Dan Romero

For all those interested, Justin (@jwickett) and I (@blazamos) will be hosting the first ever Duke University Tweetup this Friday, November 21 at 6:30pm. Food, drink, and merriment will be provided. RSVP with an @reply, direct message, or email. More details to come later.

We all know that Twitter has a 140 character limit for each tweet. It forces rants and diatribes into witty one liners. Not only does it make Twitter, well, Twitter, but more specifically it increases the substance to character ratio.

Blogging on the other hand, has no pre-defined limits. Such freedom allows for a full spectrum of post lengths: from the Jason Kottke’s punctual remaindered links to the longer, magazine-style articles on A List Apart. And thanks to scrolling, blog content can be as long as the author wants it to be.

Setting word limits for blogging would be silly. The medium today has come to rival (and in many cases exceed) the mainstream media. More realistically, its unenforceable. Blogs, unlike Twitter, are a decentralized community running on a multitude of publishing platforms and content management systems. 

While restricting John Gruber to maximum word counts is not going to happen, I think there is something to learn from the newspaper industry’s long-established traditional of limiting words to the physical confines of a printed page. Print media is a world measured not in bytes but in inches. And the reality having a few inches to make a point forces writers to stick to what’s important. Whether the final product comes out an author’s terse nature or the trimming pen of a good copy editor, the end result is (usually) a focused piece of writing.

Going forward, I am going to make an attempt to keep things short. Not because shorter writing is better writing (I’ll write about this at some point), but because shorter writing is better suited for the Web, RSS, and information overload. If I can say it in 140 words, I will. If I need a couple hundred, or thousand more, I will do that too. But the goal in the back of my head will be to keep it short and tasty.

I’ll leave you with Mark Twain quote that — no matter how many times it’s quoted by Zen master life-hacking productivity types — is solid advice about writing: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

I never thought I would enjoy cooking. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, but rather the fact that I grew up never really thinking about it. It’s soft of a shame since now I have started cooking I truly to do enjoy the process. Almost as much as I enjoy the food.

I’ve only been at it for a few weeks, but I have already learned a couple of lessons from my time in the kitchen.

While I have yet to cook something extraordinary, I haven’t been making Easy Mac. My biggest culinary coup to date has been chicken parmesan.  It took me a few tries to get everything right. The first time I tried the recipe I didn’t have any flour. The second time I burned half of the chicken cutlets. The third time however, went off without a hitch.

Same scenario with chocolate chip pancakes: the first attempt the batter was too runny; the second attempt the frying pan was too hot; but by the third time came around, they were better than the ones at Waffle House. (Disclosure: I have never eaten at Waffle House — this opinion belongs to my primary food tester.)

Lesson: Cooking takes practice. If you don’t think you can bake a chocolate celebration cake, try anyway.

When I cooked my first meal for others, I gained a new appreciation for how much harder it is to cook for people other than yourself. The variables seem to increase exponentially. You have to cater to what people like and dislike. You have to make sure what you are marking is agreeable with everyone’s dietary systems (religious, personal, etc…) and allergies. Most importantly, you have to ensure there is enough food. That may sound simple, but it’s surprising how fast disappears when you have five people sitting around a table.

Lesson: When cooking for others, be extra prepared.

Finally, for the non-chefs, a suggestion. Try cooking something, you might like it. Bon appétit.

This is not the first time I have officially “launched” a blog. I have had mixed results. But this time, I think it’s going to stick.

The first attempt was back in 2003 with Joroma. I hacked together a Movable Type install. I wrote ten entries and then abruptly stopped posting. I can’t seem to remember why. Here is my first post from June 26, 2003:

wow… i finally got my weblog to publish and now i really feel special. maybe i’ll write a guide on how to set up MT on netfirms free hsting accounts. well, it was confusing enough for me. i know that no one is reading this and i know that i probably won’t get any readers for a while, but i think blogging is the coolest thing in the world and i think that i should give it a shot anyhow. so here is the first enrtry. let me know if anyone has actually read this.

Kind of embarassing but the sentimental nonetheless. I was 15, the same age as this kid, and for what it’s worth, configuring a MT install on a free webhost in 2003 was probably more complicated than a multi-user Wordpress install.

My next blogging attempt came in the form of blazamos. It was powered by Textpattern and hosted on the original TextDrive (now Joyent). The content was a hybrid of politics and technology and it lasted me until the beginning of my freshman year of college. (It still exists today, albeit as a sporadically updated tumbleblog.)

Finally, the most recent blog I’ve tried to keep was at danielwromero.com/blog. I started it in the second semester of my freshman year and tried to focus on topics I felt I was more knowledgeable about — web apps, online media, and politics. Unfortunately, I never got around to posting as much as I wanted.

So now I am once again starting up a blog. I am 21 years old now. We’ll see how it goes.