To mark my seventh year in blogging, as of 2014, I decided to go over my approach to writing posts, hitting publish and interacting with my readers.
Part of that necessitated stripping down my blog to the bare minimum — minimalism, as we know it — which I have always loved, (and which runs in my family, as I learnt on my last trip to Europe). Further, I have taken time to re-evaluate and re-think my approach to blogging.
Honestly, if you have ever caught your blog going stale, or through a rough time (and let us be honest, we all have) then you will be surprised how much good taking time off to come at it in a whole new way will do.
What is Swiss style?
If you have been following me for a while now, you will know I am a big fan of minimal design. I got so many emails about this that I decided to clarify things here.
Swiss style has little to do with Switzerland. It’s an avant garde art movement started in post-WWII Switzerland and quickly spread everywhere else. Key elements of this style, more technically called the international typographic style, are the use of left-aligned sans-serif fonts and lots of supporting photographs, like this photograph of me writing this article.
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Blogging at my desk, with my laptop over a precarious edge
I love typefaces as much as Lasagne Verdi al Forno. No, really, I do. Helvetica is one of my favourite sans-serifs, as you can probably tell by looking around this screen. And Swiss style (I call it that because saying international typographic style every time is tedious) uses sans-serif type exclusively.
In short, the style of this website as you now see it, is Swiss style. But, of course, various (albeit at a limited amount a time) solid colours are used as well. I like minimalism partly because it’s as difficult as it seems easy. It is hard because the thing boils down to deciding what to throw away; and, confessedly, I’m a hoarder, and I find it hard to throw something away because “you’ll never know when you’ll need it!” so minimalism lets me practice throwing away.
This page, and this blog and this site, in its current form, is about as minimal as I have ever got and I’ve really come to love it much like physics and music: the simplest stuff is always the hardest, the most correct and the most beautiful.
A note on Helvetica Neue
I’ve spoken so often about Helvetica, that I thought I would dedicate a short note on it’s ancestry and correct pronunciation.
History
Helvetica is a classic typeface which is a slight alteration on the original and the first widely-used, probably Swiss, type known as Akzidenz Grotesk from the 1890s.
To compete with this, in the 1950s Swiss type scene, a new typeface was released called Neue Haas Grotesk, or the new Haas Grotesk, since it was developed in the Haas Type Foundry and was based on Haas Normal Grotesk and inspired by Akzidenz Grotesk. Neue Haas Grotesk later came to be known as Helvetica.
Later, in the 1980s, a team of type designers sat down to give the letters in Helvetica, now more popular than ever, a more unified height/width ratio. This altered version of the typeface came to be known as Helvetica Neue.
Pronunciation
Many people I know (and certainly more than half the world) pronounce these Swiss/German/French typefaces wrongly. So here is a quick guide to saying it right:
Akzidenz is not pronunced rhyming with accidents; it goes aak-szi-DANCE.
Helvetica, I have heard many say as hell-vet-ica. It’s actually (h)ell-VEE-tica.
Neue, is not pronunced new or nui; it’s NOY(a).
In each case the text in capital is stressed and letters in (parentheses) are sort of semi-silent. The r is throtal, like the french r, and rhymes with air.
No more comments
A second major (almost elephantine) change I have made is turning off comments. I no longer allow comments on this website. First of all, I almost always reply to comments via email. I get them in my moderation queue, I reply by email. I get them in my email, and I do likewise.
I did this mostly because I do not see the need of a comments stream. A fraction of readers actually ever comment anywhere; and moderating discussions that arise out of comments can be very strenuous. It is one of my principles: if it is strenuous, something is not right; if it is strenuous, it can hardly give delight. Nobody said that.
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Change: (Oh, the Onion!) If you want to read the article, click here.
Image courtesy: Flickr/Unlisted Sightings
Now I have no interest in getting into an argument over the use of comments. Yes, they help discussion; and, yes, as Rich Polanco points out rightly, they help readers ask and explore questions they were probably hesitant to ask right away for whatever reason. But comments also come with a weight. As a blogger with a lot of other things on my plate, comments simply take too much of my time.
If you have something to say, use the multitude of sharing options I have provided at the head and foot of this (and ever other) article, and speak your mind in various social networks. Get the word out, get a-discussing with your social circles too. If you share it, I will know, and I will track the link like I always do and if I come across some interesting discussion going on, I will, most definitely, participate.
On Ghost
If you have followed me on Twitter, you will know I have said a couple of times already, how WordPress as a blogging platform was something I loved; and how the current direction WordPress is moving in is sidelining bloggers to make space for large CMSes.
I suppose it comes down to how nobody likes change at first, and how WordPress’ current progress might very well have been the intended one, but to satisfy my urge for a clutter-free, minimal blogging platform, a new kid just arrived in town:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Ghost is John O’Nolan’s brainchild, but really a product that many of us bloggers had dreamt up at the back of our mind. To put it more simply: Ghost is what WordPress started off as (and will hopefully stay that way).
Currently, Ghost’s installation, although based on a much more advanced and contemporary platform of node.js, is complex for the average user. It is something the Ghost team will have to change if they want to get things moving (and they are working on it, as they say on their website.)
But from what I have seen of Ghost, having installed it on my Linux machine, it fits scarily well into my imagination of a minimal blogging platform. I like to write my blog posts in html and Ghost’s Markdown supports it; not to mention that Markdown is, in my opinion, downright the best way to write an article if you want to spare yourself any distractions.
In fact, I like it so much that I have decided to move my upcoming Essays subsection/sub-blog (as I call it) from a fully set-up WordPress.com blog to a Ghost blog. For obvious reasons, my current website, i.e. this one, will stay on WordPress.
Joining the Internet Defense League
VHBelvadi.com is now an official member of the Internet Defense League, a non-profit political activism movement against government control/take-over of the internet. I believe that the internet was the last good thing to happen to humankind, and not least because no single government controlled it. Or, to put it blandly, why fix something that is not broken?
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The IDL cat: brought to you by Fight for the Future.
Other member of the IDL are WordPress, La Quadrature du Net, Cheezburger, Overblog, Reddit, Open media, IMGUR, OTI, EFF and Mozilla, with whom this website has sponsorship/affiliation (move your mouse or finger to the bottom left of your screen.) Why? Because it’s right.
Looking forward
I have been blogging for seven of the twenty years that the concept of weblogs has been around, and for seven of fourteen years since it came to gain substantial mainstream use. That is 50% of the time.
I started off with a Vox and a Blogger couple running simultaneously, was dissatisfied with Blogger for reasons I will not go into, and moved finally to WordPress as Vox shut down and then to this admittedly larger website. So far, the writer in me has liked it.
I was excited when WordPress introduced the full-screen writing option, and have only been as excited about a back-end change when Ghost 0.3 was released publicly. Where do I want to go from here? I cannot say. I love writing, and sometimes it involves guiding readers, sharing my experience, sharing my opinion, introducing products, decently commenting on other’s articles (only because I respect it highly and think it deserves a post all by itself), taking readers through my everyday learning and then some.
I see no reason to stop. And I do not see anything better than blogging rising up in the distance either. I still tweet, I still write on Google+ and elsewhere, I still contribute to moderated debates; but blogging has been in a league of its own, and will continue to be, as far as I can tell, in the short, visible future.
It might be with new additions like my design (which took me a full month to make responsive!) and Ghost, which beckons me as an early adopter, and it may be with a lot of other changes which neither you nor me like; but it is really that blogging will remain blogging, and I will remain blogging.
I know it is still a month before we welcome 2014, but I’m generally excited by everything, which is exactly what I am as I unveil my redesigned website. And the best part of this redesign, and how it is different from previous iterations, is that things have been changed from the inside-out. The code running this huge system has been refined. Everything should not only be much faster than ever before, but also much sharper and much, much smoother and pleasanter.
To put numbers, my move from WordPress to VHBelvadi.com was termed VHBelvadi.com 2.0. In that spirit, the move made here is fantastic and substantial enough for me to declare that, with a Swiss design and ultra minimalism focusing my readers’ attention on content, with a more thoughtful back-end and faster front-end, this is VHBelvadi.com 3.0
Well, then, I’ll see you on the other side.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
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