Great article on the web as personal design playground: https://colly.com/articles/this-used-to-be-our-playground

One slow moving project of mine is about posting some longer-form, art-directed posts to royscholten.nl, starting with 3 “dossier” pages for each of the main areas currently listed there.

Two technical pieces I had to get in place to be able to do that:

1. Load custom css for a specific post.
2. Allow plain html in the body of a post

Load custom css for a specific post

For this I had to connect some dots across multiple pedantic comments on stackoverflow. The apparently more common usecase is to automatically include a css file that is specific to a certain type of post. I want to include a css file with a single post.

I did not bookmark or document where I found this. I think I remember making Hugo choke on not correctly commenting the url I did want to add as documentation, so I left it out.

Anyway, in the front matter of that specific post you create a customcss parameter that has the URL to the CSS file you want to include:

customcss: "/css/specific-styles-for-just-that-post.css"

And in /layouts/partials/head/extra.html add this line:

{{ with .Params.customcss }}<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ . }}" />{{ end }}

This takes care of adding the link to the stylesheet to the generated HTML of that specific post.

Allow plain html in the body of a post

Much easier. Thank you Ana Ulin for explaining and documenting how to do that.

via https://twitter.com/eaton/status/1338601760714354689, eaton points us to https://jjosephmiller.medium.com/the-rhetoric-of-content-types-c9e6994d2b01

“Separating collections of attributes from rhetorical function is every bit as important.”

Reminds me of something eaton mentioned earlier: for a given site/platform/service, there’s not one content model, but multiple in parallel.

Content model for storage

At the very least there’s the model on the level of the database: the technical content model and the finer grained data model behind that. This content model is mostly concerned with how the content is stored

Content model for communication

On top of that the content model for a specific channel, let’s say, “the site”. The content type building blocks in the database model by themselves are not flexible, rich enough to compose the necessary screens with. The content model of the site is often more expressed throug it’s design system, with page/layout types like “landing page”, “list page”, “item page”, “sub home” and the like.

These are all composit pages. Even the single item page is not built from the content item alone. Header, footer of course, but also additional navigation, and “related content” bits and bobs get added to the core content provided by the content type.

One difference between item page and the other composits is that on the single item screen, all the additional items are “pulled in” to the content item. The foundation of the page is indeed the item itself. (the URL of the page is the URL of the content item)

For the other composit pages like a typical landing page it helps to think of those as an empty canvas (header, footer will likely still be on there, I’m talking about the space between those two). For these empty canvasses, there is no one specific content item that is the boss of the page that provides base content and context. Content: there’s no single item that defines the basic set of available items to show. Context: there’s no main metadata to derive the additional “related” items from.

So given the building blocks as defined in the database content model, we run into the need to repackage the content in a content type into smaller subsets of related fields. (Drupal: view modes)

We need canvasses and flexible content chunks that can be added to those.

Content, design, system

The above still approaches the Communication Content Model from a display/design angle. Expressed in terms derived from design system language. But the communicative function of this “title+body+image+link” content component is not necessarily the same as the communication job of this other “title+body+image+link” content component. They may have an identical structure in constituting parts, but what they communicate and how may be very different.

Congrats to Sue Borchardt for becoming the first cynefin artist in residence. She asks this question which I think is an important one:

“If a space for creative experimentation existed right now in your workplace, how might today be different for you?”

This hits exactly on the reason we started tacit.studio.

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I’ve been reposting the work-so-far of my 50 birds project to my instagram account. Scheduling with Hootsuite works well. I just lined up the last ones for this week. Hope to finish at least one more this year to hit 30 completed prints, each in an edition of 20, so that’s 600 prints done. Only 400 left to go!

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On why hand drawn diagrams, as part of this thread. There will even be a conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams in 2021*.

I miss working and thinking and drawing through things with my team on my big whiteboard.

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Austin Kleon has a good post on (variations on) morning pages. Earlier this year I stopped a 100+ days streak of writing three pages long hand each morning. Going to get back to that.

"Morning Pages is another tactic for getting out of your own way"

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I write my morning pages with Eno’s “Neroli” on. Another ambient-ish album that got back into rotation is Wandelaar by Haron

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#weeknotes 2020-50

You can really see the architectural concept coming together.

Built and curated an exhibition with my partner in art Martijn van der Blom. It’s called SET::SOLID. I’m showing a selection of twelve of my bird prints, Martijn presents twelve unique prints from his Masks series.

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Hanna Darboven & Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. Great picture of Darbovens’ desk in there. Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt created typewriter art in the 1970’s in East Germany which was sent out as mail art. The mail art she received offered glimpes of the world on the other side of the iron curtain.

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Still working through this excellent piece: Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design by Lisa Angela. It already reminded me of a community and a book to check out.

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Some updates to https://royscholten.nl/, it has small pictures now!

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Preparing work on the zines I’ll contribute to a group expo in February 2021. I already made one in remembrance of Herma Steur earlier this year.

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Sounds: my spotify year in review is basically the playlist I made for spinning with some added Esoctrilihum, Mare Cognitum/Spectral Lore and Paysage d’Hiver from before I bought those on bandcamp.

#weeknotes 2020-49

Nu te zien in de Gooische Brink 35 Hilversum. Lego-prints van Martijn van der Blom en Roy Scholten.

Facilitated working through a complex site building question. A webcam pointing at some handdrawn diagrams was super useful in keeping the discussion on track.

I’ve been collecting links on Wardley Mapping for some time now, still need to dedicate time to figure out how/where this applies to the visualizing, mapping things I already do.

For example, modeling content. I wrote up how to build a content model in Obsidian.

Found out that the Common Pochard* had been missing from the collection all this time! Fixed that.

Preparations for an exhibition in the center of town together with Martijn. More on that soon.

Sounds: saw a tweet that asked for goose bump recommendations. Didn’t reply there, but:

• Blood on the Motorway by DJ Shadow
• Ashtray Wasp by Burial
• Encore from Tokyo by Keith Jarrett

#weeknotes 2020-48

Facilitating a discussion on a complex subject through hand drawn diagrams and a webcam hovering above. The drawings were essential in keeping the discussion productive and on track.

Please be sure to check out this beautiful schematic map from the 12th century. That tweet also has the link to the full scan of the book it is in. Oh my, such great looking pages.

“If you cut an animal skin into 4 sets of two pages, the number of possible ways of arranging these 4 pieces into a booklet is 6,144.” via @LitteraCarolina.

My account on drupal.org turned 15 years old this week. Quite the ride. Drupal is a large open source content management system. I help design it. More on that here.

Emily Webber on serendipity in the workplace.

Dinosaurs. 10 dino cards in legopress added to the print portfolio. It’s a collaboration with Martijn from 2017. The little arms of the T-rex were a design challenge, but no more. Also, T-rex vs. Triceratops.

The dino cards were a precursor to the 50 birds project that’s still underway. Here’s a short video browsing through all the trial and error prints that lead up to the final design. I wrote a short article on this project, in dutch, here.

Bill Sienkiewicz, always Bill Sienkiewicz.

New sounds. More noise for tumbling through space via Prava Kollektiv: Arkhtinn, HWAUOCH, and personal favorite Voidsphere*.

#weeknotes 2020-47

Going to have a look at this intro to Sketch Your System

I found out too late about this workshop on making medieval ink. Youtube has the goods, of course.

Small indieweb tweaks to www.royscholten.nl, just h-card stuff for now. On yoroy.com I even had webmentions and some syndication going for a short while, but it’s all very fiddly still. Also, I turned yoroy.com into a static html site (in dutch) so that removed those types of features.

Het goede en gewenste van structured content is ook dat sommige dingen daardoor juist niet meer mogelijk zijn! https://write.as/bildung/onmogelijk

More Luhmann* Zettelkasten geekery. Here’s a talk by one of the researchers that are working to digitize this analog knowledge database: https://vimeo.com/173128404. The presentation is German spoken, so I created a rough but mostly complete translation

Coming May next year: The filing cabinet, a vertical history of information. “The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information.”

Sounds: new Aesop Rock (the rapper with the largest vocabulary), Black Curse – Endless Wound and Convulsing – Grievous. The last one oddly helped achieve some actual flow during work this week.

#weeknotes 2020-46