All Play and No Workflow Makes Internet Something Something

via @bldgblog, this post on organizing the Internet Reader workflow.

It's an anecdotal account of a designer reviewing how he saves links to read later. Complete with white board wire frame.

You probably do something similar, and so do I, and maybe it is less complicated or more complicated. And we'd probably all love to write a blog post detailing exactly how. Because this is the internet, and we like to share.

And there are a shitload of links.

But here's what I thought of, while I found myself trying to visualize the map he was describing. I thought of, "what the fuck, why am I reading this?"

Here's something I didn't read. It's an article on Time Magazine's website about how there are things out there that figure out what we want. Like Pandora and Facebook. It's funny that there's an article in what used to be my link into American content when I was seven years-old, telling me my content is now being provided by products I've been using for five years.

But not that funny. Because there is a lot of content out there, and this is a SERIOUS PROBLEM.

I don't know how I can play with this duality in this essay in a funny way, so instead of dancing around it, I'll just say it. Yeah, the shit we read on the Internet isn't really world-crucial. But then again, it is. Amid the laughing cats there is the only forum for oil spill news and revolutions and campaigns, and, to use a term from the time of Time Magazine, civics. It's the internet, of course!

So the best guide towards managing this content is a designer's whiteboard and a chorus of sites and services ending in .us and .ly, or a five year-old five years-late Time Magazine?

I work in an industry that is very similar to the Internet. It's called "printing". Printing is a lot of things, but for the purposes of this blog post it is a completely custom manufacturing system. This means, if there is a mistake in manufacturing, you can't have the customer go to the Apple Store and get a completely identical item, because there isn't one. It means you can't go back and fix spelling errors in the content after it is produced. If you fuck up, you are making the whole job again.

This is similar to the Internet not just because most of what the print industry actually prints advertising, but because there is not one Internet experience that is the same. Everyone uses it differently and has a different product. Different content.

You can't run a successful print manufacturing system without a workflow. There are just too many places for mistakes. Between designer, salesperson, estimator, prepress, press, and bindery, there are about five place each for things to get fucked up. Any fuck up costs money, any fuck up past estimator ends up costing material resources. They call it spoilage. Stuff that gets recycled because it's no good to anyone.

So it strikes me as I'm reading this first link, how is there not a workflow for the Internet? It's like we kept a print shop open with nobody working there, and when the customer shows up we show 'em in and say, "help yourself". Try not to get your legs stuck in the rollers.

Of course, there isn't what OSHA likes to call "stored kinetic energy" on the Internet, and the only resource we have to lose is time.

But still, there is no unified approach to Internet content management. No workflow. Just a browser, and a bunch of .us.ly's. The fact that a browser can combine an address bar, a search portal, bookmarks, and maybe even RSS all in one program actually puts it in the front running for workflow.

One of the great parts of the Internet distributed OS-experience is that you can customize. Plug-ins, extensions, javascript. But you have to find these, or hear someone else talk about them, or start picking a bunch of social media chicklets at random, using your email address like a coin in a slot machine. Every workflow ought to have flexibility built in, but still, there is no place to even start.

It's been the prevailing logic that the content provider is responsible for this. There is an awful lot of talk on the Internet about "curation". Like, each website is a museum. How many museums do you go to a year? Every time you need to check a fact, do you run on down to the Smithsonian? Museums are nice experiences, but they are not resources for most people. Some websites do a pretty good job, with a sturdy comment system, and maybe even a little community going on, that leads people to stop into their site directly, to see the dinosaur bones, and the woolly mammoth, and the real Apollo space capsule. I'm thinking of Slashdot, or maybe BoingBoing. But these are still magazines, publishing about things that are going on elsewhere. If the Internet is really supposed to tell us what is going on around the world, and help us connect with other people, it's some sort of crazy open air market, where people are getting pickpocketed, lost amid the meat harvested from unrecognizable creatures, and a sweaty westerner is buying a strange little puzzle box at the cafe in the corner, where it seems they sell a lot of those little puzzle boxes to westerners. Maybe this is the flavela chic stuff that guy is always talking about. What guy? I don't know, something I heard behind a stack of shipping crates.

I'm working on a redesign of my website(s) right now, because on the output end, your system and workflow does affect your content. Without the right tools, it's hard to make anything. But I still don't know what to do about absorbing the content, and helping my content be absorbed by others. I tweet links, comment on blogs, share-and-share-alike, but often it feels like I'm a guy waving a sign at an intersection, or sending ten thousand pieces of junk mail. I wouldn't rather send my stuff off to an editor, and wait six months for them to tell me they lost it (for fuck's sake, thank goodness internet self-publishing is actually rewarding compared to something!) but it seems like there is a hole here, for something not yet invented. I can actually almost taste it. Tastes like a community as easily browseable as Facebook, that incorporates any login, with public, semi-private, and private feeds, with synchable bookmarks, and read-and-comment-republish RSS/Twitter compiling... Hell, if I had any programming chops, I'd build it myself.

Until somebody builds it, I guess it's just "what's your pleasure, sir?"

Print it, Cut it, Fold it--Now Unfold it

I work in a print shop, doing the digital printing, but also in the bindery. A lot of bindery work is fairly boring, because it is repetitive hand-work. But I like using the folder most of the time (except for hours on end, because it is loud).


It is really an amazing machine. It's made by Stahl, I presume, in or around the mid-70s. All solid-state electronics, but mostly mechanical. There are a zillion things to adjust in order to make it work right. I'm only now, after using it for a year and a half, starting to get the hang of it. Still, folding pieces of paper, relatively easy with fingers, is kind of a hard task at high speed. There are more modern folders on the market, but even this machine is better designed than a lot modern bindery equipment. If our tape-spine printer breaks, there is nothing for it but to send it back to the factory, because all the electronics are sealed in plastic. But this folder, if something breaks, you can rig it back together with flashlights, duct tape, wire, and rubber bands (seriously). It's all designed in-line. By this, I mean the paper takes a straight path, and the machinery comes to meet it. My digital press is filled with crap, because the designer felt the need to flip the paper around all crazy like one of those moving ball machines that used to be in airports. (Whatever happened to those?) That means there are thousands of parts to break. It's like they built it one piece at a time. Okay, now the papers comes out of here... what do we do now? Uhh, train a penguin to carry it up a hill, put it on the roller skate, and then let it fly through the ring of fire to set the toner. Good idea! Not Stahl. This is good, German engineering.

Because I am the sort of nerd who finds this stuff facinating, I will give you a guided tour of how to fold a piece of paper, 6000 times an hour. If you don't find this stuff fascinating, you might want to skip to the gift shop now.


The paper begins here, in a giant stack. Each sheet must go through the folder separately, to get a clean fold. Compressed air is used both to blow air through the stack to seperate the sheets, and as suction to pull each sheet off. The compressor is on the floor to the right. As the paper goes through, the table raises automatically. There is a mechanical lever resting on the top sheet to tell the table when it is as the right height.

Each hose is carrying a flow of air to different sides of the sheet. Each one is adjusted individually to get the right amount of air to lift the top sheet, and only the top sheet. This is a tough part to balance. The metal wheel is suction, and it rotates to pull the top sheet off to the feeder belt, which begins at the top left of the picture. The suction starts and stops rapidly, to pull the sheet forward but not suck it up around the wheel. This timing and suction are also adjusted manually.

Here we are from the other direction. The belt pulls the paper forward, straightening it as it goes. The thing suspended near the gold piece of christmas garland is the counter. It's an old electronic eye, wired to a counter unit, which you'll see in a minute. Every person that sees the machine asks if the chirstmas garland is necessary. It is. It is exactly the right weight to keep the paper from popping up in that gap. The gray cord not connected to the counter, leading off to the bottom right, is the double detector. It is a flap of metal set (manually, of course) at a certain height to let only one piece of paper through. If two go through, the flap lifts, activating a switch to stop the machine. Two sheets will sometimes go through, and just get a messed up fold. Other times it will jam. The florescent light is because the bulb in the electric eye unit burnt out. No problem! Bring in a desk lamp.

The paper goes through the feed belt towards the folding panels. I don't know what they're actually called. Racks, panels, I don't know. They are the diagonal pieces extending upward and downward, which you saw in the first view. Wait, let me give you a closer look:

Yes, that. There are two there, parallel to each other, and another two extending downward below. In between them all are the rollers, about where the big shiny wheel is. The blue bar extending across the panel is the stop bar. You pull it up or down the panel, depending on where you want the fold. If you want it six inches in from the leading edge of the sheet, you set it six inches up. The leading sheet with shoot into the panel from the feed belt, and bounce against the stop bar. The bounce will cause the sheet to bend where it is not supported, which because of the panel and the feed belt, will be exactly six inches in from the edge of the sheet, and also right at the:

Rollers! It's a bit difficult to see, but there are a mess of rollers, very close together. They have small grooves, parallel to the axis of the roller. After the sheet bounces in the fold panel (which is pulled back to the left in this view), the bend in the sheet catches in these interlocking grooves, and is creased, nice and clean. In this action the rollers catch the sheet and drag it back out of the panel, taking it on its way.

The rollers are set up in a pattern like this, each spinning an opposite way, very much like gears. Since there are total of four panels, there can be up to four folds per sheet. After the first fold, the sheet can be pulled into the next panel, where it is folded again, just as if the first fold never occurred. You have to set the stop bars correctly to get the pattern you want. Or, if you only want one fold, you can fold down deflector bars to keep the sheet from entering the panel, and just continuing on its merry way through the rollers. The first fold would actually be creased by the rollers marked (2) and the unmarked roller between it and (1), in this diagram. Then it would go into the second panel, and the next crease would be made between rollers (2) and (3). Get it? No? Me neither, not for awhile.

These are the bottom panels. The job I was folding while I took these pictures was a pamphlet with a letter fold, which opened with two overlapping flaps, like a mini booklet. After the first fold, I had to send it down to the bottom panels to give it a second fold in the same direction. If it was a Z-fold, it would've gone to another top panel. That's why this machine is so crazy--the piece of paper never flips over. It is shuffling up and down, with the last fold becoming the new leading edge.

Here's a crude diagram. All the same sheet of paper, at different stages. Red is the first fold, blue is the second, green is finished. It's still complicated, I know. I think there should be a whole branch of publishing geometry, handling everything from N-up pages on a sheet, to rotation for binding, to folding (I don't even understand a gate fold, really), to dividing up parent sheets, to proper rotation for cutting and face trimming. The who I work with, who taught me this stuff, most of them have never taken calculus, or advanced algebra or trig. But they can convert fractions to decimal so fast, and when I couldn't understand the difference between a tumble and a work-and-turn, they just shrugged. Hell, I can explain the four fundamental principles of Kantian space, but I still have to draw a diagram before I start cutting a sheet of 8-up letterhead. It's a lot of spirals, let me just say that.

Anyway, back to folding. I love this diagram, and stare into it's magical gnostic lines while I'm hypnotized by the rhythmic clacking of the sheets hitting the stop bars. I just reminds you to set the stopper to keep the panel from catching on the rollers when the deflector plate is in place. You can also see two knobs for adjusting the gaps between the rollers (the purpose of the back diagram shown earlier). These also have to be adjusted manually. If you have them set wide, like for a thick stock, and then try to run something thin through it, the rollers won't catch it and it will just get stuck in the panel.

This is the counter. It is supposed to have a break (the LED screen) that will pause the flow of sheets every hundred, or two hundred, or whatever it is set at. This doesn't work right now, so I just watch the main counter, and stop the flow every hundred, so I can pull them off and rubber band them, or whatever. This counter unit is as big as my head. I've never been so fortunate as to look inside, but I bet there are some pretty awesome components inside: tubes and such. We inquired, and a new one costs $2500. I don't know if that's for a brand new solid state counter system, or if that's just how much replacement manufacturing equipment costs these days. They always try and get you on stuff like that.

This is the control panel... displaying sideways, for some reason I don't understand. Anyway, from the top we have air flow, feeder table controls, start/stop the flow of the feeder, and then the flow control (the two silver knobs) and table up or down. These buttons are a lot of fun to push.

And, here we are at the end. All the folded sheets come off on a conveyor belt, also manually operated. Finished, folded product!

You might notice the other piece behind the folder, that looks a lot like it. That is the right angle, which can replace the conveyor at the end. It goes on at a... right angle! It is for folding... right angles! After the initial four possible folds, you can send the sheet through for ANOTHER four folds, at ninety degrees. You have to replace the exit rollers with score bars, because by that point the folded sheets will be getting pretty thick, and you need to score it a bit to get it to fold again. Especially since the grain of the sheet was probably heading the direction for the first set of folds, and folding across the grain can get ugly. I can't really think of any typical project in which you'd want to do eight folds, because it is not a map fold--it would end up looking like an accordion folded again the other way. Sometimes we fold 11 x 17 sheets in half, and then letter fold those (so one fold, and then an additional two at the right angle). But that's just about it.

Anyway, if you're still with me, thanks for getting to know the Stahl folder! Being the nerd that I am, I really enjoyed learning how to use it, because such an interesting and amazingly simply yet complex mechanical process never occurred to me, despite all the folded paper I have seen in my life. Maybe you also derived a similar bit of perverse bindery pleasure out of it. I like paper products a lot (why I enjoy printing and bindery work more than the average manufacturing experience) and this is why. It's working with your hands, using your head, and in the end if you do it right, you actually end up with a useable product with quite a bit of craftsmanship imparted to it.

As Thin as a Sheet of Paper

There was a few posts going around a couple of months ago, describing the "magic yellow dots" many printers superimpose over a printed document as sort of a digital fingerprint for the printer.

Many people got upset, feeling Big Brother was tracking them through this technology. I thought this was a little silly, because from most printed mechanisms someone can easily do forensics to determine what sort of machine was used to print it, whether it be through the ink, substrate, type, or a thousand other things. The yellow dots is actually meant to prevent counterfeiting, and there are other technologies even more active to prevent that. For example, many photocopiers with a data link will phone the US Treasury if you try to scan a bill. Really.

But the larger problem is the public conception of paper as an inert technology--that is, a piece of a paper is a blank slate not only in terms of literal printing, but metaphysically. It is somehow split off from the world of science and physiology, in which items have physical properties linking them to the rest of the world. It is therefore "impossible" to forensically track a piece of paper unless there are "Big Brother dots" embedded on it. Your thoughts have a purity of anonymity before Xerox ensnares you with their printer panopticon. But this is a ridiculous world-view, not accepting paper for what it is: a technology. One might as well assume an email to be completely anonymous because it "is electronic and therefore doesn't exist". Typically, the lack of materiality of an e-thing gave it an elusive and ethereal sense in popular metaphysics, but now this purity is reaching back to materials themselves, now supposed to be completely pure.

It could also have something to do with the ubiquity of print--getting ink on paper cheaply and in good quality requires skilled technique. But the way printed material is thrown around (and thrown away) it seems as if it grows on the tree already in a post-card, ad circular, or junk mail piece. If it so common, it couldn't be high tech, could it?

Well, in case you were still confused, and though paper (just regular, plain old paper) wasn't a technology, here are some highlights on the forefront of paper technology from Xerox R&D:

FX’ ePaper technology uses a different technology from the “standard” electrophotoretic displays. They are Photo-Addressable and should enable color - which means it could, at least in theory, be imaged on “standard” imaging devices, and not require the circuitry which make many current e-Readers so cumbersome. Although it requires electric power during the writing process, that image then remains available and the sheet of paper can be used over 10,000 times.

Security Paper is traditional paper with embedded amorphous magnetic wires around 40 microns in diameter, which work as standard paper for printing in any office device. However, special sensors can detect these coils with low-intensity oscillating magnetic fields up to 1m, thus making it possible to create “detectors” for these secure documents - either at the exit of secure buildings (similar to retail shops) or on scanners / copiers, to prevent the unauthorized duplication of such documents.

Finally, paper fingerprinting uses the pattern of the wood pulp fibers contained in standard paper sheets to store and retrieve a unique fingerprint for each paper document. This fingerprint can be used later on to detect any counterfeit or unauthorized copies, or to trace a document back to its origin.

Especially dig that security paper.