Context of my involvement

For the past few years, I’ve been working behind the scenes, supporting FLOCK as they created a small, intimate conference series with minimal resources and a tiny team. Despite experience speaking at a few conferences earlier in my career, I never realized all that goes into conference planning and hosting. Since working with FLOCK, I’ve learned a lot about what goes into pulling off events like these. So I thought I’d share my experience.

So many hats to wear

As is typical with most small-team companies, each person wears multiple hats. Once you realize something needs to be done, you’re often the one who needs to figure out how to get it done.

The two cofounders typically do all the heavy lifting for each of the events they plan, market, and host. So far, they have 1) created themes, 2) found, vetted, and invited speakers, 3) courted sponsors, 4) negotiated venues, 5) planned catering, 6) booked staff and speaker travel, and 7) physically hosted and MCed every event. There’s so much more they do for each event, and I don’t even know all the moving parts.

As you’d expect, I took on all design and creative tasks. I crafted the FLOCK logo, expanded the identity system, customized email templates, and designed and built a website to promote events and sell tickets. All of these have evolved since their first iterations five years ago.

In addition to creative tasks, businesses need to tackle lots of other basic responsibilities. I stepped in to form the LLC (using Stripe Atlas), register the business, set up bank and email accounts, manage finances (QBO), configure servers, fight my way through Facebook and Google ad UIs, and source and set up all the other systems and services FLOCK uses to support and grow the business. I also play tech support and troubleshoot various issues as we encounter them.

Event-specific design

Designing for a conference meant adding a few more unique components. The biggest one was selling and managing tickets, and collecting information for each attendee. When FLOCK started in 2018, we opted for the simplicity of Eventbrite, embedding its registration flow into each of our event pages.

A few years in, we wanted more control over ticket sales, the registration flow, and the data we collected from attendees. I have plenty of experience customizing WordPress and WooCommerce. But I needed help with the logistics of selling and managing event tickets. I knew about The Events Calendar, a heavy-hitter in the WordPress event plugin space. After some advanced customization of templates and code from TEC’s Event Tickets plugin, we were able to build out FLOCK’s event pages and registration flow as we wanted them to be.

Beyond ticket sales, we use Airtable to manage event data, because we like how easy it is to customize the views and data types. Zapier pushes data from WordPress to Airtable. We use a badge printing service (now under Eventgroove) to print attendee badges on a synthetic no-tear film.

Since the schedule often includes last-minute changes, schedule cards that go in attendee bags are printed only a week in advance. UPrinting handles our schedule cards and all of the printed material on a tight timeframe.

One of my challenges has been sourcing reliable vendors to produce custom notebooks, pens, bags, and other swag items on a tight budget. Quality and efficiency have been hard to guarantee. In our first couple years, I used Promotique (now under Vistaprint).

I sourced our latest pens and bags from vendors on Alibaba for cost reasons. I’m not sure I’d recommend doing that again, as language and time zone barriers made it challenging to solve issues that arose. Our first batch of pens got lost. And our bags almost didn’t show up in time, despite ordering them six months in advance.

Missing pieces

I’m not naive to think that our tiny team covers everything we could do for these events. I only attend a fraction of the events FLOCK hosts. So I don’t always see or notice what might seem missing from a creative or experience perspective.

This last event in a large Disney convention center was a stark reminder that we were missing branded signage outside the doors to help attendees find the right room and welcome them to it. Signage also would have been another opportunity to present our major sponsor logos.

I’m now filled with first-hand knowledge and experience that conference planning, marketing, and hosting takes a lot of work. It’s totally possible — just hard — to do with a small team. I also know how hard it is to make events profitable without a few large-pocket sponsors, especially for small events like these.

If you have tips or experience to share, or have questions for me about planning or designing a conference, reach out here or on my social channels (linked in the footer).

The post Designing a conference appeared first on Stopdesign.

Whether you joined this year, or whether you’re OG. It wasn’t all good, and there have been more than enough bad apples trying to spoil the barrel.

This thread focuses on the good, the helpful, the curious, and the wondrous. The additive, rather than the subtractive. The reasons we came here to try it out, and the the reasons we stayed.

Thanks for making Twitter what it became, what it has been. For inspiring us. For sharing what you worked on, and where you worked on it. For the peeks behind the curtains. For the mountains and the valleys.

Thanks for the introductions, the conversations, the questions, and the answers. For teaching us about brevity, prodding us to be thoughtful, reminding us to be more inclusive, asking us to be generous, encouraging us to be deliberate.

Thanks for letting us know when someone we loved was no longer here. And when new humans to be loved were finally here. When new leaders were chosen, and when regimes fell. When a plane landed in the Hudson. When, yes indeed, that was an earthquake.

Thanks for the build-ups, and the tear-downs. For the wonder-ifs, the how-tos, the fly-overs and the walk-throughs. For the wins and the losses. For the laughs and the tears.

Most of all, thanks for being here, for coming back, over and over, and sharing everything about you for all of us to see, learn from, understand more, participate in, and relate to. Thanks for all you contributed. Twitter made it possible. You made it worthwhile.

Originally posted as this thread on Twitter

The post Thank you, Twitter appeared first on Stopdesign.

A few years back, I added the redesign date to my calendar to help mark the passing of time. Each year, just as baseball’s Postseason ignites in early October, I get a reminder that takes me back to the early days of the web, even before the dot-com craze. It was a different era, marked by experimentation, exploration, and curiosity.

A decade ago, I wrote “Wired.com: Ten years later” looking back at the redesign and how far we had come since then. Another 10 years later, the redesign is now 20 years in the past, and long gone. Replaced by multiple designs many times over. Twenty years is so much time. And with internet years being like dog years, the early era of the web feels like another lifetime ago.

The World’s Wild Web

When Wired launched HotWired (its online sibling) in 1994, the World Wide Web was still a wild world filled with unknown territory and unfamiliar terrain. Wired, the magazine, kept us connected to new trends in the tech industry. Wired News kept us updated on the tech in between monthly issues of Wired.

Wired was known for its avant-garde approach to design. The design (in print and on screen) felt inspired by the techno-pumping raves its designers had just left several hours before coming into the office. Not all designs were successful or even legible. But each design introduced us to new ideas, people, and companies that were shaping our future. Every one of us familiar with Wired expected it to keep us on the cutting edge. To do so, it not only had to cover the edge, it had to *be* the edge.

Wired’s design and aesthetic were intentionally experimental. Partially out of preference, mostly out of necessity. Wired carved its own paths, inventing many of the patterns, interactions, and systems it wanted to try, because no one else had created them yet. That Wired.com was the first large commercial site to launch a standards-based table-free design is obvious in hindsight now. It was expected to practice what it preached, living on the edge of the industry it chronicled.

Gravity of the Status Quo

Despite those expectations, the 2002 redesign of Wired.com almost didn’t happen. At least, not as the standards-embracing, table-free, CSS-for-layout example we know it as today. We were already pretty far along in the redesign process. We had no plans to do anything different than the status quo at the time. The site was undergoing a visual and structural update, necessitated by updated feature and advertising requirements.

Design and Engineering at Wired Digital back then were still very divided in terms of domain and responsibility. There was little overlap, and often not very much communication between the two. Designers created their initial designs (usually in Photoshop, occasionally in Dreamweaver, if I remember right), then shared them with Engineers, who then wrote the code to recreate those designs.

In HotWired’s early days, many of the network’s pages were coded by hand as static HTML. A simple update to the navigation meant using a text editor’s search/replace function across hundreds of files. But as the engineering team progressed, they took advantage of server-side includes for common components, and crude frameworks that could be considered early content management systems began to emerge.

Eventually, we migrated some of the bigger sites like Wired News over to Vignette (one of the first big, commercial content management systems). A CMS like Vignette meant more power to handle increasing scale and variability. It also meant more abstracted, complex code, and a need for greater specialization of roles among engineers. Using Vignette meant some loss of control in the exact output of final HTML. Some of that output was controlled deep within the layers of abstraction Vignette offered (as a feature), and took a lot of work to alter or control to a finer degree.

Throughout our work on the redesign, I had been reading articles on sites like alistapart.com. I consumed and deconstructed examples from Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, and Molly Holzschlag. I had worked for years alongside Jeff Veen. I was working at cafes with Tantek Çelik and Matt Mullenweg. I kept seeing examples and rationale for adopting web standards the way they were intended to be used. I read posts about accessibility, semantics, proper nesting of front-end code, microformats, the power of CSS, and dropping tables and spacer gifs as a crutch for supporting layout and design features.

As I looked at the code we were planning to use for the new design of Wired.com, there was a huge disconnect between what we were using, and the forward-thinking approaches I kept reading about. I knew better. We weren’t pushing the edge of technology; we were lazily falling into the gravity of the status quo. The larger a company gets, the harder it is to resist that gravity and actively work against it. Our team at Wired was falling into the same rut.

Such an approach didn’t feel very wired. It was the opposite of wired. Wired’s editors used a name for outdated, uninspired tech: tired. Our team needed a jolt to wake us up. To remind us that Wired’s whole purpose was to find the edge.

Owning the Unknown

Doing something for the first time can be nerve-wracking. There’s no familiarity to ground your expectations. Being the first one to try a new thing for the first time can be even more debilitating. There’s no one to look to who can tell you what it will be like. What are all the risks? How much benefit is there? What’s the worst-case scenario? If you jump, where’s the bottom? History is full of examples where people took a risk and made the leap into the unknown. They were driven by curiosity and a belief that there must be a better, different way, despite not fully knowing what the outcome might be.

Despite not knowing that outcome, we had to change course with the redesign. We had to resist the gravity and push forward into the unknown. Not only was it the Wired thing to do, I fundamentally believed it was the right thing to do. So I stayed at the office late into several nights, reworking our front end code, separating content from design, and using what I knew to write XHTML and CSS as I knew it should be.

Mid-way through rewriting the code, I pitched the change in approach to the engineers, to my manager, and to the producer of Wired News. Everyone tried to predict potential advantages and asked about the risks. The engineers couldn’t guarantee how much control we’d have over the final output of XHTML, but were willing to try to reign in the output. My manager asked how shifting would impact our schedule, and if/how advertising would be impacted. The producer wanted to know the impact the change would make on the editorial team workflow, and what we would do with browsers that didn’t yet support some of the new code.

We had some answers, but we had even more unanswerable questions. We ultimately trusted instincts and agreed it was worth the time and effort to push forward with the new approach into the unknown, despite not having any other examples from which to learn. The ethos of experimentation and pushing to the edge drove all of us to take more risks. Those risks didn’t always work out. But we often discovered new possibilities, and we learned from every experimental attempt.

In this case, the outcome of the Wired.com redesign:

1. reduced the front-end markup size by over half (from 48KB down to 23KB)
2. dropped from 24 nested tables that controlled layout down to only 1 table that appropriately rendered financial market data
3. dramatically improved accessibility of the site for users of assistive technology
4. simplified the markup the CMS needed to support
5. limited most design changes to simple CSS updates

When I look back at Wired.com then, I see how much design on the web has evolved. We crammed so much in the top of the page (those early ad banners!). We had limited options for fonts (Arial, Verdana, Times), text was pretty small (11px Verdana!), and often made with images (remember Silkscreen?), icons and images were pixelated and blurry. But I was proud of what we achieved with that design. And I liked how easy it was to completely change color schemes on a daily basis because of the use of CSS.

With the exception of the accessibility improvement in #3, the rest of the outcomes above are debatable how relevant they are today. It’s hard for most of us to imagine a commercial web page measuring less than 50KB now. (Some of the site-wide CSS files I write now are more than 50KB alone.) We’ve come so far since this redesign in 2002. We no longer trip ourselves up trying to fit everything above an imaginable fold. Designs respond to various screen sizes. Text is comfortably larger and screens display at a much higher resolution. We tend to give everything more breathing room.

More importantly, the web now supports an unimaginable amount of tasks, purposes, and messaging, all viewable, consumable, and interactive on a multitude of devices of varying sizes and capabilities. Every one of those advancements since the early days was the result of someone or some company taking a risk and trying something new. Something where they didn’t entirely know what the outcome would be, or how well it would be accepted in the marketplace. They still took the risk, owned the unknown, and pushed us all forward by doing so.

Wired’s 2002 redesign was a just small nudge in the bigger push forward to evolve the web’s purpose and utility.

The post Wired.com: 20 years later appeared first on Stopdesign.

That it hasn’t (yet) been holistically and easily describable in a single phrase is part of the beauty of Twitter to me. It does so many things for so many people. Whatever adjective or metaphor used, I think of Twitter as a service. Because that’s how I’ve always seen it. It’s a service driven by the people and operated for the people. And it is literally in service to people around the globe.

Twitter is people-powered. It has always been about people. The way people connect to each other, they way they converse and interact, what people share, what they’re doing, what they’re thinking… and what they love. Twitter is unique and wonderful not because of the service itself, but because of the people who use it, and how they use it.

That over 500 million tweets get pushed out each day is a technical marvel. But so much more amazing are the stories of how Twitter has been (and continues to be) used. I’m enamoured and fascinated with these stories that continuously unfold on Twitter. Yet none of them would happen without the people who unite together around particular moments of time, big or small, and share those moments with their friends, their followers, and the world.

A series of moments

Small moments on Twitter are fascinating, because they reveal tiny bits about the people who share them, and in aggregate, reveal entire patterns of human behavior and emotion. Whether it’s the mundane update about what someone had for breakfast, or that they’re late for school, or that they had toilet paper stuck to their shoe for an hour before a friend pointed it out… Those small moments are real, humanizing, and pings to the world that a person is alive, is functioning, and is a normal human being.

Big moments on Twitter are also fascinating, either as a participant, or as a passive observer. Celebrations, sports matchups, popular entertainment, or newsworthy events bring massive amounts of people together. Twitter sees huge spikes in activity as people share in those moments together. Through Twitter, these moments offer the reinforcement that even if you’re watching an event alone, you’re not alone in experiencing it. In these moments, we share in the roar of the crowd in moments of victory, we unite in hope or heartbreak in moments of tragedy, and we make and record history together.

I love how people can gain a new voice with Twitter. It has given me a louder and farther-reaching voice than I ever thought possible. And while I can only physically be in one place at one time, I love how Twitter distributes my awareness of what’s going on nearby or far away. At any moment, I can instantly know what’s going on in the next room, in the next town, or in a country halfway around the world.

My history with you

I joined Twitter, the service, two years before I interviewed at and joined Twitter, the company. So I was familiar with the ins and outs of the product before I joined the team. When the idea of leading design at Twitter was first pitched to me, my thought was, “What would a designer do with 140-character text messages?” That’s basically what I knew it to be. But once I got to speak with @ev, @biz, @goldman, @gregpass, and @bs, I realized the vision for Twitter was much bigger than simple character-constrained status updates. And that it had the potential to become something big and meaningful within the world. With those realizations burning in my mind, I had no doubts that I wanted to help shape what Twitter could become. Even though at the time, it felt like I was joining the company “late in the game,” almost three years after the original idea of twttr had hatched.

As a Twitter user, I have witnessed this simple communications tool used to help unlock long-locked doors, to promote cultural awareness and sensitivity, to tear down walls of oppression, to alter the way businesses attend and respond to customers, to connect people in ways never before thought possible, and to democratize the creation and flow of information around the world. I have met and interacted with so many incredible people because of Twitter. And I’ve learned more than I ever thought possible from simply observing and occasionally participating in the conversations that unfold here.

As a Twitter employee, I have witnessed a growing family of co-workers who care deeply about their craft, their teammates, the integrity and purpose of the service, and the people around the world that Twitter serves. One of Twitter’s core values for the past several years has been, “Grow our business in a way that makes us proud.” I couldn’t be more proud of the way Twitter as a company has conducted itself as its presence and impact around the world has grown. I have seen this core value demonstrated over and over and over again through the tireless work of my colleagues, and their desire to always do right by the very people who use, depend on, and are delighted by the service every day.

My, how you’ve grown

Fast forward to today. This day. My last as an employee of Twitter. But far from my last as an active participant in this global ecosystem. It’s been an honor to serve as Twitter’s creative director for the past five years. To join at what I now see as a relatively early time period. To form and grow a design team and establish the principles on which it operated. To attract and hire and get to work with people more talented than me. And to see a team, a company, a service, and millions of people using it grow into the beautiful wonder that Twitter is today. This. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And I still can’t believe how fortunate I am that it was offered to me.

It’s a cliché in our tech industry that companies and founders start with a vision that includes the grandiose notion of changing the world. What Twitter has enabled, is enabling, and will continue to enable is nothing short of just that. As Biz says, Twitter is not a triumph of technology, it is a triumph of humanity. It all comes back to people like you and me who use the service, and what we continue to do with it. There is no other platform that offers what Twitter offers, and there is no other service that continuously reveals the collective pulse of our planet.

Twitter, the product, has a ton of momentum behind it. The teams at Twitter are in great shape, and the people on these teams are thinking of and executing on some of the best ideas I’ve seen in my time here. So it’s a good time for me to call my leg of the journey complete. To step out of the way. To let go of something I love so dearly. And to let it thrive and grow into something even bigger.

Thank you, Twitter, for allowing me to help guide you for a small portion of your big and wondrous journey. There’s a great distance ahead of you. And you’ve only just begun.

Yours,
@stop

The post A love letter to Twitter appeared first on Stopdesign.

What we’ve been up to

We post samples of recent work on our Dribbble account. We’ve started posting photos of the studio and the team on 500px. (Some are embedded here in this post.) And, of course, we tweet too, from our team account, and all our personal accounts. Want to know more? Ask me or anyone on the team anytime. Here’s a tip: the service on which we all work makes us all easily contactable. We’re a pretty open bunch, and we’ll answer any questions as openly and honestly as we can.

A perspective on Twitter and @design

Next March, it will be four years that I’ve been working with Twitter, leading and directing the Design team. People ask me all the time if I still like it. My honest answer: I love it now more than I did when I started. Anyone I work with can confirm that.

It’s not that I don’t have fond memories of my early days at Twitter. I do — those first couple years were really good. The people I worked with then, the experiences we had together, and the challenges we faced on a regular basis as a small company were inspiring. But we have a sizable team now, and exponentially more people using the product every single day.

Design has multiple researchers who help us understand how people think about and use the product. We have prototypers and devs who help us rapidly build out and gut-check experiences. And we have a great blend of experience designers who think through and work on problems from concept through to production. We can finally get ahead of big design problems and attack them more strategically.

Now, more than ever, our team is really humming, and it’s finding a great groove. We’re fortunate that the team is filled with smart, funny, talented folks who care passionately about Twitter and the product experience. There’s a great, positive energy in the design studio, and it’s contagious.

We recently added Mike Davidson as our VP of Design. I’ve known and respected Mike for ten years, but I’ve never had the chance to work with him directly until now. I’m really happy he’s here to help fight for and defend great design throughout the company, and create the space for Design to push and innovate on Twitter’s experience.

Add to this the impact that Twitter has had and is having all over the world. Connecting people, some who have never met. A pulse of the news, events, and human perspective as it’s unfolding. Distributing awareness of what’s happening in the next room, the next neighborhood over, or around the other side of the world. This free exchange of information is changing the world, and I don’t state that lightly. I’m humbled that I get the opportunity to contribute to the Twitter experience on a daily basis.

We’re just getting started

Built up over the past few years, we’ve seen an incredible evolution of Twitter. It’s a service that many of us value on a daily basis. But our team’s work is not even close to being done. In many ways, we’re just getting started. While Twitter gets tons of exposure and coverage, there’s so much work to do to make it simpler, easier to understand and use right away, and a more beautiful and consistently delightful experience.

Be one of the team members in these shots. Come help us with some of the most interesting challenges a designer can face today. And contribute to a world-changing service whose impact has only just begun. Join the flock.

The post Growing Twitter Design appeared first on Stopdesign.

The redesign of Wired News in 2002 marked the first time a large, well-known, daily-content publisher had dropped tables for layout, and embraced the separation of markup and style in a rather new (at the time) approach to web design. Several prominent blogs, and niche content sites (zeldman.com, meyerweb.com, alistapart.com) had broken ground, and were already using and evangelizing a greater adoption of Web Standards.

Halfway through the redesign process, I started plotting how Wired could support the standards movement not just by publishing stories about it, but by adopting it outright. If pure, valid XHTML to mark up the content and simple CSS for layout and style was enough for other sites, it should work for Wired too. I contacted Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer to let them know what we were up to. Their excitement over the prospect of Wired jumping on board hinted that this might be a big deal. We dove in head first, and never looked back. Not long after Wired took that leap, many other large, well-known sites and companies began following suit.

I note the tenth anniversary of this redesign, not because of what it was then, but because of how far we’ve come since then, and everything that has been set in motion since. Ten years is a good chunk of time to take note of progress, large and small. Some folks say common tools like HTML and CSS haven’t evolved much. But that misses the point of everything we’ve been able to do and experience because of our use and adoption of them.

Governments, news organizations, retailers, and individuals all around the world use our inter-connectedness in dramatically different ways, compared with ten years ago. Shopping, storing, organizing, and interacting online is now second nature to a massive global population. And increasingly, we’re doing all of this with small devices that fit in a single hand or a pocket.

As I look back on the past ten years, I can easily see how the path of my career, interests, friends, and professional connections were partially shaped by a little redesign in 2002 (now insignificant by today’s standards). A cascade of events and opportunities followed that point in history for me. It was just a matter of spotting them, and jumping on a few.

Where were you ten years ago? What were you doing, and what was your craft like then? Who do you know now that you didn’t know then? What brought you to where you are today? It’s fascinating to think of the journey from the events of ten years ago, all the way up to today. Just think of the next ten years…

The post Wired.com: Ten years later appeared first on Stopdesign.

Starting today you’ll begin to notice a simplified Twitter bird. From now on, this bird will be the universally recognizable symbol of Twitter. (Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter.) There’s no longer a need for text, bubbled typefaces, or a lowercase “t” to represent Twitter.

Our new bird grows out of love for ornithology, design within creative constraints, and simple geometry. This bird is crafted purely from three sets of overlapping circles — similar to how your networks, interests and ideas connect and intersect with peers and friends. Whether soaring high above the earth to take in a broad view, or flocking with other birds to achieve a common purpose, a bird in flight is the ultimate representation of freedom, hope and limitless possibility.

To learn more about our new trademark, visit the Twitter brand resources page. You’ll find updated guidelines, new image downloads — everything you need to start using it immediately.

Thank you for flying with us.

Doug Bowman, Creative Director (@stop)

Reposted from the Twitter blog

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And, although I’m confident that I will always think my daughter is The Greatest Thing in the Universe, I’m also all too aware that this feeling will not always be reciprocated in quite that same way or with quite that same enthusiasm that we both enjoy right now.

She won’t always run to my bed in footie jammies.

I’ll only get that particularly noisy and personalized wake-up call for a little while. And, I only get a shot at it once a day. At almost exactly 6:00 AM Pacific Time.

Then one day? I won’t get it any more. It will be gone.

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Those of you who saw my talks at either Future of Web Design in NYC, or at Webstock in Wellington may remember a segment where I urged delivering value as quickly as possible. In that segment, I compared the act of taking and sharing a photo with Hipstamatic, and the same in Instagram. I posited that one of the biggest reasons for Instagram’s runaway success is how quickly you can snap a photo, apply a filter, and share it with the world. It delivers value in three short steps, and it’s fun.

You have to explain everything you do, and people have to understand it, within seconds. […] In the mobile context, you need to explain what you do in 30 seconds or less because people move on to the next shiny object. There are so many apps and people are vying for your attention on the go. It’s the one context in which you’ve got lots and lots of other stuff going on. You’re not sitting in front of a computer; you’re at a bus stop or in a meeting.

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In December, he [Ari Ne’eman] was nominated by President Obama to the National Council on Disability (NCD), a panel that advises the President and Congress on ways of reforming health care, schools, support services and employment policy to make society more equitable for people with all forms of disability.

And Ari’s open call to those of us who work in technology:

If we put one-tenth of the money currently spent on looking for causes and cures into developing technologies that enable autistic people with speech challenges to communicate more easily — so-called augmentative and alternative communication [AAC] — we’d have a vast improvement in the quality of life for autistic people and their family members.

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But to the geeky or trained, the desktop is a fount of power and speed. Documents are side by side, text flies from here to there, IMs are answered and dismissed, mockups reloaded, batches processed, all with tiny movements of the fingers. For those of us who work all day on computers, touch interfaces are not an impending disruption.

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Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple, repeated in yesterday’s keynote address, posits that the company operates at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts. I think it’s reasonable to regard fine typography as falling within that mandate, but unfortunately, they are falling short of that promise. Building a great display for typography without building great typographic tools is a dereliction of duty.

The post Better Screen, Same Typography appeared first on Stopdesign.

As any experienced meditator knows, the mind has a mind of its own. Left free to wander, that’s just what it will do. When we manage the infinite demands on our attention by trying to juggle them all, we literally weaken our capacity for absorbed focus.

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I’m seeing lots of other folks building out their own archive. And lots of them are using the WordPress solution I wrote about. So in the interest of providing a rough starting point, I’m making the WP theme files for my tweet archive available here (under a CC license) for anyone who wants them as a base. Download tweets.zip (39 KB).

One followup note… Andy Graulund (@graulund) is building a similar tweet archive that is much more robust and more awesome than my original. His is a PHP-based solution (no WordPress required) with embedded media, permalinks back to Twitter, graphs showing tweet activity, and more. I believe he’s planning on releasing his source soon. Keep an eye out for that.

—

WordPress-based browsable, searchable archive of tweets by Douglas Bowman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The post Theme files for my WP tweet archive appeared first on Stopdesign.