Brad Barrish - Publishing

Welcome to the new place

Over the last few months, I've been trying to clean up and consolidate my online life. I also want to write more. Lately, I've been reminded why it's important to have a place of my own, that I control, where I can publish anything and everything. In the past I've had multiple domains on multiple platforms serving different purposes. The fragmentation has been a blocker for me to write because every time I feel like writing, I get caught up in where I should write. This new site aims to address that.

As is often the case, I made a list of requirements, over-researched and then over-considered when it came to making a decision about where I would publish and what platform I would use. Like many people that have been publishing online since the dawn of the web, I've been managing my own hosting and domains. While I've enjoyed the control, I just don't want to mess with it anymore. I've been managing hosting and WordPress instances for a number of domains basically since I migrated from Moveable Type to WordPress around 2003. But it's time to let the other sites go and focus on a single domain.

I looked around at a bunch of other platforms like Hugo, Write.as, Listed and even went so far as to stand up my own bare bones, raw HTML site thanks to Derek's encouragement, but decided on WordPress.com. It's similar to the self-hosted WordPress I've been using. I'm just no longer hosting it. Now, instead of paying for my own hosting and having to manage everything, I pay WordPress to host my site. And it costs a lot less in time and money. All I have to do is start writing.

Why I landed on WordPress mostly comes down to my admiration and respect for WordPress' founder Matt Mullenweg and his company Automattic. I appreciate his unwavering desire to make the web a better place through all of the Automattic companies. I've been a long-time customer of a few of them such as Day One, Tumblr and Pocket Casts. They are all champions of supporting open standards and platforms and it feels like WordPress will be around for the long haul. Of course nothing is forever and I rest easy knowing that if I ever want or need to take things elsewhere, I'll be able to do so easily. And keeping everything around after I'm physically gone will be as easy as keeping the billing up-to-date.

So, with all of that out of the way, welcome to the new bradbarrish.com and thanks for reading.

→ 3:37 PM, Jul 24

The New Yorker rolls out metered paywall | Capital New York

The New Yorker rolls out metered paywall | Capital New York

So, why did the magazine decide to set the meter at six articles per month?

“Well, it’s based on a number of factors. One is our sort of intense data analysis of our readers. Another is the economics, and the third is gut. It feels like a good number,” NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thomson told Capital in an interview. “You’ll be able to get a lot of stories, you’ll be able to get a lot of the magazine every month, but it also feels like a number where people will feel like they should subscribe.”

Data + gut. I like that. And I’m happy to pay.

→ 1:01 PM, Nov 11

Topspin Tumblr: Topspin Joins BitTorrent in Launch of Bundle for Publishers

Topspin Tumblr: Topspin Joins BitTorrent in Launch of Bundle for Publishers
topspinmedia:

For the last five months, Topspin and several other companies have been working with BitTorrent’s new Bundle platform, and today, we’re proud to share the news that it is now available to more artists as part of a closed alpha announced yesterday by BitTorrent.

I love my job.

→ 11:46 AM, Sep 25

via Frank: The Anthologists

via Frank: The Anthologists
viafrank:

I think the web is heading towards an age of anthologies, where users gain new ways to select, sequence, and publish the content they come in contact with online. Some of these will be automated like Flipboard or Facebook’s timeline, but I’m more interested in the design opportunities of the manual tools that require our attention to pass over what we’ve reaped from the web. These anthologies are more than a flat stream or cursory pass over an exhaust of data. They are experiences and content chosen by the user to be shared in a certain sequence for a certain effect. The arrangements have edges, and fly against the nature of the web, simply in that one may “finish.”

→ 1:01 PM, Jun 23

Tumblr Kit

Tumblr Kit
matthewb:

I was recently looking for a solution for an upcoming project which required me to load content by post type from Tumblr’s API. The one or two options I found produced hard-coded markup for each post, and didn’t make it easy to customise their output. As a result, I put together this little framework that combines jQuery ajax loading with Boris Moore’s JsRender templating syntax (the successor to the jQuery Template plugin).

I’ve documented the key parts over at Github and put together a quick demo page that loads various post types into a single page. Please let me know if you find it useful!

This is super fucking cool. Thanks for sharing!

→ 6:54 PM, Jun 14