I have published a now page at https://jmac.org/now. This implements Derek Sivers’s now-page manifesto at nownownow.com, and joins the many people who have published now pages of their own.

A now page, the idea goes, answers the question “So, what have you been up to lately?” It means to bridge the gap between a home page’s “Here is my whole life”, and the “Here is the sandwich I started eating five minutes ago” of a social-media feed.

As Sivers puts it:

Think of what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year.

Like, “Still living in Dallas, though considering moving to Austin. Working at ABC. Really getting into cycling. The kids are age 3 and 6. I’m reading a lot of Pema Chödrön, and listening to a lot of jazz piano especially Brad Mehldau. I’ve stopped taking on web design clients, since I’d rather keep improving my back-end database work.”

That’s what a now page is for. You can’t get that big picture from any other outlets I’m aware of.

I first heard of this many months ago via the IndieWeb community, and the notion to knit one together myself bit me while drinking a hot cider last night. I spent a couple hours making it this morning.

It’s not the prettiest thing (especially compared to some of the very creative now pages linked from nownownow.com), but it’ll do for a start. For now, I will constrain its content only to activities and other concerns “on my desk”, versus those on my to-do list.

Aside from inevitable first-draft tweaking, I intend to update the page every, I don’t know, two to four months? If it turns into “never” I’ll shrug and delete it, but for now I do like the idea, and hope that it becomes another tiny source of both fun and utility in the open-web spirit.

This article was also posted to the “indieweb” section of Indieweb.xyz.