2024-07-03

• Watched the Aaron Swartz documentary yesterday. Documentary was “just ok,” which was kind of a bummer bc I am a big fan of Aaron’s work. Naturally, the documentary spent a lot of time focused on the criminal case the government brought against Aaron for his downloading a bunch of JSTOR articles via MITs network, and that’s reasonable/a good call. But I wish they had given a little more time to certain of Aaron’s technical contributions that are really excellent. In particular, I was disappointed that they didn’t even mention Markdown. My recollection is they focused on Aaron’s technical contributions to 1) mini-wikipedia when he was 12, 2) creative commons licensing stuff, and 3) Reddit. And those are cool things too. I just happen to have a very strong affinity for Markdown because of its impact on Internet publishing. Basically, I believe Markdown made it much easier for individuals publish writing on the web with minimal intermediaries/technical acumen. HTML+CSS are “ok” for reasonably technical people, but Markdown, I believe, really shines in making those technologies more accessible to people who aren’t comfortable with writing HTML on their own. And that’s a big deal! Naturally, all of my writing on the web is done in Markdown, and I vastly prefer it to fiddling with direct HTML or using some hosted blogging platform. I think Markdown has resulted in significantly more writing being published on the web, and published in a way that isn’t owned by centralized platforms, and that’s a really great thing.
  
• With that said, one thing that still seems too hard is getting (selected) images from my phone -> published on my blog. Surprising.

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