Seriously I wonder what is wrong with us, computer scientists and computer hobbyists. I thought I loved markdown, that I needed to keep telling the world about it, but what renders in Gitea is not rendering the same in GitHub, nor in Obsidian. I'm likely idiot, let's find out.
The guide at https://www.markdownguide.org/book/ already starts by confusing its readers, looking for simplicity, with prompting the user to pick between normal or extended syntax. The top menu also mentions hacks and tools and books. Woot ? Aren't we talking about a simple text format and about making things simpler ?
This can't be so complicated, at least I thought. Then I visited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#Implementations and fallen of my chair -- note the >dramatic< tone here, but I'm only sitting in my sofa and avoiding sleep, I'm all fine.
Damn, even on Markdown supposed to provide a simple and better source format and publishing tool than HTML, we experts can't agree. Myriad of tools and implementations each extended by a few more artisanal tools here and there, millions of hours wasted ?
They are plenty static site generators and people crafting them and enriching markdown with details to hopefully generate, well, mostly valid HTML ? Or not ? Last time I checked, only an handful of those would take care of this goal.
We could chose to go back to working with text or HTML without tools in our way. This blog post for instance is almost just text and links, nothing much I require from markdown. This likely makes this portable. No transpiling needed, no tools.
It's NOT SO HARD and still readable. This blog post also has links that do not require remembering keyboard shortcuts on Mac for [Title](...) nor combining any special key.
Markdown is like sharing a recipe, but everyone reinvents a different complicated meal.
As a reminder of how shitty those social media can be, I'm feeling obligated to write this short rant.
This morning, using my secondary empty and idle Instagram account to do some research, I end up discovering a nice content through the home page feed, and I'm trying to share it with my partner.
For some reason, the share does not reach my partner, so I want to find the content again and I navigate backward and this triggers a home feed refresh. My home feed is now completely unrecognizable and this causes immense frustration.
Last week, I was about to revive my main Instagram account, and this kind of bad UX reminds me that the benefits are not worth the immense frustration and non-sense of navigating an endless loop of evaporating content. No, Meta, you won't fool me again.
I hate managing my mail inbox, and I guess I'm not the only one here. Usually my inbox is for bills, paperwork, to-dos, and so on and anyway most of the items will require me to lose time at something I don't value.
Anyway I'm trying to keep it tidy and nice to open and here are some of the habits I'm using to manage the load of documents.
Automate
Most of the emails with attachment and invoice somewhere in the object/title and sent to my accounting software running in the clouds. Other emails can just be automatically archived under some conditions.
Label everything
This is likely nothing new, but getting the discipline to achieve this in the long run is what matters. In Gmail I often use the "Filter similar items" to automatically label similar emails.
Labeling alone is a nice trick which gets even more powerful with colors and emojis.
When I added this new label for dealing with my automated research of places, I've been creating this "housing" label with a π οΈ emoji, and placed it under the ποΈ projects label for now.
Colorize
Green for good things, orange for what things that can drain money or energy. For instance paid invoices and refund are in green and unpaid invoices, fines, taxes are in orange/red.
With those labels and colors, because I rely a lot on visual memory, I can get a good sense of my priorities without having to spend much time in my Inbox by reading emails titles.
Delete handled items
Once something is done, there is no point to keep it nor archive it, unless it's something I'm really too afraid to lose for now, then I can archive it so the email can be found later.
Delegate
My time is not more valuable than other people time, but I do value some things more than others, and I try to focus on what matters for me and delegate other emails if possible, for instance I ignore some emails sent to our company because I know my partner handles those specific ones. If I'm not sure my partner is dealing with something, I'm just forwarding the email with a communication for her.
Unsubscribe
I almost forgot that must-know trick, which is quite underrated and no so commonly used among family members, which is a pity. Whenever you receive recurrent emails you have no time to read, just unsubscribe from them, even if they make it difficult sometimes.
No newsletter please
I prefer to get news by RSS on my Miniflux instance, so everything that can be turned to a RSS feed will be, and every newsletter that does not propose a RSS feed, I'll convert it to a RSS feed via https://kill-the-newsletter.com/, and if the blog I want to subscribe to is banning such automation, I'll use RSS-Bridge to generate a RSS feed by scrapping the content of their blog.
Snooze
Sometimes there is nothing you can do with an email, yet. For instance it's the tracking number of a delivery package, and the package won't be there before 3 days. Or it's a very detailed email for your hotel or event booking for in a few months in the future. In such cases I just snooze such emails for a future date.
Dark mode
I try to make my emails boring and so reduce the anxiety they cause me, and for this Gmail proposes a Dark mode. If that's not enough you can also try some extensions that turn Grayscale / Monochrome mode on. For instance on Brave (Chrome based browser) I'm using this one below.
I'm regularly battling to browse the web like before and maintain Inbox Zero for my work and personal mailboxes and I have to say it's not a fun game. Especially when some crappy tactics at are play like below.
Let's start a collection with the patterns I criticize and update this post regularly with findings.
CloudFlare (via RYM / rateyourmusic.com and many others)
Every few clicks when browsing their website with my paid account, I'm facing this "human status check" which is a big annoyance. I've informed them it's a pain, especially every few clicks and as a subscribed user. They promise their developers are working on it. We will see...
Elastic.co
First example is Elastic (elastic.co), with a work email I never asked for, inviting me to a local event. The email is long and I don't care about the Pizza party at all which is the first thing they mention in their agenda. I want to stop receiving such emails.
Looking at the bottom of their email, I notice a first unsubscribe button.
It redirects to a subscription page... (see below). Clever... !
When looking more closely, there is a second unsubscribe button, very hard to see due to the lack of contrast.
Who has then time to fill their unsubscribe form ? Not every weirdo. But that's it seems the effort which is due just for allowing me to regain a little more quiet in my mailbox. So now you know.
Homebrew (Mac)
You use brew install to run a small utility binary and ... you scroll through 630 lines of output and recompilation to see if your utility is finally there. WHY. SO. MUCH. OUTPUT.
Medium
No, you shall not ask my private data show me some HTML on the web. Well tried but nope.
I regularly have to play a few puzzles successively. In average 2 or 5. If you fail, you start over. It's very time consuming.
OrbStack updates
Leave me develop please.
RateYourMusic / Sonemic
This ones make me sad as RYM belongs to my favorite bookmarks. We are punished with this "prove you are human" form every few clicks. So annoying.
And also, from time to time.... Thank you CloudFlare.
NodeBB
Preventing users from contributing a forum for some arbitrary period is quite stupid especially if done AFTER you accept their account registration.
Once the waiting period is completed, the post is queued. This is better, yet annoying of course.
OVH
After months with Contabo (VPS), I decided it was time to close my domain and hosting subscriptions managed at OVH. I disabled the automated renewal a few weeks ago, and managed to setup redirects on my old websites. My subscriptions should be cancelled automatically but I can't wait and I want to get that out of my mind, so I want to force a manual cancellation.
To my surprise, it took me a lot of emails and exchanges with support. I understand the security measures and no one would like its accounts and services revoked by accident.
The problem is mostly the poor UX and customer support for getting this done. Let dig deeper.
When trying to cancel any service, I just get error without explanation nor resolution steps.
Later did I find emails from OVH asking me to confirm my revocation, so I could at least complete some of the steps, but it required me to leave my workflow and switch from my admin panel to emails, then manage those emails, then double check my admin panels for updates of services statuses...
In the end I opened a ticket to OVH support asking them to delete my account and the related services. They closed the ticket asking me to close my account only after services are revoked, which let me again with an unresolved solution.
I had to reopen the ticket and provide them the evidence above so they know I can't close some of my services. Closing a customer complaint on user's behalf without asking feedback is probably a tactic for improving their KPIs, but it ultimately tell they consider their customers to be nothing more than complainers with no real problem to be solved. This also tell the culture of OVH has diverged from customer first. No wonder I'm leaving you, OVH, as I'm expecting more from a service provider.
Recently I've talked about the struggle of trying to keep up with too much content and manage it and I'm starting with shrinking my 21K bookmarks to a list of essentials resources, taking inspiration from this method for purging them.
I'm using my Gimli axe with the intent of getting rid of the whole problem. Here is my run book for the task.
For every image, webcomic etc found in my bookmarks : save it on disk or forget.
For every shortened link, go to https://urlex.org/ and expand them, then see if those are still worth.
Yet about shortened link... β οΈ NEVER use short links - Refuse to short link anything. Short links die. I've learned hardly to say goodbye to hundred of my bookmarks because the domains that served those links were long gone, but on some social media any link you share is converted automatically by the platform, this is hell. Fortunately you can probably find most of them via https://web.archive.org/ Best time to do it is now !
For every YouTube video, if you don't remember why you, just forget it, or plan to watch it in your agenda. Don't add it to watch it later.
For every link to tools, discussions, product release notes/changelogs, forums, issues, bugs, tutorials, except if those are very very special, they probably address problems for your past. Forget them.
For every direct link to TV Show, movie, book pages, if you still consider consuming that content, get a copy of it, then forget about the link.
For every link to a super tool / app / code snippet : install and use the app if still worth it, add the snippets to your favorites if still relevant, otherwise forget it. Tools change. Problems stay the same.
For every link to a blog, newsfeed, either subscribe to the blog (RSS, Newsletter or Convert the newsletter to RSS, ...) or forget it.
Important content will find you.
You fill still find important content in the future.
Try to keep only links to content that might be relevant years from now. If possible just backup those pages somewhere along with your other backups, so they do not disappear. But just in case, also archive them for others through https://web.archive.org or https://archive.is/.
if a long article is worth keeping, why not taking some notes about it for later ? Or blogging about it ? Instead of just saving it for the eternity ?
I'll continue this exercise and try to save all my important ones to /links and clean other places like my Git repo, my Wallabag, etc.. I've migrated everything from Wallabag to Shaarli by November, 2024.
If you don't take care of this, the obsolescence of the web is gonna taking care of that for you. I mean your favorite images, videos, sites, will long be gone by the time you read again those bookmarks.
Have higher standards before bookmarking anything.
