The Now page

I have been thinking of mindful journaling of late. I’ll guess it’s a subconscious result of ideas I’ve seen across different places in the last couple of months–a question based social network (you get regular general question prompts), Cactus, and Now pages on some personal blogs.

I redesigned my blog about 2 weeks ago and decided to add a Now page. Then it stuck. Imagine a simple way to publish what I am currently up to (or some sort of journal), but with some social built around it. I can almost hear you scream that’s Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter…but this is different.

A now page shows a single post about what you are up to. It’s not a series of blog posts or series of status updates. And this is the base I fleshed the idea on. At every point, it will only be a single post updated with recent events. A new post overwrites your last public post. (In reality, all your previous posts are archived so you can still have private access to them). The caveat I have also added is that you can set how frequent you want to publish this–once daily, every 3 days or weekly. The goal here is to change preconceived “another blogging/status update site” bias. Once you make a post, you have to wait that interval before you can make a new post. (In reality, you can delete your last post or update your frequency and that will allow you post immediately).

Yes I mentioned social but you can loosely translate that to mean following pages you are interested in so that updates from them become available in your dashboard feed. The caveat: no public display of the following/follower counts. The numbers are only available to you. No commenting, rating or any of those things.

I spent some free time in the last couple of days to build a prototype you can check out at thenow.page. (I used Twitter for authentication because it’s a quick way to get data for quick profiles). Play around, write some stuff and publish your “now”. It’s a quick prototype so things may break here and there but I am happy to get the feedback and hear your thoughts. I am @kehers on twitter.