Ben Cohen — Briefly

Apparently boing boing has undergone another redesign. A few quick thoughts:

The header.

The content boxes alternate red and black, which is nice for consistency, but look at the bottom right corner of each thumbnail. Four categories, two colors. Not terrible, but not intuitive.

A post

Individual posts are attractively presented. Note the emphasis on spreading content via twitter, facebook and email. Comments are 4th class citizens?

The best part of the redesign is the presentation of old posts:

There is a lot of content presented in a compact space. The style distinguishes the content as “older” but leaves enough to entice the reader.

I haven’t seen an article on the redesign yet, but it will be interesting to see what prompted the radical shift, only a year and a half after the last redesign.

Edit: Apparently I am just out of the loop: redesign post

I am stupid.

But that’s a good thing. Being stupid means being selective.

I encounter more information every day than I could possibly remember or process if I tried to deal with it all serially, so I don’t try. Some things I think about as I encounter them, and the rest get filed for later consideration.

I used to use del.icio.us for my filing, but bookmarking is heavy — it requires thought to tag an article, and clutters my long-term memory. So I switched to using Instapaper when it came out. Instapaper is great, and Marco has done a fantastic job with text extraction, offline caching, and cross-platform development. However, it was (and still is, mostly) a pain to transition things from my “things to look at later” list to my “worth remembering in the future list.” Enter pinboard.in.

Pinboard helps me by offering both a light-weight “read later” list and a long-term bookmarks section, with easy transitioning between the two.

But like I said, I’m stupid. When I add things to my read later list, I forget about them. I add anywhere from 3 to 10 links a day to my read later list, and I never read them later.

Adding things to a list is half the equation for remembering them. The other half is checking the list. For that half, I wrote a little script to check my recently added new links and send me a daily email with the list. A small step, but one I hope makes my stupidity a little more productive.

Here’s the script. Please fork, hack, and comment.

http://gist.github.com/183288 (gist linked because Tumblr doesn’t allow <script> embed in the style gist provides)