It’s amazing how much a little friction in a process will slow its adoption, and cause those who did manage to adopt the process to abandon it as soon as a lower friction option appears.

Over the years I’ve thought a lot about publishing tools. I’m not a publisher, but I am a toolmaker, and I like to write, so I’ve been drawn to creating tools that make writing and publishing that writing easier. It’s been a few years since I’ve done much in this area, but I’m starting to pick it up again (this blog is, to some degree, a testbed for those tools).

Facebook and Twitter (and increasingly Snapchat) have won by solving a lot of fundamental problems: distribution, notification, authentication, and ease of use. There’s no denying that it’s just easier to create a post on Facebook than it is on one’s own blog–both easier at the time of creation, and without all of the upfront cost of setting a blog up. I’ve automated a lot of my workflow, but I’m a software engineer and nerdy enough to take the time. I am not the general case. For the open web to compete against the silos, we have to solve for the general case.

Anyway, this post is also a test post for a new workflow I’m building (code for this entire blog, including the tools I’m building to power it, is here). I’m pretty sure it works.

Only one way to find out.