Over the last 10 years, I’ve not published a lot. By that I mean I’ve started drafting a post 198 times and left it in purgatory. I also have 4 that have sat for over a decade. Some of those are things I’m working on, but the vast majority of those will never see the light of day. Here are 10 excerpts of things I should delete, but haven’t.
14 posts with no title
Some of these are clearly me testing out bugs, others are me playing with Gutenberg as it started to take shape, but the one that stood out to me was about air travel and I last worked on it 14 December 2011. It’s one that has this as the last written paragraph
The story I grew up hearing of my grandparents first date was that they went to Midway Airport to watch the planes take off (and that my grandfather invited his future in laws to tag along). Going to the airport was something that people would look forward to doing. It was something special. It is something i worry I will never experience again.
A child theme developers guide to Post Formats
This post has no content, but it feels like it could have been interesting to write. It’s also from 2011, only much earlier: 27 February. It’s also much less relevant today, so it should likely go in the trash.
Accessability
Accessibility is about making the web usable for everyone.
Accessibility is about understanding other people.
Accessibility is about
Accessibility is about people.
Therefore Accessibility is important.
Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
I started drafting this one in 2015 right around Global Accessibility Awareness Day. I am guessing that I stopped and din’t publish it when I couldn’t think of a good third beat. That or I saw a squirrel.
Axioms For The Web
I have two different drafts intitled Axioms for the web. Both are fundemently the same: they are based on a talk I gave at a Big WP NYC in 2014. This is one I would love to actually finish and publish. It starts:
Axioms are ideas we use to start our reasoning that are so fundamentally true, we use them to define what is true. They come from a Greek term that roughly translates to ‘that which commends itself as evident.’ They are phrases as simple as:
A + B = B + A
One version is 1079 words and the other is 1377 words, so hopefully this is something I can actually do. Maybe 2020 is the year I finish this 6 year old post.
Can WordPress 5.0/Gutenberg be released in 2018?
This was a potential roadmap to getting Gutenberg into WordPress core in 2018. I wrote this post up at the tail end of September of 2018 and while I was getting feedback on it, the post announcing the 5.0 release came out. My post was going to propose releasing on December 4th which ended up only being 2 days off when WordPress 5.0 came out.
Degrassi still goes there
I didn’t know that Degrassi: Next Class season 3 was premiering on netflix yesterday, but when I sat down intending to veg out after a hectic week with little sleep, It was there and I couldn’t have been more excited.
That’s the one and only paragraph of my love letter to Degrassi. I just rewatched all four seasons of Next Class and it made me wish the show never left the air
Introducing Slidedown.js
This was a nodejs presentation tool that I worked on for a few years that never really got beyond the point that only I could use it. I stopped using it soon after I finished it, since I can’t seem to actually stick with a single JavaScript library for building slideshows. The repo is still public if someone wants to use it. My goal was to have a set of themes, each named after a bar. The first one being named after my college bar, Remies.
The Situation in Mali
Back when I was the simulation director of a security council simulation, I did a lot of reading and writing about situations happening in the world. This included conflicts that didn’t get much attention, such as this March 2013 post about when the Tuareg declared independence for the region of Azawad. Sadly, this is a conflict that still persists to this day, but one that you need to search for information if you want to stay informed.
WordPress and PWA
The emergence of Progressive Webapps are one of the most exciting development for the open web.
That’s as far as I got. Despite having built aaron.jorb.in as a PWA, I haven’t taken many further steps. I do think that many parts of PWA have a lot of potential to improve WordPress, but haven’t written them down. Maybe this is another 2020 post?
Rejected Taglines for WordPress 4.6
A little bit of humor that I must not of thought was funny enough. Here are the 3 taglines I had written. I’m guessing I was hoping to add more before publishing it.
WordPress 4.6 is living in the future so the present is it’s past
WordPress 4.6 has a pikachu hidden inside. Take a look inside for it
Thanks for Updating. WordPress 4.6 is humble with a little bit of Kanye
Random Thoughts
Conference Badges, Scaling, WordPress Contributor Retention, Half Baked Ideas, committing to WordPress Core, Gutenberg…seven weeks in, Why I contribute to WordPress, WordCamp Lancaster.
What do those have in common? All are things I started a random thoughts post on but never finished it. Maybe one of these will join the 15 random thoughts posts I have written.
Overall, I published more than I let waste away in draft, but I should take my own advice from Always Press Publish from when I was blogging every day
It’s easy to fall in the trap of wanting something to be perfect before you share it. It’s similar to the “one more feature” trap that hurts the ability for software to be released. By having a deadline of every single day something needs to be published, I force my self to understand that perfect is the enemy of complete.
What do you have sitting in your draft pile from the last decade? I’m sure you have some good stuff there