Short-Burst, Motivation-Driven Creativity Capture - Drivel

This is something I’ve discussed with @tim before (as well as just about anybody else who lets me talk their ear off on the reg).

tl;dr go here if you want to see my rawest drivel. Maybe later you can subscribe to that, and/or maybe only some of the better stuff.

Idea

Eventually it’ll be some web software that will help me out with capturing my silly, nonsensical brain drippings that I am compelled to create multiple times a day. The idea is to have 3-ish tiers or “feeds”. The first one is just raw input, the following are manually plucked by me in a kind of curation process. I also thought it would be cool to have back-linking all the way up to any more-finished products come out of these blips. So you could see from any number of micro-ideas what blog post or poem or song or story it became.

Sort of analogous in model to a Trello board where people can subscribe to specific lists that have some different guarantees of what goes into them, and more rules about how the different cards flow from one list to another. But that’s just the model, it wouldn’t really act or look like that in practice.

Right now, it’s one, soon to be 2-ish markdown files on my website. I just prepend to the version I have locally and use git to push new stuff to the site. If I could get a way to update an RSS feed(s) easily it would cover the 90% use case of the original idea. Probably just be able to have a cron job that rebuilds the the feeds manually.

Drivel is what I decided to call it. And you can find this early version here

Motivation

I struggle with focus and motivation, and so I’ve learned to ride whatever wave I’ve got when I’ve got it. I try to keep as many tools to express my creativity around me as possible, so that when I get the urge I spend as little time getting set up as I can.

Lately I’ve noticed that one burst that happens quite frequently is the urge to just write whatever nonsense spills out of my head down. Usually this is something rhyming or vague or vaguely rhyming. Most of it isn’t very usable, but some of it is quite good (to me, at least). The problem is that normally these things get written on notebooks, I turn the page, and then they might as well be lost.

I’ve desired a place to put these things where, not only I could keep them and look at them later, but also other people might see them and tell me whether they like them, or just admire my nonsense from time to time.

Social media is clearly not the right place for this. I get these bursts 4-8 times a day, and I expect it would bug most people to get 4-8 tweets or facebook updates or whatever every day, most of it nonsense and not very fun.

To this end, I have come up with an idea for some software that would help me satisfy this urge and help anybody else who wants to watch my mental unraveling do so, maybe with some filtering.

I’ve decided to call this effort Drivel

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