Drafts: What's in your folder of shame?, by Jeffrey Veen

Drafts: What's in your folder of shame?

The other day, Matt Jones and I were chatting about what we haven't written on our blogs. Turns out we both are in the habit of starting posts, writing a paragraph or two, and then trailing off. We started comparing the lingering headlines in our "Drafts" folder, or as Matt calls it, The Folder of Shame:

The things where you’ve just thought of the title, but written nothing to back it up? The momentary points of self-deluded genius that in the cold light of day you thought better of?

So I took a deep breath, opened up my Drafts, and had a look. Sure enough, an accurate record of interesting ideas that never really existed:

Cyclical Optimism and the "New" Internet
Content Types in Blog Tools
54x11
Process and Stupidity
How often should you post?
Not Synonyms
The Experience of Time
Why is checked luggage so hard?
Self-centered design
Someone is reading your feed
Bending Towards Our Users

So what's in your Drafts folder?

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 6 November 2005 at 6:02 PM. It was filed under Personal.

Comments

1. On 6 November 2005 at 6:28 PM Matthew Oliphant wrote:

I found fewer than I thought would be there:

Requirements: As in, "Required."
The Credit Card Experience
Idea Analysis
Hey UX... Who's Your Male Parental Authority Figure!
The Radio Button Trap
I Swear This is Not Turning Into an "I hate Apple" Site

2. On 6 November 2005 at 7:03 PM Mark Benson wrote:

Irritable Vowel Syndrome
Punctuation Elation
Squirrely and Burly
Nice Eyes
Ulterior Motive
Shady Character
Glum Drum
Phish
My Block
Roots
End of the Future Tense
Skim Shady
Doug Mansion
Skanky Franky
Bettin' the Farm
Merry the Ratchet

3. On 6 November 2005 at 7:08 PM Ryan wrote:

Did you just scalito on my dorito, Mr. Ito?
A new series: Becoming and Unbecoming.
Deconstructing Peets.com
Designing on Rails
The Boss Loss
Regarding Ro[v]e.
Oh, Sundrop, why have you lost your way?
The Tuftian Web
The Saga of the New Jersey T-shirt.
Single Task and the Kitchen Appliance Heaven.
Ranta Claus.

That last one has been sitting there for almost a year. Maybe old is new again. ;)

4. On 6 November 2005 at 7:57 PM Roy Schestowitz wrote:

>> Invites and Free Advertisements
>> Cookie-Based Search Results
>> Windows Fragmented
>> Desktop Mouse Gestures
>> Favourite Firefox Extensions

5. On 6 November 2005 at 8:58 PM Lucas Chan wrote:

54x11?

That's a serious gear you've got there. I wish we had San Francisco style hills in Melbourne. :)

6. On 7 November 2005 at 12:25 AM Mark Tranchant wrote:

Lucas - that depends on Jeff's wheel size... ;-)

7. On 7 November 2005 at 12:44 AM Mike P. wrote:

Who needs hills? Get out on a flat and wind it up!!

(nothing like a good 54x11 ;-)

8. On 7 November 2005 at 6:30 AM Matt Henderson wrote:

+ The profession of software engineering (and the big difference between software engineers and programmers)
+ Use of OmniOutliner as a planning tool
+ The "planning" aspect missing from GTD processes
+ (A whole series of topics related to running a small services company.)

9. On 7 November 2005 at 6:44 AM Sally Carson wrote:

Awesome post idea:

* Chris Ware Should Be a Web Designer
* An Open Letter to Coffee
* (Microsoft) Outlook Not So Good
* Water Cooler Recipes

(I also wanted to comment on 54x11 -- your poor knees! Personally I'm rockin' an easy 42x17 fixie)

10. On 7 November 2005 at 7:18 AM Jeremy Flint wrote:

Reveiw: CSS: The Definitive Guide
The Web Design Process
Review: Web Design On A Shoestring
Reveiw: Yahoo!360
Reveiw: The WordPress.com Backend
Reveiw: MeasureMap

Nothing special or particularly interesting. Just some reviews of books and apps that I have never finished.

11. On 7 November 2005 at 8:12 AM Matt Shobe wrote:

Who is this other writer? He's working with much better material than I am. Draft headlines in my list:

Weather Geekery
Los Angeles to Albuquerque — by bicycle
Ten Impossible Things I Want to Accomplish
Digital Rhetoric and the Urban Hipster
Flyted.com underachieves badly for the sake of reuse
Straight from the Underground

12. On 7 November 2005 at 8:18 AM Colin D. Devroe wrote:

Here is my list:

The day I met George Lucas and we made a short film together.

The day I became a millionaire

The day I finished an app even Veen could be proud of

Ok, they are all lies, heres the real list

A meme to help developers get the feedback they deserve

Apple is becoming a digital content juggernaut

The hype machine is making great announcements into mediocre announcements

4 8 15 16 23 42

Not as lengthy as others I'm afraid. I've got more half written functions and scripts than I do drafts.

13. On 7 November 2005 at 8:19 AM Dan Saffer wrote:

* Cars as Traffic Sensors
* Socio-Mechanical Systems
* Pure Products of America Go Crazy

14. On 7 November 2005 at 8:32 AM Paul Boag wrote:

I think I must win for the most boring drafts folder. I only have two: Heuristic usability testing and AJAX wishlist.

15. On 7 November 2005 at 10:07 AM Jason Landry wrote:

Metis Crossing
Odeo Has Landed
Photos

The 'Metis Crossing' post may actually happen one day.

16. On 7 November 2005 at 1:20 PM John Zeratsky wrote:

I'm still going to write most of these, so, uh... don't steal my ideas.

* Weekly, the artist
* Carson Workshops with Eric Meyer
* Podcasts I listen to
* Imagining an on-demand future for television
* How to Rip DVDs on the Mac
* One Dream, One Web Rendering Engine
* My rear-view mirror technique is unstoppable
* Printing
* let's just call it podcasting
* Connecting to Cingular's EDGE network with the Sony Ericsson S710
* Preventing comment spam: My approach
* Drawing the line on content management software

17. On 7 November 2005 at 1:59 PM Jens Meiert wrote:

I'll never tell, unless you pay me for ;)

18. On 8 November 2005 at 12:19 PM Meri wrote:

To be honest, I tend to have lots of ideas at a time and then long dry stretches. My way of spreading it all evenly is to write drafts and then update later.

Admittedly, some of these are unlikely to be finished, but hopefully a few will!

* UK Higher Education: The Plot Thickens
* Making Users Feel Like Heroes
* IT Careers
* Style Diversity
* Music Associations
* Python for GUI Programming
* Feeling Like An Outsider
* Prioritization and ConsultingWare
* Need For Some People To Stay In Industry
* Thoughts on Flexworking
* Them and Us And Evil

19. On 8 November 2005 at 1:07 PM Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:

Since I don’t use any web-based weblogging software, mine is a directory full of (HTML-contaminated) text files; and since I put text in files with uppercase names, it looks like this:

ATOM_VS_RDF
BEGRIFF_HOMEPAGE
CLASSDBI_AND_OTHER_ORMS
CSS_RANT
EXTRATERRESTRIAL_LIFE
FLASH_NAVIGATION_RANT
FREEDOM_SAFETY_PROGRAMMINGLANGUAGES
FUTURE_OF_MUSIC
GIMP_TIP_IMAGE_ALPHA
MUSIC_PLAYER_RANT
MY_MENTAL_PROCESS
ON_MONOCULTURES
PERL_RANT
POWER_EDITING
PROGRAMMING_IS_HARD
SCREENSHOT_SCRIPT
SIFR_BLOWS
SYSTEMS_RESEARCH
VERY_HYPERTEXT
WEB_CHARSET_RANT
WHY_PHP_SUCKS
XHTML_FOR_IE

Some of them are so old that I wrote them using mdash and ldquo/rdquo entities. (It’s been a long time since I switched my entire environment to UTF-8, nowadays I write actual smart quote characters and such.) A lot of them are actually still salvagable… if I only I did salvage them.

20. On 8 November 2005 at 1:09 PM Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:

(PS.: BEGRIFF_HOMEPAGE is written in German and was supposed to be translated for posting… it means “the term ‘homepage’” (I talk about its etymology).)

21. On 10 November 2005 at 6:15 AM Olly wrote:

I've only got one: Forms Can Function. Really ought to finish it and ship it out.

22. On 11 November 2005 at 2:11 AM DonnaM wrote:

Mine don't make it as far as drafts. They sit in a backpack page, or I compose them in my head and never get to posting them...

23. On 21 November 2005 at 8:12 AM richard wrote:

It's not really a folder of shame per se, because I write while posts on purpose and leave them as drafts until the day I post them on FreshArrival. It's more like a queue of sorts. I've got:

How to design cool stuff
Brush" your toothbrush
and Ice is irrelevant

24. On 22 November 2005 at 11:51 AM steven streight aka vaspers the grate wrote:

Save as Draft?

That's so Old Media, so 1980s.

Reminds me of the IBM Selectric memory typewriter.

A blog is all about spontaneity, sharp tongues, and fast web publishing. While I'm all for fact checking and research, we cannot have much passion for months old drafts.

Say as much as you feel inspired to say on a topic, then call it a post, and launch it.

I save as draft only when I am adding material to the textual or image content, not because I'm "working [indefinitely, interminably] on the article".

I never have anything in draft. It all gets published, about one to four posts per day, at my various blogs.