors especially if you work with people who use Vi a lot. Know enough Vi to find your way around, and then learn how to customize Emacs to fit you to a tee. That way, you’ll avoid the pressure of not being able to work well with your team or your infrastructure, and you’ll have the space to explore Emacs. =) Emacs is totally awesome.

Need help with Emacs? Feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me. I’m often in the #emacs channel on irc.freenode.net , and I also occasionally schedule time to help people one-on-one. Also, the Emacs community (mailing lists, newsgroups, IRC channel) can be wonderful, so definitely reach out to them too. =)

Meta discussion: How can I make this even better? What else would you like me to draw a guide for? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Also, thanks to dash, nicferrier, fledermaus, ijp, hypnocat, Fuco, macrobat, taylanub, axrfnu, Sebboh, thorkill, jave_, jrm, and the rest of #emacs for suggestions and feedback!

Update 2013-05-18: Check out the conversations on Hacker News and Reddit!

Read the original or check out the comments on: How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners (Sacha Chua's blog)

I need to sort out what I’m hesitant about just because it’s unknown or something I’m shy about, and what I’m hesitant about because I want something different.

The things I love the most about this blog are:

• Sharing all these small, varied things I’m learning about, and not worrying about sticking to one topic, making sense, or writing too often
• Having these amazing conversations spanning miles and years (Raymond Zeitler, Clair Ching, Chris League, and a few other people have been commenting for more than five years – I’m so lucky!)
• Bumping into all sorts of amazing people through chance conversations and connections
• Following the thread of our shared curiosity into new questions
• Answering people’s questions with blog posts from when I was trying to figure things out too
• Knowing that no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s something I can learn from and possibly share

There’s a lot of good advice out there for people who want to “monetize their audience” or build a business around blogging, but… maybe I have the space to explore something different. What would this blog look and feel like in another ten years? More of this, I hope, and better. Better at learning, better at sharing, better at organizing, better at connecting.

Sometimes people pay more attention to what they pay for. Hmm, maybe optional payment, or saving payment for individual help? I don’t have a mental hangup about being paid for consulting, because that’s stuff that clearly creates a lot of value for my clients and doesn’t really give me things I can widely share as a way of helping others. I don’t have a hangup about earning a little bit from affiliate sales (since it’s entirely optional, and only the stuff that I like, and I point out non-affiliate links or alternative ways to get things like borrowing books from the library). I’m sort of okay with the idea of making collections of blog posts and sketches and selling them for a nominal fee as an experiment, although I’m tempted to just make them all freely available and then perhaps add a pay-what-you-can system or a donation button.

Anyway, we’re doing well, so I have some space to focus on learning and sharing. =) I want to make the most of that opportunity. Can you help me figure out what would make this better while keeping it real?

Read the original or check out the comments on: Thinking about what I want to do and where I want to go with this blog (Sacha Chua's blog)

(Don’t see the poll? Try viewing this post on my website.)

Aside: I was curious about just how long I’ve been keeping up with this ~1 post a day thing, so I graphed my blog posting history. It turns out that I’ve been pretty consistent, although there were days when I didn’t have anything new posted. I schedule my blog posts using Editorial Calendar and I sometimes send people sneak previews of upcoming posts using the Share a Draft plugin. This lets me smooth out the spikiness of my writing habit into a more predictable publishing schedule.

To generate this graph, I extracted the timestamps of all my published posts with the following SQL query:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(post_date) FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type='post' AND post_status='publish' 
INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/timestamps.txt';

… and then I graphed it with cal-heatmap, removed in-between labels in GIMP, and used Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to hand-write new labels. =)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Poll: How often would you like to receive e-mail updates? Also, quantifying my blog posting history (Sacha Chua's blog)

W- usually works on his computer while watching a movie. I’m tempted to do so as well, but since Neko doesn’t usually seek out company, I figured that it’s fine just spending time with her on my lap. Sometimes I try to type or draw on the side, and that’s not particularly ergonomic.

I could relax and focus on the movie, making it practice for being in the moment. Or I can play around with the possibilities, since not all movies need full attention. Knitting and crochet are out of the question because the cats are crazy about string. I can flip through Japanese flashcards on my phone. I can dust off my Twiddler one-handed keyboard and see about learning that again. I can skim nonfiction books to see which deserve deeper reading.

Hmm… This Twiddler thing looks promising. It’s amazing how much muscle memory can retain after so many years. I think it might be interesting to develop both right- and left-handed facility with this. Who knows, it might even come in handy while sketchnoting, so that I can trigger keyboard shortcuts.

This is me from 2003 or so, with a Twiddler one-handed keyboard and an M1 head-mounted display (on which I looked up stuff in Emacs, naturally). My dad took this picture. =)

It’s funny how things come together: cats, wearable computing, writing, drawing… We’ll see where this goes!

Read the original or check out the comments on: From cats to keystrokes (Sacha Chua's blog)

Here’s my current list:

Read the original or check out the comments on: Learning update May 2013 (Sacha Chua's blog)

My parents were having problems with their company’s recent web hosting migration. No e-mail was getting forwarded to the e-mail accounts that they had set up previously, and the two blogs that were separate from the main site didn’t get transferred either. My mom asked me to help restore the blogs. They needed someone to sort out the email and other system administration issues, so I suggested that she find a local system administrator who can also take care of upgrading WordPress and other sites as needed.

I don’t particularly enjoy system administration. I feel terrible when I make a mistake on my own server, and I don’t want to be on the hook for anyone else’s. I’ve done some system administration work as part of web development, since I was usually the person with the most Linux experience in my teams. Setting up is easy, but maintenance could be fiddly, and keeping up with security updates can be no fun. (I’m looking at you, Rails.) Add to that the time zone differences and the inability to just lean over and fix things, and, well…

So I was feeling conflicted and unfilial about wanting to help my mom but not wanting to commit to being the company sysadmin. The problem needed to be fixed, though, and they probably wouldn’t find a good system administrator in time.

As an experiment, I tried imagining an alternate universe in which I would be comfortable making those changes and being The IT Guy (or Gal, in this case). If I lived near my parents, I would help them, of course. I do that for friends and family here. If I had the routines for managing many sites, then it would be easy to maintain another site and another company. I can imagine that for Alternate Universe Sacha, this kind of work might even be easy and enjoyable.

Having imagined this Alternate Universe Sacha, I tried “stepping sideways” into that role. Sure, I was half a world away, but I could mentally move the house to my hometown. Time zone differences and distance can make it difficult to communicate because it’s hard to tell how busy someone is and when you get the information you need, but it actually worked out well because I worked on it in the evening while people were at work back home. If I stopped worrying about the possibilities of messing things up worse and instead took the same methodical approach that I would use if I had a lot of experience in this (and I guess I do, compared to many people), then it would actually be pretty straightforward. Besides, I reassured myself, everything will turn out all right. Even if I messed things up, family’s still family. For gaining experience, it’s hard to find a more forgiving client.

It turned out to be straightforward, although it did involve a lot of clicking around. E-mail works again, and the blogs are both back up. Not only that, I now have an alternate universe Sacha whom I can think of myself as if I need to do more system administration work. I’m using that idea to make it easier for me set up proper maintenance for my personal sites as well. If I was an experienced and constantly improving system administrator who enjoyed doing this, how would I do this? It’s no substitute for actual experience–I’ll still miss things people learned the hard way–but it helps me reach that point of learning what I need to learn the hard way.

I wonder what alternate universe selves I might play with in the future. Do you use any?

Read the original or check out the comments on: Stepping sideways into Alternate Universe Sacha (Sacha Chua's blog)

High Park has a lot of cherry trees. They bloom for such a short time and it’s hard to predict when peak bloom will be, so it can be difficult to organize a get-together with friends. The park is just a few minutes away by bike, though, so it would be a shame to miss it. This year I guiltlessly went on my own to see the cherry blossoms, enjoy the brief spectacle, and marvel at how busy the park is during those few days.

I like the delicacy of watercolours, but have never quite gotten the hang of doing them with actual water. I fuss about with water and paints, and then I end up with this brownish-grey mess that doesn’t look anywhere near what I wanted. Drawing on my tablet PC is helping me learn to enjoy drawing, so maybe my tablet PC can also help me learn to enjoy painting.

Here’s the rest of what I drew/painted:

I used Artrage 4 because it can mimic brushes and other cool things. I don’t have the level of real-life watercolour experience that would make me frustrated with the tool’s limitations, so I’m learning by trial and error. I want to make etagami – picture letters! Here are some examples:

• etagami-inbox
• kiirakirsi’s pinterest
• Dosankodebbie’s etagami notebook
• Maybe I can send my friends and family digital hand-painted letters, and then eventually move to doing them on paper… Or as print-outs, but that would be cheating, wouldn’t it?

Read the original or check out the comments on: Cherry blossoms in High Park, and playing with digital watercolour in Artrage 4 (Sacha Chua's blog)

• Weekly review: Week ending May 3, 2013
• Thinking about movies
• Sketchnoting: Finding a balance of details and diagrams, and calibrating your writing to time
• Hacking my motivation for workouts
• Quantifying my habit of writing, and things I’ve learned along the way
• Use the weekly review to give yourself permission to do things you want to do
• Monthly review: April 2013

Accomplished this week

• Business
  • Earn
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Do some consulting this Wednesday
    • Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • Discuss curriculum sketches and workshops with M
    • Start drafting a curriculum sketch for M
    • Send invoice
  • Connect
    • Help Cena Mayo with Emacs
    • Join ALU Lisp meeting
    • Attend Toronto Agile Support Group
  • Build
    • Accounting
      • Set up accounting thing
      • Ask accountant about QST
      • Send Interac transfer to accountant
      • Check out and send accountant’s copy of my Quickbooks records
      • Apply accounting changes
      • [#A] Call Revenu Quebec – Waiting for call back
    • System administration
      • Copy my home directory
      • Copy all the files for my website
      • Copy ~/all_dbs.sql
• Relationships
  • Family
    • Upload database
    • Recreate basic WordPress
    • Synchronize e-mails
  • Go to HackLab open house
  • Host tea party
• Life
  • Japanese
    • Register for a Japan Foundation library card
    • Study a Japanese song
    • Learn new Japanese song
    • Read a volume of manga
  • Gardening
    • Buy tomato plants from corner store
    • Plant tomatoes and other vegetables
    • Add compost and topsoil to grass and backyard
  • Set up dentist appointment
  • Game: Make progress toward endgame
  • See cherry blossoms
  • Draw for the fun of it
  • Declutter
  • Fill up my TFSA and RRSP

Plans for next week

• Business
  • Earn
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Tuesday
    • [ ] Earn: Consulting – E1 – Thursday
    • [ ] Talk to Shawn about sketchnoting FITC
    • [ ] Sketchnote GIST tech conference
  • Build
    • [ ] Practise drawing for two hours
    • [ ] Sketchnote a book
    • [ ] Interface for goals
    • [ ] Figure out org2blog publishing using Org 8
    • [ ] Set up virtual box
  • Connect
    • [ ] Talk to Matt about what he can help me with
• Relationships
  • [ ] Get together with W-’s family
• Life
  • [ ] Collect 50 sentences for my Japanese-English deck
  • [ ] Take notes on “Strategies for Reading Japanese”
  • [ ] Plant lavender
  • [ ] Have dental new patient exam

Time review

• Business: 35.8 hours (Earn: 18.2, E1: 18.2, Connect: 3.1, Build: 14.5)
• Discretionary: 43.6 hours (Social: 8.6, Productive: 15.5, Writing: 3.7, Emacs: 2.6, Play: 3.4)
• Personal: 20.9 hours (Routines: 11.3)
• Sleep: 54.1 hours – average of 7.7 hours per day
• Unpaid work: 13.7 hours (Commuting: 1.5, Cook: 4.6, Tidy: 1.9)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Weekly review: Week ending May 10, 2013 (Sacha Chua's blog)

April will be more about slowing down and following up, I think. But this is good.

It took me a while to sort out a good workflow for processing the videos from the Emacs Conference, but I was glad I did so, even though there were a few miscommunications along the way. I got back into the swing of consulting and sketchnoting too, so that was great. =)

It’s almost a third of the way through May already! I’m looking forward to more consulting, sketchnoting, and illustrating. The weather’s warmed up, so friends are starting to organize more get-togethers. Then there’s planting the front and back garden, studying Japanese (my goal for May: 500 lines in my spaced-repetition deck), and drawing some more… May’s shaping up to be terrific.

• Emacs
  • Brainstorming ways to help build the Emacs community
  • Emacs Conference 2013 Sketchnotes (also, PDF!)
  • Emacs Conference 2013 videos
  • Emacs chat intro
  • How to present using Org-mode in Emacs
• Improvement
  • Analyzing my London trip decisions: What worked well? What can I improve?
  • Understanding my procrastination
  • Things I’m learning about sharing other people’s knowledge, or why you should show me what you’ve been meaning to teach others
  • Things I learned from sketchnoting the FITC design conference
  • Practice Perfect: Calling your shots
• Drawing
  • Visual book review: The Culture Blueprint (Robert Richman)
  • How I read books and do visual book reviews
  • How I use Evernote to support my sketchnoting practice
• Life
  • Time enough for friends
  • Towards wonderful new normals
  • Building bridges to geekiness
  • Weekend cooking
  • Impatient for spring
  • Crossing worlds
  • Squishing my excuses: idea edition
  • Why and how I’m (re)learning Japanese
  • Sunday
  • How I got started in investing
• Quantified Self
  • Quantified Self: a year of grocery data
• Reviews
  • Weekly review: Week ending March 29, 2013
  • Weekly review: Week ending April 5, 2013
  • Weekly review: Week ending April 12, 2013
  • Weekly review: Week ending April 19, 2013
  • Weekly review: Week ending April 26, 2013
  • Monthly review: March 2013

Read the original or check out the comments on: Monthly review: April 2013 (Sacha Chua's blog)

I also use the weekly review to make sure I spend time on things that I want to do. It’s easy to forget that in the endless ping-pong game of responding to other people’s requests, or to scatter your attention among lots of interests and not feel like you’re making progress in any particular one. Give yourself permission to work on something you want to do, and carve out space for it in your to-do list or calendar. I divide my to-do list into three categories: work, relationships, and life. The work category is easy to fill. Relationships take a little more thought, but other people make it easy by asking. Life, on the other hand—the skills I want to develop, the hobbies I want to explore—that requires me to step up and choose to do something instead of having my time filled by things that other people have chosen for me.

Lots of things are interesting, but I try to pick one or two things to focus on during each week. For example, I’ve been focusing on planting the garden and studying Japanese. I might explore other ideas during the week, but it’s good to make slow and steady progress in my focus areas.

I make that space by managing my commitments. It’s easy to get used to a hectic, time-starved status quo, and it’s gratifying as well—busy-ness helps you feel valued. For me, “normal life” includes time to breathe and time to play. I avoid being busy. When I notice I’m starting to make mistakes because my calendar is too full, I slow down and see what I can say no to.

I add “want-to”s to my to-do list instead of just keeping it to the “must-do”s, and I remove or change other tasks until things look like they’ll fit. It makes reviewing and planning more fun, and it gives me something to look forward to during the week.

Might be something that can help you establish that habit. =) Happy to hear your thoughts and to read your weekly reviews!

Related: On the practice of a weekly review

Read the original or check out the comments on: Use the weekly review to give yourself permission to do things you want to do (Sacha Chua's blog)

Since I schedule my blog posts, my blogging history doesn’t give me useful data. Fortunately, I can get that data from my time-tracking. Here’s a graph showing how much time I spent writing between January 2012 and April 2013, with the greenest areas for days of about 4 hours of writing. In total, I spent 346 hours writing, for an average of 0.7 hours per day or 5 hours a week. I wrote during 254 out of 486 days (58% of the days), or roughly every other day.

My longest streak of non-writing was 8 days of not writing (September 2012, when I was on a trip with my family). My longest streak of continuous writing was 12 days of writing every day (June 2012).

I usually start writing between 7 PM to 9 PM (after dinner), but I also write at other times. With the more flexible schedule I get to have these days, I go on a writing sprint whenever I want to.

One of these days, I should put together a graph that takes into account how long I spend writing, too.

It turns out that I write a lot, although it doesn’t feel that way looking at it one day at a time. In 2012, I wrote around 133,000 words for my blog. This is slightly more than the number of words in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but nowhere near as awesome. I clocked 268 hours for writing during that year, so that works out to a really low 8 words per minute. I already know that the bottleneck is my brain, not my typing speed, though. =) The time includes writing non-blog stuff as well as discarded posts, but hey, it still gives me a good general idea.

Anyway, some quick non-data thoughts on what Leo said about the benefits of writing, and what I want to add:

• “Writing helps you reflect on your life and changes you’re making.” I do this a lot with my blog – looking backward to review decisions, looking forward to explore the possibilities. Not only is writing a good excuse to ask yourself these questions, but having a record of your reflections, reasons, assumptions, and predictions also helps you make better choices.
• “Writing clarifies your thinking.” It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand something if it’s just inside your head. Once you try to explain it to other people, though, you’ll quickly find gaps. Writing is one of my ways of thinking out loud. My thoughts are fuzzy and elusive until I sit down and write a blog post, a note, a list, or draw a mindmap or a sketchnote. I figured that it’s okay to be wrong in public from time to time, and it’s better than never knowing about mistakes.
• “Writing regularly makes you better at writing.” I suspect that rewriting is an even more useful technique for better writing. I don’t do as much rewriting and editing as I probably should, although I often revisit and write about old topics based on new questions or ideas. That said, writing is great for practising organizing your thoughts and figuring out how to communicate them, and regular blogging is a great way to experiment with different techniques.
• “Writing for an audience (even if the audience is just one person) helps you to think from the perspective of the audience.” I like writing for myself, and I also like writing for other people. It’s fun to answer questions or to build on other people’s thoughts.
• “Writing persuasively — to convince others of your point of view — helps you to get better at persuading people to change their minds.” I’ve mostly given up on persuading people to change their minds, having read quite a few argument/rhetoric/persuasion books that made a lot of sense to me. Now I go for the low-hanging fruit of sharing tips and ideas for people who’ve already decided, and helping illuminate the possibilities for the people who are on the fence. =) Still, practice in examining and organizing my thoughts helps a lot when it comes to making better decisions or helping other people with theirs.
• “Writing daily forces you to come up with new ideas regularly, and so that forces you to solve the very important problem of where to get ideas.” Since I write about whatever I’m learning about, writing encourages me to keep learning. I don’t promise a particular set of topics, though, so I don’t feel that pressure to keep coming up with good material. Besides, there’s so much to learn and share!
• “Writing regularly online helps you to build an audience who is interested in what you have to share, and how you can help them.” This is actually pretty darn awesome. Connecting without small talk, yay! =)

Writing is well worth the time for me. I wonder what would happen if I doubled the time I spent on writing, maybe splitting the extra time between research and editing… Hmm.

Is writing worth it for you, too? What’s your experience like? How would you increase its benefits?

zenhabits: Why You Should Write Daily

Read the original or check out the comments on: Quantifying my habit of writing, and things I’ve learned along the way (Sacha Chua's blog)

There aren’t many things in my life that need this kind of extra motivation. Sometimes I need to use extra motivation in order to start giving a good presentation if I’m not feeling up to par, but it’s a scheduled commitment, so that helps me get going. Once I’m in the flow, crowd energy usually leaves me buzzing. Dealing with system administration issues and embarrassing mistakes is tough, but it is what it is, so I just have to knuckle down and do it. It’s just optional tough things that need this kind of external motivation-hacking, like exercising or shopping for clothes. (Yes, I’m weird.) There’s clearing my inbox, which I usually get around to doing once a week or so. Business mail gets faster replies, but I’m not super-responsive, and I think that’s actually okay with my priorities.

I have six sessions left on my 10-session pass (which is my second), and I plan to go once a week with W-. (Maybe even twice, if I can work up to it – I used to before I sprained my ankle.) I wonder how much I can hack my motivation, and if I can get to the point of wanting to get another 10-session pass. In that time, I’m probably not going to be able to enjoy the feeling of keeping up properly with the rest of the class. I usually modifying all the exercises so that I can do them without getting so tired that I might injure myself. But I can increase my enjoyment of being able to check off one more session (maybe with a nice big visual reminder?), especially combined with biking to and from the gym. I can line up treats for myself (such as books or stretching), and then focus on tying the positive feelings back to the exercise. I can also look for other forms of exercise that I might enjoy. Maybe lifting small weights or hula-hooping while playing games? <laugh>

Lifehack.org: How to Trick Yourself into Loving Your Workout

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My sketchnoting style is more information-dense and more linear/column-based than many other sketchnote styles I’ve seen. You can compare my recent sketchnotes with the ones on Sketchnote Army or the Flickr Sketchnotes pool to get a sense of how they’re different. I take information-dense sketchnotes because I want to remember and I don’t trust my memory. If I want to create a summary later on, I can do that from my sketchnotes, but it’s difficult to go the other way around. I’ve learned not to trust that events will have video, that I’ll have the patience to sit through a recording, or that slides will make sense after a quick flip-through. My notes are all I can rely on if I want to make sure that the time I spend listening to a talk doesn’t just evaporate into forgetfulness. =) So even if my hand cramps a little after sketchnoting a full-day conference with few breaks (hooray for quick finger exercises and stretches), it’s worth it because I come away with much more and I can remember a lot.

I paraphrase a lot because I want to make ideas more concise, particularly when it comes to Q&A sessions where people haven’t rehearsed what they want to say.

I’ve thought about writing less and drawing more, but I’m actually pretty happy with where I am. Summarization comes afterwards, when I know what’s important to me. Most presentations do very little sign-posting of what they’re going to cover and how important each part is, and even the ones that do can sometimes go on interesting tangens. When I’m sketchnoting a presentation, I don’t want to prematurely lock into the structure or metaphor I think the speaker has (even if they say they’re going to talk about 7 things, for example). That takes me out of the moment and makes me second-guess myself when the speaker says something interesting that doesn’t fit into the pattern I want to draw. A column-based layout may feel less creative, but it frees me up to listen.

I might go back and move things around a little during the gaps in the talk, but I generally don’t go back and reorganize everything. I want to publish things as quickly as possible. My target is to publish the sketchnotes within 10 minutes after the talk ends, and I usually do. It’s a great way to delight people over social media.

I write simple letters on a plain white background. My images and text tend to be separated by whitespace so that I can move things around as needed. I draw uncomplicated figures. I generally use one or two accent colours and maybe a lighter shade for highlighting or depth. Again, I’m optimizing for speed and attention. I’ve thought about going back and revising some of my sketchnotes to be more visually engaging, but then there’s so much new material that would be interesting to draw instead. Besides, I don’t want to give people the impression that that kind of detail or layout is what they’ll get from me when live sketchnoting. I really like being done with a sketchnote shortly after a talk. This also means I don’t have to worry too much about following up and I don’t have to juggle multiple ongoing projects. I do occasionally revise sketches and help people turn them into proper illustrations for reuse, but that would definitely be a paid gig. =)

I draw over a light dot grid, and that helps me fill a page at a more consistent rate. I know that if there’s an hour-long talk, I can draw letters at my normal size. If it’s a short non-interactive talk like an Ignite presentation or a TED talk, I might put several talks on one page, or I might increase the size and be a little looser with the layout. As I listen, I adjust my writing depending on the rate that people are speaking. If they speak slowly or they repeat themselves a lot, I’ll draw more images. If they speak quickly, I’ll try to capture as much as I can, and then go back and add highlights and some icons afterwards. Because I work digitally, I can remove the grid before publishing the image.

Working digitally makes it easy for me to compensate for different talk densities. If a speaker ended up saying less than I expected, I can rearrange the text and images around to look more balanced or I can crop the image at the appropriate point. If a speaker says more, it’s easy to add another layer and save a separate image. Autodesk Sketchbook Pro isn’t a vector program, so enlarging things doesn’t work particularly well, but I can move around or reduce parts of my image if I need to squeeze in some more information.

Other sketchnoters have great tips, too. Some people write down just the first few letters of a word or phrase, and then go back and fill the rest when there’s time. The Bikablo books encourage you to practise drawing key icons the same way each time, so that you can quickly sketch the first couple of strokes to remind you of what to draw. The Sketchnote Handbook talks about using your audio memory to hold on to thoughts as you draw. These tips work for me, too, and I’m getting the hang of using them. Hope they work for you too!

One of the interesting things about sketchnoting is that now I have a better sense of how much space there is in most presentations and conversations. It’s like seeing key words light up and thinking, “Oh, I want to capture that,” and also seeing the gaps where you can write or draw. You develop a sense of how much you can squeeze into each gap. If you find that you’re picking up more keywords than you have the time to capture, you can increase your thresholds for interestingness or reduce the complexity of your capture.

You can develop this sense of timing by practising with talks of specific lengths. For example, if you go to a lot of 1-hour talks, you’ll get a sense of how much people typically cover in an hour. Every so often, it’s good to practise with something that’s really information-dense: a well-written nonfiction book, an intermediate- or advanced-level talk. Like the way you can improve your speed-reading performance by occasionally reading at a rate faster than you can comprehend, it’s good to scramble in sketchnoting from time to time.

Hope that helps!

Cheryl Lowry: “Drawing is easy. Thinking is hard.”

Read the original or check out the comments on: Sketchnoting: Finding a balance of details and diagrams, and calibrating your writing to time (Sacha Chua's blog)