Category Archives: Writing

One Class In High School That Changed My Life – And I Almost Didn’t Take It

Old photo of a classroom of girls sitting at desks typing on typewriters. They girls are all wearing school uniforms and the walls are vary sparsely decorated.

It’s funny how decisions you may make in the moment can affect the course of your life.

It was the fall of 1984 and I was signing up for classes for my last semester at my high school in southern Connecticut. I had one open course slot and I had to sign up for some class. I’d completed all my required courses and could sign up for any course I wanted.

So after some deliberation, I signed up for “typing”. This made sense in my brain since I’d been playing with computers since 1977 when the first Apple II came out and one of my best friends got one. Later I got my own Commodore 64, and at the high school I helped out in the computer labs that were full of Apple IIe’s.

It seemed to me that typing might be something to learn. 🤔

BUT… this was 1984/1985 in a US high school. The only people who took “typing classes” were the girls who were expecting to become secretaries. 🤯 Looking back, it’s kind of fascinating now, but there was this clear gender divide. Typing was NOT a class that boys normally took at my school.

So there I was… in a room full of desks with IBM Selectric typewriters on them. The only boy. Me and 20+ girls sitting there typing jjjjjjjjjjjjj and fffffffff a zillion times until we could finally work our way up to such phrases as “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and go on from there. Typing and typing and typing for the five months or so of the semester. Typing so much that we could “touch type” and be able to be looking at something completely different while typing on our typewriters. Doing speed tests and accuracy tests and more.

In the perfect clarity of hindsight, it turned out to be one of the smartest things I ever did!

I would go on to the University of New Hampshire where I got involved in the early Internet, as well as earlier networks like BITNET, EcoNet, etc. I would write millions of email messages, thousands and thousands of blog posts, a number of books, many reports and documents… and many, many lines of programming code in so many different languages.

I would go on to teach electronic publishing using Framemaker… and then develop courseware… and help people create web pages using HTML. Several of my jobs involved writing extensive sets of documentation, or later rapidly developing draft documents for Internet standards.

Because of that typing class, I was well-prepared for the USENET flamewars… for long debates on email lists… for being able to just spew out blog posts, press releases, speeches, or whatever else was needed.

Typing has been a critical component of the success I’ve had over the past 40 years… it turned out to be perhaps the single most useful class I took in high school!

And I almost didn’t… it was just tossed in at the last minute because I needed to fill a slot! 🤣

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons – History Trust of South Australia, circa 1945 – not my actual school.. I’m not THAT old! 😃

My Themes for 2026 – And Returning to Writing

A mind map on a gray background showing a white box with 2026 in the middle of it. On the right side are three lines going out of the box, with a word on each line. The first line is blue with the word "Health". The second line is orange with the word "Resilience". The third line is purple with the word "Hope".

Following a practice I’ve been doing for the past 17 years (see list), my first post of 2026 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles.

This year they are a re-ordered version of last year’s words: Health, Resilience, and Hope.

Health

This is my perennial theme… but I MUST make some changes this year and prioritize my health. I’m 14 pounds heavier than I was one year ago, and my blood pressure has been inching up more. If I want to be around long term, I’ve GOT to make some changes!

Resilience

As I talked about last year, “resilience” is a theme coming up in both my personal life and through the work I do at the Internet Society. Expect me to write more about this on various different levels.

Hope

As bleak or chaotic as things may be, I think we must choose hope “as a daily, gritty act of resistance and resilience”. There are people working on ideas and solutions for many challenges we have. There are people working to blunt the impact of extreme policies. We need to celebrate and support this work – and do more ourselves. That is MY continued goal for this year, as it was last year – to keep highlighting these hopeful stories, and to create some of my own as well.

These are my themes for 2026.. let’s see what happens!

A Note About My Writing

You’ll notice that I did NOT write any other posts on this DanYork.com site since last January. And if you look at my danyork.me aggregator site, you’ll see that I really didn’t write anywhere else, either!

For most of 2025, my role at the Internet Society was supporting our President and CEO, with first her communications and then since May 2025 as her Chief of Staff. The role was very intense and left me little time to do other writing – but even more so I was very aware of my close proximity to the CEO, and I didn’t want any of my writing to potentially reflect back on our CEO. I didn’t want anything I wrote personally to be viewed as potentially coming from our CEO or reflecting her views.

To minimize any potential confusion, I chose to go silent and not publish personal blog posts, podcast episodes, newsletters, or anything else. I was never asked to do this by our CEO or anyone else, and I don’t know if anyone there even noticed. I just felt it was best for me in my role.

That role is now changing as I go into 2026. I’m moving into a different role heading up a new project. We will be hiring a new Chief of Staff, and that person will be taking over the duties I had with our CEO. And so with all the changes, I feel that I can resume the writing and other content creation that I used to do. So you should see more writing from me in the months ahead!

Celebrating 20 Years as a Wikipedia Editor

a pink-ish box with 2004 in big letters on the left side and then on the right side the text 'I have been editing Wikipedia since 2004-04-21, twenty years ago'

Today is a special anniversary for me. It was 20 years ago that I set up an account and first made an edit to Wikipedia! On that day I became a “Wikipedian”… although I’m not sure if that name was being used yet. Wikipedia had only been launched in January 2001, so it was a VERY different world in those days.

With the complete transparency of Wikipedia, I can of course go back and see what my earliest edits were. It’s fun to scroll down the list. Amusingly, my very first edit would be frowned upon today. I added the URL for my employer at the time, Mitel, to what was then a very sparse article with five paragraphs of text with no sources or references. (Compare that to today’s article for Mitel.) Today this would be considered a “COI edit” as I had a “conflict of interest” and per the “WP:COI guidelines” it would be recommended that I not make this edit directly (although it was just adding something factual in the form of a URL, so other editors may allow it).

But back in 2004, those were still the very early days when everyone was still trying to figure out what this Wikipedia thing was all about. The norms and conventions for things such as WP:COI hadn’t yet been developed.

The only other edit I made that first year was that same day when I first created my “user page” with one sentence linking to the other sites where I wrote. (How many people remember Advogato?😀) Twenty years later, that user page looks MUCH different!

Then in January 2005 I started creating and editing pages around Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and later in the year about.. Canadian food! 🤣 (We were living in Ottawa, Ontario, at that time.) And then a whole bunch of other pages, many of which are still in Wikipedia 20 years later, although substantially edited by others since that time.

After that, I didn’t really do a whole lot of editing. In the first 15 years (2004-2019) I made a grand total of 146 edits.

And then… came the COVID pandemic.

As one of the ways I dealt with my own mental health during that time, I started livestreaming Wikipedia editing to Twitch! 🤣 (Which I haven’t done lately, but will probably do tonight just to celebrate the anniversary.)

Every. Single. Day!  For most of a year-and-a-half! 🤯

You can see this clearly in one of the tools available to see contributions from Wikipedia editors:

Dyork-wikipedia-yearly-edits

You can see there was even a year (2008) when I didn’t make a single edit, and one year (2012) where I made only one single edit.

And then… BOOM… 2020 hit and there I was!

What’s interesting about 2020 and 2021 is the salmon-colored block on the right. This was what is called a “template” and was where I was manually copying in the daily data from the Vermont Department of Health to update the chart that appears on the side of the article about the COVID-19 pandemic in Vermont. Every single day. Later in 2021 someone thankfully automated that so that it pulled the data direct from the Vermont Department of Health’s system, but for all that initial time it was a completely manual process – and was part of what I did each night on my Twitch livestream.

With that burst of activity during the pandemic, it caused me to dive deep into Wikipedia and learn about parts of the site and community that I had never really engaged with, and that in many cases hadn’t even been around in the earlier days when I first got involved. I learned a huge amount.

And out of that I became endlessly fascinated with how the whole Wikipedia community – and broader Wikimedia movement – has evolved, and I continue that fascination today. As you can see from the chart, I’m continuing to edit in 2024 and plan to keep on going.

In fact, I’m seriously thinking about bringing back the livestreaming. (Follow me on Twitch to be notified or over on Mastodon where I’ll post if I’m streaming.)

Wikipedia has definitely changed a huge amount over time, from being a site that was initially dismissed and derided, to today being one of the sites where you can go for well-sourced information. Sure, it definitely has its quirks and problems, but overall I believe it’s definitely a positive force in these times when we are so challenged for good information.

Given all the changes that are happening with the way we find and consume information (thinking of generative AI in particular), it will be interesting to see how Wikipedia evolves over the next 20 years!

Meanwhile, there are articles to edit and users to welcome… 😀🎉

An companion podcast episode is available at:

1000 Days of Journaling with Day One

IMG_7813Back in June 2021, Automattic announced that they were acquiring Day One, a journaling app. I had never heard of Day One, but being a strong WordPress user I paid attention to news from Automattic. Given that so much of Automattic’s tools are aimed at public writing and publishing (ex WordPress, Tumblr), I found the addition of the private publishing of Day One to be curious.

I investigated… and rapidly became intrigued.

I liked the fact that it seamlessly worked across all my Apple devices and systems. As a security geek, I loved that all the journals are end-to-end encrypted so that not even Automattic can see them. I enjoyed how I could easily add photos, audio, and video into posts. I was amused that there was an Apple Watch app that let you add audio (which I’ve used maybe twice, but it’s fun that it’s there).

Pretty soon Day One just became an integral part of my daily life.

Today marks 1,000 days straight of using the app. BUT… unlike Duolingo where a “streak” is a gamified way of keeping you involved, this streak is purely a recognition of how much the app has become woven into what I do. Unlike Duolingo, I wasn’t trying to keep a streak going… I was just constantly using the app.

To be clear, I haven’t been writing brilliant pieces of text every day for 1,000 days. When you pay for a Day One subscription, as I do, you can create as many different “journals” as you want.

And so for me, Day One has become a chronological note-keeping database. I do have a “Journal” where I occasionally write down thoughts, poems, ideas, etc. But I also have journals for:

  • Gratitude – I do keep a daily gratitude journal of things I am grateful for
  • Health – Notes about medical appointments, blood pressure, weight, exercise
  • Games – Records of Wordle (yes, I still play daily!) and other games
  • Clothing – What I wear during the work week (mostly so that I don’t show up at my weekly Rotary Club meeting wearing the exact same thing as I did last week! 🤣)
  • House – Notes about changes, updates, repairs, etc, on our house
  • Cars – Records of oil changes, repairs, and other aspects of car ownership
  • Home IT – Updates about things I’ve done on our home systems
  • Instagram – It automagically pulls in any Instagram photos I post so that I have my own local copy
  • And several other journals for notes about family and other life aspects

You can see from the list why it’s never a struggle for a “streak” to happen… the app is just woven into the fabric of what I do every single day.

I’ve also started using it for journals for focused activities. For example, I recently spent a week in Honduras on a service trip. I created a separate journal, and while there spent time each capturing my memories of what I did during the day, and adding photos and videos so that I could remember when I got back home. This worked out well, and by virtue of the new “Shared Journals” feature, I was able to share this journal with my daughter who also accompanied me. As I started using the app more intentionally in Honduras, it was fun to see that it created a map of where I was when I posted each post, so I could geographically see where I had been.

I’ve also started a journal up for the 12-week Climatebase Fellowship that I began yesterday. Again, to capture notes and thoughts while in the middle of that focused work.

I also very much enjoy the “On This Day” aspect that shows you want entries you made across your various journals over the years. It’s a fun and interesting way to reflect back and understand where you were and where you have come from over time.  (There are even more features of Day One that I haven’t played with at all.)

But wait, you might say… didn’t I write about moving note taking from Evernote to Obsidian? How does Obsidian fit in here?

The answer is that I’m using both. Day One is what I use every day for chronological notes. It’s my daily diary of life. It’s where I record thoughts I randomly have, or what I’m grateful for, or photos of what happened on a particular day. It’s also where I check to see when was the last time I got an oil change for the truck – or what clothes I wore to Rotary last Wednesday 😀.

Obsidian is what I use for more long-term or structured notes and storage. For example, when I was taking French classes, all my notes are there. I have a note with the various biographies that I use so that if I need a bio to submit to a conference, I can rapidly get one. I have notes with abstracts for various talks. I have “link dumps” of research I’ve done on various topics.

I use Obsidian for things that I want to retrieve based on topic or search term, rather than date.

I could use Obsidian for the daily diary aspect. I know some people do. The reality is that I was already using Day One when I discovered Obsidian, and so I already had solved the chronological note taking in my daily life.

And so here I am… 1,000 days of using an app… every…. single…. day!

If you haven’t checked out Day One, I encourage you to do so. For me, it’s an amazing app that helps me every day with capturing what is going on in my life, and in my thinking.

I’m Doing It Again… Getting Sucked Into Consuming Vs Creating

IMG_4021I’m doing it again… instead of writing and creating new posts in the morning, I’m sitting there scrolling through Mastodon… or reading the latest news on Memeorandum or Techmeme… or jumping into work email or Slack before I really need to. And sooner or later, any of the “free” time I had is gone and it’s time to start the work day. The time has melted away.

Consumption has triumphed over creation, yet again.

That’s no way to get back into writing more. That’s no way to develop habits of consistent writing.

And yet it is so incredibly easy to fall into that pattern… again and again and again….

So today I’ll write this small post of self-reflection to start yet again. Here’s to yet another attempt to break that pattern and build newer, stronger habits! 

——

Image credit: a generated image from Leonardo.ai

A New Plan For Getting in the Habit of Consistently Publishing Podcasts and Newsletters

a screenshot of a black calendar of the month of January with a large green checkmark on every Friday and a large orange checkmark on every MondayIn thinking about my themes for 2024 and specifically about changing my habits, one change that I am going to try is to get consistent with both my “The Dan York Report” podcast and also my “A View From The Crow’s Nest” newsletter.

Right now they are both “irregular” or “periodic”… meaning I just do them whenever I think about them or have some reason for doing them. Which means that sometimes I publish 4 of them in a week… and then I don’t publish anything for four weeks or more! 🤦‍♂️

I want to get in the *habit* of doing both.  I want to instill in myself the discipline of regular production.

And I also want to be realistic by planning a weekly production. Sometimes in the past I have tried to “get back into producing content” and targeted daily production. But that’s not realistic for me with everything else going on in life. 

We’ll see. Weekly may turn out to be too much. Perhaps I will shoot for every other week.

My logic for the podcast being on Mondays is that it gives me time on the weekend to do the production. My logic for the newsletter on Fridays is that sometimes I write about stuff that people might want to experiment with over a weekend – or I have links to other longer reads or items that may take more time than people have in a typical week day.

There’s also a symbiosis where either the Friday newsletter can feed into the Monday podcast… or vice versa where the Monday podcast becomes the topic for the Friday newsletter.

Another aspect is that by limiting myself to weekly, I’m hoping to plan ahead and produce both newsletters and podcasts in advance! (Wild concept for me!!)

Which isn’t to say that I won’t also put out a podcast or newsletter at another time when something interesting or breaking news makes me want to publish a new edition. But I want to get to a consistent cadence.

Again… we’ll see! It’s all a grand experiment. Stay tuned… if I actually execute on this I’ll drop a podcast episode tomorrow…. 🙂

 

20 Years Ago, LiveJournal Was My Home On The Web

IMG_3981This morning brought a reminder that it was twenty years ago that I opened up an account on LiveJournal. For about four years, “LJ” was my home on the web. It was where I wrote MANY articles, connected with people across their journals, and started interacting with a few people with whom I am still in touch today.

My journal site is still there today, with a much younger photo of me (I still had brown hair!), but my last entry was 11 years ago in April 2013, and that was just an update to a post four years earlier in April 2009 saying where people could find my writing. I haven’t really written there for most of 16 years… since back in 2008.

In those early days in the mid-2000s, LJ was a vibrant, social place to be. There were no advertisements and it was one of those amazing places of creativity during that time. Strong communities were built and thrived. Many of the ways we started interacting there (ex. “friends”) would carry over into later services.

Wikipedia outlines some of what happened after that… Brad Fitzpatrick sold the site to SixApart and I think they understandably wanted to figure out how to turn it into a business. But then in 2007 it was sold to a Russian media company… and things changed more and more after that.  (Viewing my site today I am amused to see some of the ads displayed to me having Cyrillic text.)

In my own case, I’d started to branch out. Those were the glory days of “blogging” as a thing, and at the end of 2005 I’d launched first Disruptive Telephony and then Disruptive Conversations as places where I very prolifically wrote on different topics. I continued to use LJ as a place for “personal” blogging… up until I decided to start up the site you are reading this article on.

Still, for a few years, it was my home on the Web – and I’m grateful for the time that I was there!

The Single Biggest Thing Preventing Me From Doing More Writing Is…

screenshot of a mastodon client running on an iphone. Screenshot is tilted to the left on a white background. The client is in dark mode and so is mostly black. One of the posts shown in the client includes a photo of two hands in front of a keyboard.

As I’ve frequently lamented in my yearly themes (although not this year), I would like to get myself to write more. And back on December 1, 2022, I tried to commit to #100DaysOfBlogging, but that hasn’t worked out so well.

I’ve been watching how I spend my time lately, and to I’m sure the surprise of absolutely NO ONE, including myself, it would seem the single biggest thing preventing me from doing more writing is… getting distracted by social media! 🤣🤣🤣

Take this morning. I was awake early at around 5:00am (courtesy of our wonderful but early-rising dog) and I sat on our couch drinking some tea and browsing through Mastodon (you can find me there). About 1.5 hours later, I’d read some great commentary, found some new articles to share, engaged in some conversations, and generally had an enjoyable time interacting with people.

But… could part of that time have been better spent getting some writing done?

I struggle with this, because on the one hand I learn things from social media that are then useful in new articles or other work. It’s “research” of one form. And engaging with people in an online community is a good thing to do.

But on the other hand, I find myself doing this a bit too much.

I’ll note, of course, that THIS IS NOT A NEW ISSUE FOR ME! In fact, I can easily scan my archives and find I’ve been writing more or less this same kind of post for ** 15 years **! 🤦‍♂️

The common theme through all of that is… “I’ve got to change… I’ve got to not get so sucked into <whatever services>”.

And yet I do. 

The siren song of distraction is incredibly strong.

Perhaps this is the thing where I’ll keep shouting about it in the hopes that eventually by saying it enough I will make it happen in my life.

Or perhaps in 2033 I’ll be writing the same basic post again, lamenting how much time I spend with some new service. 🤣

P.S. And I don’t even mention TikTok, which seems to be wired into my brain in a way that whenever I open up the app it is then an hour or so later when I emerge again! (Hence why I don’t open it all that often.)

Poem: In the end, it didn’t matter

In the end
It didn’t matter
That their kids got many other required vaccines for school

It didn’t matter
That their jobs required annual flu shots

It didn’t matter
That unvaxxed people they knew died

It didn’t matter,
Their lords said this vaccine was bad

Nothing else mattered
In the end

Finding the Toolchain to Consistently Create Content

tools on a pegboard

If one of my aspirations for this year is to consistently create content, one of my personal challenges is to figure out HOW to easily do that.

Ideally, creating content on my own sites should be as easy as sending out a tweet, posting a message to Facebook or Mastodon, or posting an image to Instagram.

And therein lies my challenge.

I’d like to make it so that I could just post from my mobile phone or iPad, so that whenever I have a story idea I want to write I can just post something easily. And, I can also post from my laptop or desktop. I want to be able to post content from anywhere, just as I can with Twitter, Mastodon, and Facebook.

I want to remove any friction from creating content.

However, the main personal sites I write on – this DanYork.com site, Disruptive Telephony, and Disruptive Conversations – are all still hosted on TypePad, because that is where I created them 15 years ago! 😀 And, alas, there is no mobile app or easy way to create content. There IS a mobile web interface, but it doesn’t provide me with a way to create drafts and have a queue.

Now, if the sites were on WordPress, the WordPress mobile apps provide a great experience, but they aren’t… and the switching costs are large. There’s a great amount of work to move thousands of posts and images, including substantial URL rewriting/redirecting. It’s not an easy task.

I’d like to move the sites to WordPress eventually, but not this year.

For the moment, I’m using MarsEdit on my Macs, as I’ve done for many years. For the mobile side, I’m still exploring options. One thought is to use the DayOne journaling app that is now part of my daily workflow. Write the posts there and then copy/paste to the mobile TypePad interface. But I don’t know… I’m looking at other IOS editors, too, and so far not  yet finding the toolchain I need.

The search continues!  The goal is to remove friction from the creation process.