Andy Welfle.

Most of my best writing is spread out among a number of other websites. My guest post at GatherContent, for one, and some favorites from Medium or Woodlcinched. I appreciate that my writing is found in a diverse number of sites, but how do I show all those articles to someone at once?

Because of this question, I’ve been looking for a good online writing portfolio for years now. Sure, I could (and maybe should) put a custom portfolio option in a subdirectory of Welfle.com, but I tend to think that if others can create one better than I, why not use theirs?

That’s why I was excited when I found Contently recently. They have free platforms for writers, for brands and for media companies. I’m concerning myself specifically for the portfolio platform for writers.

It lets me add publications for which I’ve written, and from there, I can add clips. From there, I can get into the granular details, editing the title, description, and thumbnail of each clip (if the original article doesn’t have an image? No problem: I can upload my own!). I can rearrange those clips within my portfolio. And — best yet — it dynamically shows how many shares, likes, comments, etc. that I’ve gotten on it.

There are a few things I’m not thrilled about — it calls each clip a “story” for example, like I am a journalist or a fiction-writer. And see there where it says I have “2.5k followers”? That’s including Twitter and LinkedIn followers, where in reality there is likely a big overlap. And a couple of the publications have no appropriate thumbnail, so it displays a generic icon which I don’t think looks great.

Still, though, for a managed service, and a free one at that, this is great.

Sign up here, or if you want to see mine, check it out here.

I’m trying to do more writing about content strategy, since that’s what I do professionally. I’m a big fan of the folks across the pond over at Gather Content. They make a really invaluable tool for people like me — it’s a system to collect content from a client, for later integration into their website.

They also have a pretty great blog about content strategy, and have invited me to contribute to it! I adapted a piece I wrote for the Reusser Design blog and submitted it to them!

I learned about this whole “blobs/chunks” things from my content strategy hero, Sara Wachter-Boettcher. In a nutshell, it’s about custom content types (chunks) as opposed to a general WYSIWYG editor to handle the main content of a page (blobs).

Hit the link for the full article and some screenshots.

I have some friends who are amazing poets. I mean, really, really good. My good friend Erica has a blog called Let it go and I am consistently blown away by how beautiful her poems are.

She, and other friends, really ramp it up in April, which is National Poetry Month. She’s committed to a poem a day, and while I can’t match that, I’m trying to get the creative juices flowing to that area again. I figured others might like to join me in the National Poetry Month Poems collection on Medium.com.

I used to not be too bad at writing poetry. In college, I wrote a few that I was, and still am, pretty proud of. Trouble is, after graduation, almost all of my writing took a turn for the concrete — I write almost solely to inform nowadays, and I’m painfully out of practice with fiction writing (which was my whole life at a certain time in my life), entertainment features writing and poetry.

Nowadays, I can still write a limerick or a haiku, which I don’t really consider real poetry. (At least not the way I write haikus.) But to set my mind free to make associations I don’t usually do — I don’t know if my mind is lest plastic with age, or if I’m just woefully out of practice, but it’s a serious challenge.

Hopefully, this month I can overcome that.

Have you guys heard Inside Joke yet? It’s a fortnightly podcast where my friend Dirk talks to interesting people. He’s interviewed awesome people so far like Matt Kelley, Erica Anderson and Alex Jonathan Brown. He even interviewed me several months ago.

But this most recent episode takes the cake. He has Roman Mars from the excellent, excellent podcast about design and architecture, 99% Invisible. This is a big deal for public radio geeks like me. I learned a lot about Roman Mars (Like did you know he’s responsible for Public Radio Remix?

It’s a reasonable listen at 45 minutes. You should check it out at the link, or go find it on the iTunes Podcast Store.

Something really exciting happened to me yesterday — I was invited to contribute to Medium (which I’ve mentioned before in a previous post here) This is a platform I’ve been excited about for months — it’s a content publishing platform created by Evan Williams (@ev), the founder of Blogger and Twitter. He’s a heavyweight in the social media world.

What is Medium? What problem does it solve? Ev says of the usual social media players in an interview in November on The Big Web Show:

Social media [that is talked about today] is about lowering the bar to the floor when it comes to creating content, but has a ceiling as to what can be created. Instagram is great how great how quickly you can do something that is cool, but you can [only do that one thing].

With Medium, it’s kinda the opposite. Not everyone can create (at least not yet), but there are many things you can post: short form to long form writing, photos, etc.

Yes, that does sound like a blog, doesn’t it. Well, almost. Joshua Benton from the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard said in a post about Medium:

What’s most radical about Medium is that it denies authorship.

Okay, maybe not denies authorship — people’s names are right next to their work, after all. But it degrades authorship, renders it secondary, knocks it off its pedestal.

… And while social networks allowed that value to be spread, algorithmically, much wider, the proposition was much the same. You were interested in your Facebook news feed because it was produced by your friends. You were interested in your Twitter stream because you’d clicked “Follow” next to every single person appearing in it.

It feel like a big, collective, hive-mind blog, and posts are organized in collections. Though I can create a private collection, which could essentially function as an in-platform blog, I would have much more success with a shared collection. So rather than assign a category to my post, I’m writing a post to that category. As Benton said, “topic triumphs over author.”

By downplaying the author a bit more (than, for example, this blog, which is solely about me and my interests and thoughts), it’s elevating the content and its message. Content is king, after all, and I can definitely respect it taking a role higher than the author.

Just today, for example, I wrote my inaugural post in a popular collection called “Writers on Writing“. My post is something which is something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, is now part of that collection.

People can “recommend” the post which moves it to a more prominent place, and I have the chance of being moved to the front page. But I’m contributed toward a larger theme, one voice in many. This blog, for example, has many posts in various themes, but the unifying factor is that they’re my posts. Medium is mostly about the content itself.

Medium’s not bad to look at, either.

Using the gorgeous Tisa Web Pro, the compose screen and the article view is full of Typekit-y goodness. It’s a breeze to add photos between paragraphs, and adding a cover photo to your story is as easy as dragging and dropping. You have minimal editing capabilities, but I’m okay with that. I especially like how the text-formatting bar is available by selecting a word or phrase after you write it — I can spend less time worrying about my formatting when I should be concentrating on writing my content.

Don’t worry. This blog isn’t going away. I’m still not certain when and how I’ll be using Medium. But since I’ve been finding so many great articles and stories on Medium to read, I’m really excited to contribute in some way to that greater body of writing.

Everyone who works at a creative agency has an “agency crush”: another company that does something cool that you admire and — however subconsciously — want to emulate.

For me, that agency crush is One Lucky Guitar. For some of my coworkers (well, and me, too), it’s Sparkbox. And for my boss, it’s Carsonified.

Ryan Carson, the owner of Carsonified, has long extolled the virtues of the four-day work week.

There’s a big hump to get over in client perception, he says:

When we tell people that at Carsonified we only work 4 days a week (Mon-Thurs, 9am – 6pm) then the general assumption is that we don’t get as much done as other companies. That our workload has to be reduced in order to fit into our smaller work week. “You can’t do a full time job in just four days,” is the most popular reaction.

My boss has taken this to heart, and that’s why at the beginning of 2013, we started working ten-hour days, four days per week.

From my post at the Reusser Design blog:

Longer work days mean more concentration time, and that, paired with a conscious effort to minimize interruptions, means more productive days. And as a bonus, our team gets Fridays off to work on creative projects, spend more time with their family, or maybe just sleeping in!

I’ve never been much of a morning person, so getting up at 5:00 AM to be into work at 6:30 AM is really hard. But doing that only four days a week makes a big difference, especially because I can get a lot of things done on Friday — stuff that would otherwise be broken up into a few hours in the evening on the other weekdays.

tl;dr I really like working longer work hours, but four days a week. Fridays off are worth it.

The brilliant Marco Arment discusses the new App.net tiers and some recent changes. As always, he writes with clarity and foresight:

My bigger concern is the shift they’ve taken recently away from being a near-clone of Twitter. They’ve always positioned themselves as a more generic platform that could be used to support many different apps, and the Twitter clone was just one use of it. But they’ve pushed especially hard in this direction recently, especially with the heavy promotion of the new File API.

I’ve been using App.net now for about a month (Thanks, Brad Dowdy, for the invite!), and I just switched my trial account over to a paid account last week.

(Of course, all that is moot now that ADN offers a freemium plan.)

So far: I’m really enjoying it. The community is small — a little too small, maybe — but it serves a niche. With a handful of web developers, tech journalists, Minor Internet Personalities, and smart people, I’ve been really enjoying the thoughtful, intentional conversations I’ve been having there. (Which is helped, in part, by the 256 character limit on posts as opposed to Twitter’s 140.)

I say “intentional” because, in general, there was no one there who didn’t want to be there. Either a user was paying $35 a year, or had a month trial to give it a try and make a decision whether or not to stick around.

This model has changed now. In the matter of a few hours, the number of Fort Wayne residents on ADN went from two to more than ten. Now there are plenty of people who signed up for free just to stake out their claim on another social network. And more businesses and faceless brands can and will join to market at is. But is this the price of growth? I suspect so.

I don’t harbor any unrealistic expectations. App.net could very well fail like all the other ones, or just peter out, like Google+. The creators want it to replace Twitter. I can’t imagine that happening, though I wish it could. I’d be happy with my niche group of internetters. I think the community is so tight because of the moralistic ideal we all hold — a high regard for developers, for the privacy of the user and as much transparency as possible in how the platform is run. They’ve done a great job with that, and is antithetical to everything that pisses me off about Twitter.

I’ll be interested to see where it goes. Meanwhile, I may have a few invites left to a free ADN account. Or, if you’re already there, find me at @andyw.

The amazingly creative folks, and my good friends, at pye,brown (pronounced “pie comma brown”) are holding a second Bomb Shelter event. I was out of town during the first one, though I fully intend on attending this.

What is the Bomb Shelter? Says the website:

The Bomb Shelter is a post-apocalyptic haven for first-time standups to get on stage and tell jokes in front of an audience that just wants everyone to survive the night.

This is a great idea. I have no stand-up comic aspirations, but if I did, my roadblock would be a safe space to try out my jokes, my technique and audience reactions, long before I build up enough confidence to try it out in front of strangers.

Click the headline to check it out (more details, like ticket prices and locations coming soon), or click here to check out videos from the first event.

I had a draft half-complete in my list to write about Day One, a really, really gorgeous diary app, but then I read this post by Chris Gonzalez over at Unretrofied, and realized he talked about it it way better than I.

This thing makes me want to journal. Creating an entry is super easy since the home screen provides two gigantic buttons for starting either a photo entry or one with only plain text. Once I’ve started up a new entry, before I’ve even typed anything, that entry is immediately useful due to the date, location, and weather being filled automatically.

I am in total favor of keeping a diary. I think it is a great idea to outline your thoughts, actions, and feelings every day, so you can look back later and reflect.

Trouble is, I don’t do it.

Am I lazy? Well, maybe. Mostly, I just can’t get in the habit.

This is a great, accessible way to do it. I supplement my iOS Day One app with the Mac App, which is as equally beautiful. The two of them sync instantly via iCloud.

I’ve been using it off-and-on for about a year, and this year, I’ve been more on than off, which is good.

In true HufffPo style, they have only the most biting White People Problems-worthy commentary.

Citing an article from The New Media Society, “Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: The performative and political dimensions of Facebook abstention, the author suggests that being able to refuse this mainstream platform is a privilege in itself:

Like tossing out the boob tube or insisting on going around without a cell phone, ditching Facebook, though embraced as a kind of counter-culture status symbol by those who quit, smacks of elitism to others, in part because it suggests whoever quits has enough social caché or stature to make socializing on Facebook unnecessary. They’re too busy, too important to have to be beholden to posting photos or status updates. (Quick, someone tell the Rich Kids of Instagram.)

I do understand that as a white, straight, cisgendered male, I have plenty of my own privilege to get over. So excuse me as I shove my “conspicuous media non-consumption” further down the list, guys.

(Thanks to my good friend Amber Recker for the linkage!)