May: A Non Web-Based Interface
Websites are nice, but they can get a bit stale. Stale in the sense that any given web design pattern becomes set and it's difficult to get past it and see new ways of accomplishing the task. Not that this is always a bad thing; familiar design patterns vastly simplify the amount of effort it takes to engage with new sites. But it can feel stale from both the perspective of using and building websites.
For this reason, the bulk of this month's effort won't be building a website. A website will be a final product, but the majority of what I'm interested in exploring is a process: how might we create a blog post without interacting with a website at all?
I chose creating a blog post for a couple of reasons. First, because it's a complex enough task that it'll require a non-trivial amount of work to get right at the most basic level (compared to sending a Tweet, say, which you could do pretty easily through SMS, voicecall, letter, telegraph… it's just a collection of characters). Blog posts contain styling and often images, tags, hyperlinks, etc. Second, making a blog is a super basic process that still manages to elude me. As I wrote in March, I am perennially unsatisfied with any sort of blogging system because there's a strange feeling of constraint. My hypothesis then was that the medium was the issue; that I just needed more expressive posts. My hypothesis now is that the system is part of the issue too; the idea of going onto a website to make a well-thought-out post also doesn't work for me. What if you could interface with the blog itself through a more flexible system that changes how the action of blogging happens?
The goal is to create a blog post on a website without touching a web-based interface. Probably the most obvious way to accomplish this is with a text editor. But in my mind that's not really an interface to something, it's functionally the lowest level you can get to the post itself. It's also incomplete; the text editor doesn't push the content to a server for others to see. In other words, I'm looking for a slightly higher level way of interfacing with the whole system, from drafting a post to posting it. Some systems like blot.im show promise in creating alternative ways to accomplish this goal.
What I'd like to explore is using email as this interface. How can I use the unique attributes and constraints of this system to create an interface that works? That's the goal for this month.
I've picked this project for May because this month I'll have significantly more time to work on Twelve Websites. This system will require learning a lot of new technologies and will need to be quite large and well-considered to get it to work at even the most basic level.