cafebedouin.org: 2021 Year in Review

December 31, 2021December 29, 2021 ~ cafebedouin

Top 10 Most Viewed in 2021

Posts That Deserve More Visibility

Reviewing the posts I wrote this year, I’m pretty happy with a lot of what I’ve written. I think the post Write: More Frequently, Less Long is a good thing to keep in mind for the coming year. I posted about the same as last year, 408 rather than 418 in 2019. However, the word count for the year went up to 89,691 from 58,705. It may be better to be briefer.

In the main, you can probably expect more of the same in the coming year.

52 Things [Tom Whitwell] Learned in 2021

December 4, 2021December 4, 2021 ~ cafebedouin

“4. 10% of US electricity is generated from old Russian nuclear warheads. [Geoff Brumfiel]
43. Privacy seems to be connected to productivity. An experiment in a phone factory showed that putting curtains round workers on a production line increased output by 10–15%. [Ethan Bernstein via Ethan Mollick]
52. A study of 14,000 Australians over 14 years found that neither being promoted nor being fired has any impact on either emotional wellbeing or life satisfaction. [Nathan Kettlewell & co]”
Tom Whitwell, “52 Things I Learned in 2021.” Fluxx Studio Notes. December 1, 2021.

cafebedouin.org: 2020 Year in Review and Looking Ahead to 2021

December 31, 2020December 31, 2020 ~ cafebedouin

In 2020, I posted 418 entries with a total of 58,670 words (most of which are quotes of someone else). There were +8750 views by +6,400 visitors to cafebedouin.org. Most of the views are concentrated either on the main page or the most popular posts, these had 100 views or more:

My favorite posts of the year:

In 2020, I posted once a day, which seems like the right amount. It encourages me to write or find something new to think about every day.

As I wrote last year, “I still would like to move to a format where half the posts are in a Foucault hupomnemata-style, i.e., ‘to capture the already-said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self.’ It strikes me that the Zettelkasten Method is essentially the same thing.

Perhaps the evolution here is to use the WordPress format and write short commentary posts on a daily or weekly basis to capture ideas, and then try to thread them together into a more formal page that incorporate these bits into a monthly essay. Anyway, I think this is the direction I’m going to explore in the coming year.