Following a discussion on LinkedIn about why more technical writers should blog, I’ve joined a new project: the tech writing webring, started by CT Smith.
What’s a webring?
A circular structure of websites that are linked together, organized around a theme or perspective. Basically this was a way to help people discover content prior to search engines. It’s a fun, retro-internet approach lines up nicely with my goals and ideals for this site.
How do I join?
To join this webring, add the links to your site and submit a pull request adding your site to sites.json. See the README for instructions.
Implementation details
Implementation is driven by a simple agreement: all members display a block of links to help people discover other sites in the ring. Sometimes this is done with javascript, but what’s cool about this ring is that the requirements for adding it to your site are really pleasantly minimal.
Note, going by LinkedIn discussions, this part is optional - but it’s part of the fun!
All you need to do is add a block of links somewhere on your site, replacing YOUR-SITE-URL with the URL of your site:
Part of the <a href="https://caseyrfsmith.github.io/webring/">tech writing blog webring</a> |
<a href="https://caseyrfsmith.github.io/webring/navigate.html?action=prev&site=YOUR-SITE-URL">Previous</a> |
<a href="https://caseyrfsmith.github.io/webring/navigate.html?action=next&site=YOUR-SITE-URL">Next</a> |
<a href="https://caseyrfsmith.github.io/webring/navigate.html?action=random&site=YOUR-SITE-URL">Random</a>
These are connected to the ring, and you can use those to find people who also blog about technical writing. The final step is submitting a pull request to update the list of sites in the public GitHub repository’s JSON file.
Adding this to my site involved four steps:
- Defining a partial (reusable block at the template level) to add the webring text to content on this site.
- Adding the partial to a conditional block in my singles layout(the template) that handles specific elements for blog pages (publishing the title, date, etc.).
- Updating the site with these new elements.
- Making a pull request to add my site to the webring.
What’s next with this blog
I’ve been taking a little time off from blogging recently, focused on recharging my batteries, but I have some long-form content coming down the pipeline.
Upcoming posts
I do have a couple of long form posts that are coming down the pipeline. There’s been some good discussions in Write the Docs about knowledge-centered service (KCS) and Salesforce, and it’ll be nice to get a bunch of thoughts about knowledge management out of my brain. I hope they’ll help fellow technical writers if they encounter these very different methodologies in the wild.
These pieces are in the editing phase and are definitely long form content (3,500 words-ish). My goal, however, is to shift back to shorter, more frequent content once these are published. So keep that in mind if you’re going to follow my RSS feed.
How I want this site to work
The other side is I really want to finish the publish-on-own-site and syndicate everywhere (POSSE) script for this Hugo site, and share it on my Github page. The goal is to have a Python script handle syndication for blogposts to Mastodon/Bluesky, using the front matter from the posts (typically a short description).
This way, there’s always RSS for places where you can control how you receive content from me, but then social media becomes a way of getting additional discovery out there. That way everything I author is stored here.
The big thought is to follow cool projects like this one by Jon Brown which use federated social media as the comment system for your site. This would transition the discussion from one-to-many (me broadcasting) to many-to-many (easier, direct discussion).
These project developments will probably also end up here, so if that sounds interesting, feel free to follow along in an RSS reader (for now!).