The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.

He goes on to highlight how unusual this is when compared with the previous generation, who rarely had the need or opportunity to write outside of school assignments.

What intrigued me, though, wasn’t the amount of extracurricular writing, but how students’ perception of writing has changed in a culture where most of their work is widely shared.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

This struck a chord with me. I left my university after two years. Originally, I intended to go back after a year or two, but I never did. There were a lot of reasons why I left, but a big one was that, like these students, I had a lack of enthusiasm about my course work. School assignments seemed pointless to me. Most of them didn’t really benefit anyone, maybe not even myself. Sure, sometimes the process of completing an assignment helped me learn the material, but a lot of the time the purpose felt more like I was just proving that I had already learned it. Not putting my knowledge into practice, not creating something, just going through a literally academic exercise.

This was especially true because by the time I was halfway through my freshman year, I scored a part-time job as a Java developer, thanks to some good luck and the help of my roommate. I had the freedom to work remotely from my dorm room for as many or as few hours as I could manage each week. This made it hard to feel motivated to spend a lot of time writing trivial programs that demonstrated some principle or data structure without actually accomplishing anything useful, when I could spend the same time writing software meant to be used by real people, while learning skills I knew were applicable to real-world work, and get paid for it.

(As an aside, none of that software I worked on in my college job actually was used by real people, as far as I know. Frankly, it was pretty pointless too, and I quickly realized that I would never want to actually use the software myself, and wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, either. Despite that, I learned more skills while working there that I still find useful now than I ever did writing map coloring programs and merge sorts in my CS courses.)

So I find it really interesting to learn that a whole generation of students shares my disdain for purely academic exercises. OK, maybe that’s an overstatement, but I think the article does point out a need for change in the way school work is assigned. Students who are used to creating and sharing their creations as a part of their daily life won’t be motivated to work on projects that they’re expressly forbidden to collaborate with their peers on, and which effectively die on the day they’re handed in for grading.

Maybe schools need to learn how to engage students in work that is essentially open and collaborative, not just with their classmates, but with the world at large. Work that helps build their reputations, and provides real value to a broader community. Work that feels meaningful to both the students themselves and the people they involve as their audience and co-participants.

Maybe schools need to learn how to recognize the creative work that students are already doing, on their own initiative, and nurture it into something that also has academic value.

Maybe schools need to realize that it is increasingly important for people in all sorts of careers to take an active role in shaping the world, and that working through scripted assignments for evaluation by an academic authority is teaching students skills for twentieth-century jobs, instead of helping them master the creativity and boldness that they will need for the future that they’ve already started building.

That said, I have a handful of long-standing intentions that never seem to turn into action. Or, really, they’ll turn into a short spurt of action whenever I’m feeling particularly guilty or inspired about them, that quickly fizzles out as soon as something else comes up.

I think part of my problem is that I rarely set concrete goals for these things, only vague notions such as “exercise more” or “work on music” that do nothing to help me gauge whether I’m succeeding or failing. Another problem is that when I keep my personal plans private, I’m accountable to nobody but myself, and it’s all too easy to make excuses about why I did other things instead. So, I think I can beat both of these hang-ups by deciding on a handful of specific metrics and declaring them here in the open. Maybe I can shame myself into keeping on track.

It just so happens that now is one of the more ideal times for me to be refocusing my life. The entire second half of 2008 was impossibly busy for me, punctuated by frequent travel… at least, much more frequent than I’m used to. It looks like this summer may turn out the same way for me, and I’ve got another long trip planned for February, so if I want to establish some new habits, now is the time.

I don’t want to be unrealistic — the whole idea is to make these goals achievable — so I’m limiting it to five reasonable objectives. At the same time, I do want to stretch myself a little, so in addition to five modest goals each one will have a more challenging pair. If I hit the first target, I can feel pretty good about myself, but if I hit the second, even better.

Music

I have a life-long love of music… and a life-long habit of collecting musical instruments and projects, only to let them fall by the wayside. For ten years now (wow, has it really been that long?) I’ve dabbled in electronic music production, but have yet to really finish even one track. I’ve started plenty, but tend to lose interest or become otherwise distracted before any of them are finalized. OK, so it’s a hobby, and maybe I should be happy to just play around, but it would be nice to see something through. I’m going to try to put together a short album of techno and electro tracks, and if that goes well, a second collection of a few more free-form tracks.

Good: A five-track EP
Better: An additional three-track EP in a more adventurous style

Writing

It seems like I write a blog post every couple of months about how I need to write more blog posts. In November I said, “surely I can think of something interesting to post at least once a week.” It turns out, thinking of things to write about isn’t as hard as actually taking the time to write them. So I’m going to dial down the ambition a little bit and shoot for somewhere between one and two posts each month.

Good: At least fifteen posts this year
Better: At least twenty posts this year

Exercise

I’m not getting much of a workout sitting behind a desk for eight-plus hours a day. This is nothing new, but I think it’s starting to catch up with me. When I first moved to San Francisco, I lived at the top of a steep hill, which helped me get my heart rate up every day, but now I live in the flattest part of the city. I walk to work most days, but it hasn’t been enough to keep me from gaining weight in the past year. I’m still far from overweight, but if trends continue I may not be for long. Beyond that, it can’t be great for my health in other respects to be so out of shape.

I’ve never liked gyms, but several months ago Sharon & I got a stationary bike. In true San Francisco style, we found it on the curb outside our apartment. It’s pretty common here for people to leave unwanted items outside on the sidewalk for other people to claim. Usually, there’s a pretty good reason these things are unwanted, but this thing looked pretty clean and in good working condition, and it appeared out there in the time it took us to go out for brunch and come back, so we figured, hey, why not?

Since then, I have been mostly using it as an elaborate towel rack. It’s kind of ridiculous… as a form of exercise, it couldn’t really get any easier or more convenient. I can use it from the convenience of my home, and listen to music or a podcast while I cycle. I don’t need any gear other than what I already lucked upon, and there’s no need to coordinate with anyone else. Surely 25 to 45 minutes per day can’t be that hard.

Good: Average three hours per week on the stationary bike
Better: Average five hours per week on the stationary bike

Finance

Considering the times, we’re in pretty good shape. We’re not carrying any debt, we’re renting so there’s no mortgage to worry about, we’ve got relatively healthy long-term retirement accounts and a decent amount in savings. Still, I don’t feel like I’ve got a handle on where our spending is going, and we would eventually like to buy a house or a condo, so I feel like we could be saving more.

There are plenty of tools out there to help people get more of a grasp on their finances. There’s Quicken and the like, and in the past two or three years a number of web-based solutions have appeared. Each of these has tradeoffs, but I haven’t really taken the time to evaluate them fully. I think the first step in any long-term plan is to figure out where you are now, so I’ll take a look at all of the options to help me do that and try to get one set up. Once that’s done, I can try to develop a plan with Sharon for the next few years that will help us reach our goals, even in uncertain times.

Good: Set up and maintain a tool for tracking finances
Better: Create and stick to a monthly budget, including allocations for investment and philanthropy

Organization

Part of the reason I think I have such a hard time working on long-term goals — things that I think are personally important but that are not really essential in day-to-day living — is that I have a hard time juggling all of the things that I want to do with all of the things that I feel like I need to do. A few years ago I was introduced to David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology the same way many geeks were, through Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders weblog. The approach appeals to me, and I’ve read the book a couple of times, but I still haven’t found a “trusted system” for capturing projects and actions that appeals to me. I tried the all-paper route for a while, but it felt cumbersome. I really need something that I can use from a computer and from my phone. Echoing what I said about financial planning software, there are a number of web-based and local software-based approaches to task tracking now, and with an iPhone I wouldn’t need to be at a computer to use either. It’s again just a matter of trying them out and choosing one that doesn’t feel like a burden. If I can get that sorted out, I’d like to get the apartment organized better, and the first step in that will be to get rid of the piles of crap that I don’t want, need, or use anymore.

Good: Choose a tool for GTD-style task and project tracking
Better: Sell, donate, or trash everything in the house that we don’t want

Keeping Tabs on My Progress

I know that setting goals is pretty meaningless if I’m not tracking metrics on a regular basis, so as an experiment I’ve set up an account on Daytum to try to record my progress. I’m not sure yet if the site will really fit well, but it’s a start, and since it’s public, it helps to keep me honest. I’ll also plan to check in here a few times this year to note how I’m doing. If it works well, maybe I’ll start to make a habit of doing this every year. And if it doesn’t… I suppose I’ll have to publicly shame myself here so that may be all the motivation I need.

Hey, well at least I can add a tick to the blog post count!

Over the summer I finally got around to updating WordPress to 2.5, and later to 2.6.3, as well as updating to the latest release candidate of K2, the theme I use for this site. These changes should result in a few subtle improvments — my corners are much rounder now, and things like commenting and searching are all ajazzy. More importantly, it should keep me safe from any known security exploits in the wild.

I dressed up the site a bit further with a little favicon I made using the handy pixel editor at favicon.cc. I made a custom style for K2 with a few tweaks to the default look, and patched a couple of bugs in the theme that were preventing the markup from validating properly. I started promoting the site in a few more places, and notably added it to Planet Atlassian, which I imagine is how most of you are seeing this now.

Stats

I also got a couple of statistics tracking services up and running on the site. On the one hand, DreamHost (my hosting provider) offers analog out of the box. It’s not too pretty, but it gives me some interesting information about low-level requests, browser usage, detailed referrer information, and other nerdery. On the other hand, I’ve installed the WordPress.com Stats plugin (should I be admitting that? I hope there aren’t any known security holes…) to give me a higher-level view on popular posts and some pretty graphs of hits over time.

Unsurprisingly, my most popular post recently has been the one where I voice my support for Obama. It turns out that he’s got quite the following. What is unexpected, though, is the close second. “10 Reasons Why Being 30 is Better Than Being 20” has gotten a lot more traffic than I could ever imagine, mostly from people searching on Google for things such as “being 30″ or “good things about being thirty” or even “reasons to be 30″. It seems that I was not the only one suffering from a little bit of age-related anxiety this year. None of my other posts were even within the same order of magnitude of traffic as those two.

But, as analog revealed, most of the traffic hasn’t even been coming to blog posts at all. I first noticed something strange when I saw that my top referrers listed in analog are all myspace profiles of random teenage strangers. Then I discovered what they were all linking to:

It turns out that dozens of Obama supporters across the internet have been hot-linking to my copy of Shepard Fairey’s famous image of Obama — the one that I considerately copied from the site where I originally found it instead of stealing bandwidth.

My first reaction, “I’ll show those little brats,” had me searching for instructions on how to block hot-links, or maybe even substitute a replacement image to help teach them a lesson in manners. I quickly reconsidered. I’m only using a tiny fraction of the bandwidth allowed by my hosting plan, and, besides, why should I punish a bunch of young people — who probably don’t know any better — for displaying their enthusiasm for a presidential candidate that I strongly support? So, for now, I’ve left it as is, though I’ll be keeping an eye on it, since I’m practically begging for abuse by announcing it here.

Speed

Despite the relative lack of popularity of the actual writing on the site, I did make a few performance improvements, so I should be able to handle the surge of traffic from Digg or Slashdot that is surely just around the corner.

First, I installed the wp-cache plugin. For those who haven’t heard of it, wp-cache saves WordPress the trouble of recreating pages from scratch every time someone visits one, and therefore speeds up load times significantly. It’s not the most sophisticated caching plugin available, but it is super simple and seems to work pretty well.

Next, I stripped out the Amazon Associates widget JavaScript. When I wrote an article about Nine Inch Nails late last year, I made a cheap attempt to defray my hosting costs a little bit by adding links to Amazon.com whenever I mentioned an album. As you may know, website owners can get a small kickback on purchases made by their readers by including a special identifying tag in links from their site back to items on Amazon. There are a couple of ways to generate those links. One is to go through a tedious search form on their affiliate program website. The other is to use one of a variety of JavaScript widgets, which can do everything from recommending products based on keywords in your page to displaying a gaudy spinning 3-D carousel with pictures of popular products. I didn’t want anything that intrusive, so I just used a simple widget that automatically generated the correct links for text labelled with the ASIN of an item on Amazon.com. All I had to do is include a special script tag somewhere in the post.

For this I got a result that had all of the functionality of an unadorned text link, but was much, much slower. The site that serves Amazon’s affiliate widget JavaScript files performs pathetically poorly, and it drags down any site that uses widgets with it. Even worse, the post in question was included on the front page of the site, as well as several other index pages, so it was causing nearly the whole site to load slowly. So I bucked up and went through the process of converting all of the links in that post so that I could remove the widget script. It turns out that exactly zero people have bought anything through those links anyway.

After these two changes, the load time for the home page went from six or seven seconds down to under two seconds with a completely empty cache on both the client and server, and less than half a second with a warm cache (usually around 300–400 milliseconds in my unscientific tests).

I also added “more” tags to all of my old posts, so that it only displays an excerpt on the home page and index pages, with a link to continue to the rest of the article. This was less for performance — it probably doesn’t change load times significantly — and more to make the site easier to scan. I hope this will make it more readable for people, but if not please let me know and I can change things back. One thing I worry about especially is that I think WordPress will also truncate items in the RSS feed. I generally prefer full-text feeds myself, so I’ll understand if this irks people, but then again maybe nobody will care. Let me know in the comments and if it bugs enough people I’ll try to find a workaround.

OpenID

Another change is completely invisible to most readers, but helpful for me, so I’ll share in the hope that someone else finds it useful. I set up incrementalism.net as an OpenID delegator. This means that I can log in to sites that accept OpenID using my own URL instead of my actual identity provider URL, which I always seem to forget for some reason (am I “tmoore” or “timmoore” or “timothy.moore” on that site?) I did find a WordPress plugin to do this automatically, but I found it to be clunky, a little outdated (no OpenID 2.0 support) and apparently no longer maintained. The K2 WordPress theme supports custom user functions to allow you to easily add in plugin-like functionality, so I wrote one that looks like this:

<?php
/*
    Add OpenID Delegation
    Inspired by WP-Yadis http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yadis/
 */
add_action('wp_head', 'insert_delegation_tags');

define('MYOPENID_USERNAME', 'tmoore');

function insert_delegation_tags() {
    if (is_home()) {
?>

    <!-- OpenID Delegation -->
    <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
    <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://<?=MYOPENID_USERNAME?>.myopenid.com/" />
    <link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://<?=MYOPENID_USERNAME?>.myopenid.com" />
    <link rel="openid2.provider" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=<?=MYOPENID_USERNAME?>.myopenid.com" />

<?php
    }
}
?>

If you use myOpenID or another OpenID provider, feel free to adapt that for your own site. It looks like there’s now a new, more flexible plugin that has replaced WP-Yadis, but for now this does exactly what I need with no fuss.

So, What’s Missing?

One thing I haven’t been doing a lot of is writing. After my insistence that starting was the hard part, it turns out that I all too easily fell into that nerdy cliché of fiddling with the technology on the site instead of producing useful or interesting content. While I hope that this post has something of interest to readers who run their own weblogs, I’m writing it more to get back in the habit of posting. I intend to keep up a more regular schedule going forward — I won’t try to post every day, but surely I can think of something interesting to post at least once a week. Not everything will always be relevant to everyone that reads the site, since I don’t think there’s that much overlap between what my co-workers, my old DJ friends and my Mom are into, but I hope that everything will be interesting to someone, or at least fun to write.

In the past, I’ve sometimes shied away from writing personal things about my own life, but I think I’ll loosen up on that, since I think most of my readers know me personally, and it could help my writing voice sound a little less stilted. On the other hand, I’ll continue to write about technical things here, especially now that I’m becoming more visible as an Atlassian employee. So I apologize in advance if you’re bored out of your skull by half of what I write — you can use the category links on the right to focus in on the parts that you are interested in, and you can tack “/feed” onto the end of a category index URL to get a customized RSS feed.

This came out longer than I planned, but if you’re still reading, thanks and welcome to the relaunched incrementalism.net. I hope you’ll stick around!