{"id":4320,"date":"2023-09-20T12:13:46","date_gmt":"2023-09-20T12:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/?p=4320"},"modified":"2023-10-06T08:05:18","modified_gmt":"2023-10-06T08:05:18","slug":"theres-nothing-more-permanent-than-a-temporary-hack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/?p=4320","title":{"rendered":"There&#8217;s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This morning&#8217;s Memex 1.1, John Naughton&#8217;s Substack newsletter, including this quote by Dave Winer: &#8220;There&#8217;s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack.&#8221; and it feels like a great theme for my day today, which I am spending sorting through my own temporary hacks from the past 15 years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s my day to clean out my archive of files and emails at ALT, the last steps in a long handover process. Documents I filed away in 2017 to be reviewed later are stacked alongside old references I have written for former employees and pictures from past keynotes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most of this stuff can just be deleted all together, but I am mindful that some things are important for the organisation&#8217;s history and legal records, GDPR permitting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I am pondering if how many times I didn&#8217;t circle back to things I implemented as a temporary hack, and hence today&#8217;s quote really chimed with me. Here are some examples of what I&#8217;ve come across:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>My CMALT portfolio that I published in a Google folder (an organisation-hosted Google folder, for which, I just discovered, you can&#8217;t transfer ownership outside of your organisation&#8217;s domain);<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>An email filter I set up in 2015 when I first joint a very busy Jiscmail list, and which has quietly filled up a folder with tens of thousands of emails since&#8230; EEEEK;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A shortcut to a file to a shortcut to a file to a shortcut to a file&#8230;.; <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Lists of things I want to do, and a lot fewer lists of things I did! Fortunately I discovered a file with old appraisals going back to 2008, so hopefully somewhere in there are records of what I accomplished in more detail than the lists I sporadically kept. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even Gmails hefty power is taking time to delete all the emails, one year at a time. It feels extremely satisfying however, and is also necessary, as my new free-lance role within the organisation is limited to a specific project and I want to ensure that I have a clean footprint on which to work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As I delete things, I also need to bring some order to my own domain, and again the newsletter provided some inspiration in the form is <a href=\"https:\/\/xkcd.com\/773\/\">this XKCD comic<\/a> about university websites:<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/image.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"541\" height=\"378\" src=\"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/image.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4321\" srcset=\"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/image.png 541w, https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/image-300x210.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 541px) 100vw, 541px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">University Website (XKCD, 773)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s easy to fall into the same traps for one&#8217;s own website as organisational ones. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Enjoyed this post? Get my free\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/?page_id=4148\">monthly newsletter<\/a>\u00a0directly to your inbox.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This morning&#8217;s Memex 1.1, John Naughton&#8217;s Substack newsletter, including this quote by Dave Winer: &#8220;There&#8217;s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack.&#8221; and it feels like a great theme for my day today, which I am spending sorting through my own temporary hacks from the past 15 years. It&#8217;s my day to clean out my archive of files and emails at ALT, the last steps in a long handover process. Documents I filed away in&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/?p=4320\">Read more<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">There&#8217;s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-leadership","category-open-practice","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/dan-cristian-padure-noOXRT9gfQ8-unsplash-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7wa4N-17G","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4320"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4337,"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4320\/revisions\/4337"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}