It’s no secret that this blog has been operating at a reduced pace for some time now. I’m struggling to post much of anything, and I’m utterly failing in writing the kind of stuff I would like to be writing: longer and (hopefully) more substantive essays than what’s been posted recently, the kind that I used to turn out regularly.

And it’s hardly the case that I’ve been stumped for topics to post about, either. To the contrary, all sorts of blog post ideas continue to occur to me at all times. Often I’ll start mentally drafting them, anticipating a free moment when I can type them out and turn them into real posts that get published on this site — you know, like a blogger would do. But then a very busy day goes by, and two or three more, and before long the post no longer seems timely or unique and the moment is gone.

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For the past week or so, I’ve been playing with a slightly different kind of content here at Subtraction.com. This is something I talked about in a recent post in which I rambled on about the state of several different blog tools; I’m now experimenting with Tumblr-style image blogging that in most cases is purely about the image, with only a short line of additional text, if any. Here’s one example. (There are still some kinks to be worked out, so bear with me.)

This might seem unremarkable to regular readers since I already publish short, image-heavy, posts with just a bit of text. On the back-end though, it’s quite different, or at least meaningfully different. With the help of my friend Adam Khan, we’ve customized an ExpressionEngine ‘channel’ that presents a much more succinct publishing interface than the one I normally use. In essence, there are fewer fields to fill out and the fields themselves are physically smaller, which dissuades me from writing at any great length. On top of that, we’ve cooked up a bookmarklet that drives a simple script for grabbing images and auto-populating the forms, so creating a new post when I come across something I like only takes a few clicks.

None of this is novel in the least, as plenty of Web apps already do this much better than what we cooked up in an ad hoc fashion. But it’s long been a struggle for me to post here as regularly as I’d like, especially as my schedule just keeps getting busier and busier, so anything that makes it easier for me is something worth experimenting with. It’s also a useful reminder that interface design does matter — having a simpler, more concise publishing U.I. directly influences the kind of content that gets produced.

To be clear, this does not mean I’m giving up on posting longer pieces of real writing here. I still enjoy that a great deal; it’s just a matter of finding the time. Hopefully this supplemental style of blogging will help fill the void, but if you have any thoughts on how successful — or unsuccessful — it is, please let me know in the comments.

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Last week I had to shut down the comment thread for a post I wrote about The Daily when it turned into an unexpectedly snarky exchange on the merits of various approaches to iPad publishing. To look at the twenty comments that were published before I shut it off you’d think the discourse wasn’t that bad, but I had to filter out several fairly nasty and thoroughly unconstructive comments that some less diplomatic readers tried to post.

I don’t mind debate and disagreement and even outright refutation of my opinions, but I really do mean it when I implore commenters to “Please be nice.” In fact, that’s the only instruction I offer in my comments form, simply because I feel like it’s short and simple enough to set the right tone for 99% percent of the people who comment here. When commenters don’t adhere to that, the fun of running a site with open comments is drained away for me.

Luckily, this hasn’t happened very often. In fact I can’t remember the last time it did, and I doubt I’ve had to take this measure more than two or three times in the decade or so I’ve been running this blog. So I’m very grateful to the vast majority of the readership here who have had the decency to be nice in the comments.

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