We have a great community on the web. Thanks to blogs, Twitter, Dribbble, and trusty old Email, we have an unprecedented connection to people doing amazing things all over the world.

Even with all of these connections, it is easy to feel lonely. Though I love being part of this community, I still live in a town where I have no friends (next to a city where I have many), work independently, and am still living the bachelor life (three years and counting).

Since the beginning of January I’ve been in Cupertino working with a client of mine. It’s been fantastic to get into the office to work directly with the team. The creative energy is palpable. The only downside to the whole trip has been living in a hotel in a city I don’t know. It’s an isolation I wasn’t expecting.

Frequent trips to San Francisco has helped. Working on weekends from a coffee shop filled with people has been good for my psyche.

But, no coffee shop could replace the incredible feeling of community I’ve felt over the last few days.

This past week, Macworld | iWorld was in town, and with it brought countless Mac and iOS geeks from all over the country. Included in the flood were some of the very people I’ve felt such strong community with through our various social connections online. People like Shawn Blanc, who I have known for almost four years now, and Ben Brooks, who I’ve known about a year and have worked with on various projects over that time.

I got to meet the intelligent and inked Brett Kelly, hear the southern drawl of Stephen Hackett, enjoy a salmon sandwich by the pier with Thomas Brand, share a pint or two with Matthew Panzarino (still have your room key, bro!) and Matt Alexander (thanks for the biggest margarita of my life!), and celebrate the beautiful socialism of Canada with Mike Vardy.

I also got to meet and drink with a couple gentlemen whose work I have admired for as long as I’ve been on the internet: John Gruber (thanks for pulling us from the couch next to the bathroom to have a drink with you) and Scott Simpson (I’ll be checking out the comedy festival this week!).

For those who were at the expo but we didn’t get a chance to connect: let’s make a point of making that connection next time we’re in the same city. For those who didn’t even make it to San Francisco for the expo: shame on you. You missed on one of the best experiences of any Mac-geek’s life.

I’m still in the Bay Area for at least a few days (my plans for heading home are up in the air, currently). So, if you’re free tonight or tomorrow and want to grab a drink, be sure to get in touch.

※ Permalink for “Community” published on date_to_rfc822

Since writing this article, I’ve built a tool that makes it easy to design a customized DuckDuckGo search box for your website.

My friend and colleague Ben Brooks is tired of Google, and I can’t blame him. In an effort to reduce the number of Google services he’s beholden to, Ben asked me to update his site’s search with the DuckDuckGo search service.

Previous to this change, I’d used a simple form that pointed to google.com/search, with some additional parameters to limit the search to Ben’s site. With this form, I was able to style it using CSS to make it match the site’s design, as well as remove any Google branding.

To make the switch to DuckDuckGo, Ben first replaced the custom Google search form with a search box he made using DuckDuckGo’s Search Box Wizard. While this provided the functionality Ben was looking for, it was a long way from the nice design I’d come up with for the former search bar.

I started digging into the old code I’d made for the Google search form, to see if I could simply replace a few parameters to make it work on DuckDuckGo. I got close, but wasn’t able to pass both the search term and limit the search to Ben’s site; I could only do one or the other.

A quick email to the support team at DuckDuckGo resulted in a small modification to my code to make it work, as well as an introduction to the other custom URL parameters available to customize the search experience even further. Using a few of these parameters I was able to change the font to Helvetica, match the link colour on the search page to the links on Ben’s site, and turn off their sidebar.

I’ve included some of these parameters in the code below, which you can modify and use to add a custom DuckDuckGo search to your own site. To see what the codes used in the “name” attribute, be sure to read through DuckDuckGo’s URL Parameters page.

<form method="get" id="search" action="http://duckduckgo.com/">
  <input type="hidden" name="sites" value="YOURDOMAIN.COM"/>
  <input type="hidden" name="k8" value="#444444"/>
  <input type="hidden" name="k9" value="#D51920"/>
  <input type="hidden" name="kt" value="h"/>
  <input type="text" name="q" maxlength="255" placeholder="Search&hellip;"/>
  <input type="submit" value="DuckDuckGo Search" style="visibility: hidden;" />
</form>

※ Permalink for “Adding a Custom DuckDuckGo Search Bar to Your Site” published on date_to_rfc822

I have no clue.

※ Permalink for “How To Not Get Food In Your Beard When You’re Eating” published on date_to_rfc822

Update: Since publishing this post, I’ve been engaging in a very friendly and informative email conversation with Andrew de Andrade. Andrew has shed a lot of light on my situation, and has shown me that what I experienced was not censorship, but an attempt to provide the Hacker News with an experience they would benefit most from. I thank Andrew for providing this clarity. I apologize to anyone who was offended by this post. I’ve also issued an apology on this post’s Hacker News thread.

This experience has taught me a lot about community and social norms and behaviours, which Andrew has encouraged me to write about in a future post. If you have any input on this situation or topic, I’d love to hear from you!</em>

I’ve been a reader of Y Combinator’s Hacker News off and on for about a year now. I enjoy the mix of technical, business, and social news it provides. And, more often than not, the discussion in the comments can be just as informative as the articles the site links to.

After hearing my friend Ben Brooks remark that he often submits articles he writes to Hacker News, I decided to submit my post announcing the closure of Simple Desks.

I submitted the story to Hacker News with the title of the article, “Shutting Down My Porno Site.” Yes, the title was provocative. But, it felt appropriate given the context, which was the idea of what has come to be called productivity porn. Most of the article and especially the lead paragraph played on that very idea.

After I hit the submit button, I started getting ready to head out and join the New Year’s Eve celebration. Before I left, I took a quick look at my Hacker News submission and was surprised to see the title had been edited: the system removed the word “porno.”

I was also a bit confused. A quick search reveals 432 story titles that include the word “porn,” 173 with the word “fuck,” and 210 with the word “shit.”

Even more confusing, there are currently 9 stories on Hacker News with the word “porno” in it.

I wondered if my submission was censored because it had quickly made the front page. Maybe I had just missed seeing when it was edited. But, many of the stories found in the above searches clearly had enough points to have been on the front page.

I tried doing a Google search for other instances of people complaining about censorship on Hacker News, and came up empty. Any mention of censorship right on the Hacker News site seems to revolve around Y Combinator’s relationship with the startups that are covered on the site.

I’m not opposed to a site like Hacker News controlling the content that gets posted to their site. They have a brand they wish to maintain and a certain audience they hope to serve. As their guidelines state, they aren’t interested in “politics, or crime, or sports, unless they’re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.”

However, no where in the guidelines does it say anything about the use of provocative language in a story’s title. They do warn against adding your own “gratuitous editorial spin” on a link to an article you didn’t write, but nothing is mentioned about language that should or shouldn’t be used in a link’s title.

Once I saw that Hacker News had censored my link’s title, I posted a quick comment to let potential readers know what happened. My fear was that visitors would see a title that read “Shutting Down My Site” and be offended once they saw the article’s actual title. My intention was never to trick people into seeing my article. I just thought it would be an interesting read for the Hacker News community.¹

If Hacker News doesn’t want provocative titles on their site, I would have preferred the entire submission be rejected rather than potentially deceiving the community into reading something that uses language they don’t want to see. It reflects poorly on me as a publisher and as the submitter of the link.

Whatever their policy is, it should be clearly communicated in the site’s guidelines. I’m cool either way, I just want to make sure I’m contributing fairly to a community that I’ve benefited from in the past.

※ Permalink for “Censorship On Hacker News” published on date_to_rfc822

It was pretty. Damn it was pretty. The subjects were all scantily clad in accessories and the lighting was just right. Whether it was an image I found on the web or a self-shot photo submitted by a reader, my standard was always “will this make my readers’ jaws drop?”

But, it was bullshit. It was such bullshit. We were creating this completely unrealistic ideal that no one should have to live up to.

Who has the most minimal desk setup?

The real question is, who gives a fuck?

I started Simple Desks—a Tumblr site for collecting photographs of minimal desks and work setups—back on March 15, 2010. Its initial purpose was simple: I was having a desk custom built by a friend, and I wanted an easy way of saving photos to use as inspiration. Tumblr’s bookmarklet was the easiest way I could think of to simply keep an archive of the photos I found, without having to clog up my own hard drive.

Shorty after I started the site, I published a link to it on Twitter and asked if anyone had a photo of their desk they wanted to share, feel free to submit it. Eighteen months later I had published over 350 photographs of people’s desks.

Desks.

Empty, lifeless, workless desks.

About 6 months into running Simple Desks I began realizing that what I was doing was running a porn site. No, not topless girls and chest-hairless guys romping around in a beach house-type porn. Just pointless, casual, look-at-this-empty-fucking-desk-you’ll-never-have porn.

And we were all getting off on it.

But I kept it up. I kept it up because, baby, it paid. Not in the thousands-of-dollars-a-month type of paid, but certainly more than what a guy publishing photos of desks should deserve.

Then, in October of this year we finished the short film my friends and I spent countless hours on, and I realized how incredibly proud I was of that and how excited I was to share it with people. I never felt that way about posting desk pictures. Never.

So, I started thinking about shutting it down. Once I returned home from LA in early December, the decision had been made: as of 2012, Simple Desks would be no more.

And, if I had any doubts about whether this was the right thing to do, hearing Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin discuss the fetishism of minimalism on a recent episode of Back to Work quickly put them to rest.

---

I want to spend my time creating work that is substantial. To hear someone tell me that a scene in Imprint made them tear up, that a lyric in a song I’ve written has uplifted someone who was down, or to see users enjoy using something I’ve created on the web, these are the moments I want to experience more often. These are moments for humans.

※ Permalink for “Shutting Down My Porno Site” published on date_to_rfc822

About a month ago, I wrote about why, once again, I’ve shifted the focus of this site. At the end of the post I left a link to a short survey. When I created it, I expected maybe a dozen or so of you to take the time to respond. Unless some of you have far too much time on your hands and submitted multiple surveys, I believe 72 people filled the thing out.

To give you some perspective on that number, my Feedburner account tells me that I have around 500 RSS subscribers. I assume most people have forgotten what RSS is, so I also shared the survey with my 1100 Twitter followers. I’m estimating that there is a large cross-section between those two numbers, so let’s assume (for the sake of my terrible mathematic skills) that the number of potential people to fill out the survey was 720¹. Assuming this, it means that roughly 10% of the number of people I expected to reach took the time to respond to my survey. Given that toothpaste companies only ask 5 dentists what toothpaste they like, I’d say my survey produced a pretty reasonable data sample².

So, what did you have to say? Well, let’s find out, starting with you.

How are you feeling today?

I asked this question for two reasons:

1. To show I care, and
2. To see whether how you were feeling coloured your remaining answers.

To the second point, it appears as though your outlook that day didn’t colour your answers. Those who were having lousy days and those who were having great days both loved and hated certain things about my site.

Only one of you responded that you felt awful. Whoever you are, please let me by you a drink or a coffee or whatever will make you feel better. The vast majority rated your day as a 4 out of 5.

How long have you been reading my site?

I started blogging at patdryburgh.com back in 2007, when I was working as a music director at a church. Its purpose was to track what I was learning about leadership, music, and life in the church. The focus of my life and my blog shifted a year later when my time at the church came to an end and my career in design began.

Though I don’t have the numbers saved anywhere, I remember a distinct drop-off in readership when this shift happened. Understandably so, as my readers at the time were mostly music pastors who had no interest in what the latest CSS3 effect was going to be.

The responses to this question really reflect this shift. 78% of you started reading this site in the past two years. I can count the number of readers who have been reading this site for more than 2 years on one hand and a hot dog.

How do you read my site?

I wrote this question as a multiple-choice question so you could give more than one answer. Your answers were very informative, but there was actually only one answer I was truly interested in: “In a ‘read it later‘ type app.”

The reason is simple: is my content interesting enough for people to want to take their time reading it? When I write a longer article, is it skipped, read on the spot, or saved for later? I realized once the survey had been published that the question didn’t really answer all of these questions, but I still hold to the goal of providing content that is worth postponing to read until you have the time to focus.

Turns out, not many of you read my site in an app like this. I believe this result speaks to the lack of long-form articles I’ve posted to the site over the past two years. I plan to rectify this in the coming new year.

Post Frequency and Link Posts

I asked about my post frequency because I knew what my next question would be. A lot of what I publish here are link posts, which are my way of sharing what I find on the web. I rarely post links on Twitter—I save that space for dick jokes and complaining about Apple products. I care a lot about the link posts, because I truly value the work other people produce and share. If I could make a living sharing with you the work others have created, I would gladly take that opportunity.

It seems as though most of you at least like the link posts. If you don’t, please stop reading my blog. They aren’t going away. In fact, seeing the results of this survey has encouraged me to increase the rate at which I post links. My commitment to you regarding link posts is two-fold:

1. I will rarely, if ever, post something that everyone else is linking to, and
2. I will only publish something I’m really, really excited about or interested in.

Which of the following topics would you like to see more of? / Which of the following topics would you like to see less of? / Have you learned anything valuable from my site?

I asked these questions because I wanted to get a sense of why people were reading this site. Turns out, a lot of you read it for multiple reasons, both professional and personal. That actually means a lot, because it tells me you read this site not only for your personal gain—though I certainly hope you do benefit from what I write—but also because you care about me. As a human being in the 21st century, that means a lot.

Further Input

A lot of you were really nice in your additional comments (especially when it came to complimenting my beard). What I don’t think I’ve communicated nearly enough is that I really, really care about you. I want to hear what you think (in any medium other than a blog comment), how you feel, what’s going on in your life. If you’ve written something you think I’d be into, please let me know. If you’d like to grab a coffee or a drink and get to know one another better, let’s set a date. If you have a question or a problem you think I can help with, feel free to ask. I’ll do my best.

In Conclusion

This site is about me (see: the domain name, the about page, the silly cartoon face), but it’s also about you. I believe this, because I believe that we as humans are inextricably connected to one another. We grow together, we learn together, we laugh together, we cry together. I read your site or follow you on Twitter or like your Instagram photos because I care about you. It feels great to know that’s probably why you’re reading my site, too.

※ Permalink for “The Results Are In” published on date_to_rfc822

※ Permalink for “Las Vegas – Los Angeles” published on date_to_rfc822

Around the time I decided to quit my job and work for myself I made the decision that this little site should no longer be a personal blog, but a marketing page for my design work.

The site’s design has changed several times along the way, all with the intention of improving its appeal to potential clients. I updated it with new work, made it responsive, and added pretty new buttons, all the while tracking how each change affected the number of inquiries I received from potential clients.

Quite frankly, it didn’t.

In the past two years, one client has found me through my site.¹ All other clients have come through word-of-mouth and relationships I’ve built over the past 4 years I’ve been in this industry. That’s not to say my site didn’t help at all, but I realized that the time I was investing trying to entice people I didn’t know to become clients wasn’t paying off, especially when a steady stream of people I had a connection with were already happy to hire me.

About a month ago, I took down my portfolio of work from this site. I moved the blog (including link posts) back to the home page.² Most of you likely didn’t notice, as the majority of you read my site through an RSS reader. I didn’t announce it because it didn’t really matter; you were already reading.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, why I feel so passionate about keeping a personal blog. These thoughts have been stirring in my head and this evening I finally feel like I have the capacity to put those thoughts into words.

One of my favourite things to do with this site is to share the amazing things people are doing all over the world. Whether it’s a friend asking for help to record an album or a stranger taking my breath away, I want to do what I can to get the word out about it.

I rarely if ever get feedback about the things I share or write. I don’t do this for comments (they aren’t enabled) or tweets or emails. I do it because it’s the best way I know to let you know about what’s on my mind or to share something I’ve discovered.

---

A couple of years ago, I took some time away from checking my site’s traffic statistics. It was a great way to gain some perspective on why I was blogging, and to realize what was important were the connections I was making with others through my writing. As I prepare for a trip to LA this week, and as the sweet smell of Christmas begins to permeate the air, I think it’s about time to take another step back until the new year. Not from writing or posting links, but from worrying about how many people are following along.

Before I do, though, I’d love to hear how you feel about what I do here. I’ve never taken a survey of my readership, but I think before I stop worrying about how many of you there are, it would be good to get a sense of the overall attitude towards my blog. If you wouldn’t mind taking about 5 minutes to fill this out for me, I would really appreciate it.

Take The Survey

※ Permalink for “On Blogging” published on date_to_rfc822

I linked to David Redding last week when he featured me in his photo series, The Real London. David is a craftsman. He is able to take a scene which most people walk right by on a daily basis and turn it into a magical location. He did this on our photo shoot last week. Below are the results of his craft.

---

Thank you, David, for not only taking some fantastic portraits, but for also showing me what true confidence looks like from the other side of the lens.

※ Permalink for “The Other Side of the Lens” published on date_to_rfc822

We’re only two weeks from the very first screening of Imprint, the short film for which I am both an actor and producer. It’s been accepted into the London Short Film Showcase happening on Saturday, November 5 at Museum London. The showcase will be the first screening of a project that has stolen my heart for the past 3 months.

We just launched a new website for the film, which includes an updated trailer, a free download of the film’s soundtrack (including a cover of the Antlers song “Kettering” by my new band Burn Like Fabulous), screening dates and locations, and a list of credits for the film.

Speaking of screenings, I’m really excited to announce the second screening of the film happening on Sunday, November 6 at FitzRays at Dundas and Talbot in Downtown London. Burn Like Fabulous will be playing some of our favourite songs, and my dear friend Carly Thomas will be opening the night with her beautiful music.

---

If you can’t tell, I’m incredibly excited about this film project. I’ve never been part of something like this. From filming until 4am in the morning to having the cops called on three separate occasions to staying up multiple nights editing to seeing a forklift lifting a demolished Lincoln and dropping it in front of a telephone pole just so we could re-shoot a 30-second shot; it was totally worth it even if the film never makes a dime. The skills, knowledge, and friendships I’ve developed over the course of the project were well worth the cost.

If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you come out to one of the two screenings happening in November. For those who can’t make one of the screenings, I’ll be sharing details about how you can see the film in the next little while.

※ Permalink for “Imprint Update” published on date_to_rfc822