A longer placeholder note, for testing the reading experience

This is a placeholder note, much longer than a typical one. It exists only so the post page can be checked with every kind of formatting in it: headings, lists, a quote, an image with a caption, a table, some code and a couple of footnotes.¹ Delete it before the first real post.

Most notes on this site will be a paragraph or two. But now and then one will run longer, and it should still be comfortable to read on a phone in bed or on a laptop at a desk. That means a sensible line length, generous line spacing, and headings that group the text without shouting. It also means bold and italic words that stand out just enough, and links that look like links without relying on colour alone.

Why short notes still need good typography

A short note is read quickly, often on a small screen, often in passing. If the text is cramped or the lines are too long, the eye loses its place and the reader gives up. Good typography is mostly invisible: the reader notices only that reading felt easy.

The old writers understood this in their own way. They wrote in the margins of books, in small careful hands, because the margin was where thinking happened.

The mind that reads slowly is the mind that keeps what it reads. A page skimmed is a page lost.

Three habits worth keeping

1. Walk before checking the phone in the morning.
2. Write one note a day, even a short one.
3. Read something old before something new:
   • a page of a classic,
   • a letter rather than an article,
   • a poem rather than a thread.

And a plain list, for comparison:

• Sleep is the first training session.
• Most work problems are attention problems.
• Ancient advice survives because it keeps being true.

A caption sits directly under its image: write it in italics on the line after the image.

A small table

Tables are rare in notes, but they should still be readable on a phone.

Habit	Time of day	Minutes
Walk	Morning	30
Read something old	Evening	20
Write a note	Any time	10

A little code

Code is rarer still. Inline code looks like npm run dev, and a block looks like this:

// Count the words in a note
function wordCount(text) {
  return text.trim().split(/\s+/).length;
}

A final thought

A note does not have to be finished to be worth sharing. It only has to be honest about being a note.² The margin is a place for questions as much as answers.

---

That rule above is a horizontal line, written as three dashes in Markdown.

Footnotes

1. Footnotes are written in Markdown as [^1] in the text and [^1]: ... at the end. The site numbers and links them automatically. ↩

2. This is the second footnote, to check that several sit neatly together. ↩