A fortnight since my last update, and it’s been heads down all the way. Two major deadlines, two smaller ones and a unexpected bonus job have kept me incredibly busy — but given that it’s the culmination of three months of work, I can’t really complain. It’ll certainly be nice to get paid.

The last couple of weeks have taught me something about discipline, and I’ve been trying to stick to office hours (more or less) so that I don’t end up screwing myself over. This has been difficult: not least because writing longform pieces has always troubled me. All that empty space!

Now, though, I’ve realised that I was always coming at it from a newspaper angle before: writing so lean that you are always stretching out to fill wordcount. Now, I write long and then trim the fat off — a much more satisfying and productive way to do it. Four thousand words for a magazine sounds like a lot, but when you’ve got a lot more material than you really need, and a lot more to say, it suddenly feels like it barely scratches the surface. That’s why people spill out into books, I suppose.

In between, there has been much fun: welcoming our friends from Norway (that’s not a euphemism), watching the “gender illusionists” of AsiaSF, drinking, building out @IfYouOnly, sunshine, fog, playing a bit of pool, and much more.

Anyway, the fruits of both Project Moke and Project Olana are unlikely to surface before November, but it’s gratifying to have got it out of the way. And once Olana is finally filed, we are going to head off for a couple of weeks of trains, which should be exciting. I’ll still be working, but on the move.

The @IfYouOnly experiment is going well so far, with (as I write) 700 followers who are beginning to contribute ideas for articles.

It’s also bringing forward some useful comments and questions, not least this post from Jake Brooks.

He works for a design company in Brooklyn, so perhaps you might expect him to say this — but it’s worth saying nonetheless:

What long-form journalism suffers from online is not only that it has a short shelf life, but that it doesn’t have its own design. Individualizing long-form journalism has never been the web’s priority. When space is infinite, a 500-word piece is no different from a 4,000-word piece. Each is put into the same cookie-cutter template. For long-form journalism to survive online, this needs to change.

A few years ago I made a similar point to this in a meeting at the Guardian. How do you treat long features online in a way that makes them more engaging and enjoyable? How do you get away from templates that make everything look the same? How do you make all that extra work — work which makes the article qualitatively better in print — translate into added value online?

For various reasons, it didn’t seem to get picked up internally, but it’s still the big question for me.

The truth is that newspapers and magazines use a lot of templates and a very specific design language, but they manage enough variation within those designs to stop things looking too boring. Plus, of course, they have a limited amount of information per issue, whereas websites can have an almost infinite number of pages (so the design problem becomes more obvious). So how do you combat that? Do you simply do less, so that you can devote more time to those pages? Do you use smarter content management systems?

This far from the only problem that features face online — in particular, there’s the question of how you making the larger investment in each piece worth it financially — but I know that design does make a difference: just take a look at this recent, beautiful games review from BoingBoing and tell me it doesn’t benefit from the touch of individuality.

“With the help of Twitter and sites such as Long Form and The Awl, longer articles are finding a new lease of life as people take the time to find and read them”

You can read the rest of this piece I wrote in today’s Guardian, following my recent blog post about IfYouOnly.

IfYouOnly isn’t just about long form journalism — just important, interesting journalism, which can be long or short — but the point is solid. It’s only the beginning of a journey, though, and I’ve already had some great responses and comments from people.

I think there’s a lively and important conversation to be had around this topic. Let me know if you have any thoughts.

Tempted by the increasingly low cost of the Kindle, we ordered one a few weeks ago. It arrived today. The screen is vastly improved, and it is smaller, lighter and faster than its predecessors.

A few people have asked “why not get an iPad”? Well, good question. The first answer is price: the Kindle costs $139, versus at least $499 for the iPad. The second is that I still don’t see a need for another computing device in my life beyond my laptop and phone. I work from home, so don’t have the commute time that an iPad might fit into. I write for a living, which means I rely on a keyboard for touch-typing. My tendency to forget to charge my gadgets means that I don’t need another gizmo that runs out of battery on a near-daily basis.

The iPad can do lots of things, but I just want the Kindle for one thing: reading. And I read quite a lot.

This should make it easier to get through some of the longer stuff, and read more books without gathering more stuff. Plus it’ll come in handy on our upcoming two-week rail trip around the US (which, coincidentally, gives me a chance to plug Anna’s fun Snailr project) and my subsequent visit to the UK.

A few years ago, you might have said that Silicon Valley was the centre of the electronics industry. Companies like Intel and HP, which forged new ground in the computing revolution, controlled the world through technology.

Today, however, the Valley is more about a service culture and internet business than hardware — though the huge names continue. Instead, the balance of power (at least manufacturing power) has shifted to China and more specifically Shenzhen. Companies like Foxconn employ hundreds of thousands of people to build the machines that we use every day, and many of the objects that pass through your hands each day will have had their genesis in a factory here.

All this means that SEG Plaza is, possibly, the world’s foremost electronics market. It’s in the heart of Shenzhen, itself the heart of the world’s biggest electronics manufacturing industry, and it occupies the first eight floors of a 300+ meter tall skyscraper.

There’s everything you could imagine inside: computers of all shapes and sizes, mobile phones (genuine and shanzhai), wires, cables, components, tools, accessories, electronics and much more. I’ve seen similar in other cities, and other countries, but SEG was so busy and bustling that it took things to a new level.

The photo above is one of the more odd things I spotted in there — a sales desk of some sort, where a large team of uniformed young people appeared to be taking orders and talking to customers on the phone.

All the surrounding stalls and cubicles were filled with goods: this one just had people. Given that it takes up valuable sales room, it’s definitely sending a signal about what these guys are up to.

I’ve been playing around with Twitter for a long time now — and although my relationship with it has been up and down, I think it’s great fun. I’ve set up lots of accounts, some personal, some private, and some have been very, very public (@guardiantech, which I originally set up to send myself text message alerts, now has 1.6 million followers).

The other day I was thinking about how I like to share links with people on Twitter, Delicious, Pinboard and so on. And I thought about how I like to read great writing. Could I hook the two together? Of course.

Naturally, I started an account dedicated to exactly that: @IfYouOnly, an attempt to highlight a single piece of interesting writing each day.

There are few rules at the moment, apart from the idea that it’s there to highlight important or interesting pieces of writing from any point in history. I want to see if it grows, how it grows, why it grows, what it does, how people use it, whether it’s useful. Follow, share, suggest articles, do whatever you like.

I was inspired by a couple of other projects, primarily 1ArticlePerDay and LongForm, but there are some other schemes to highlight great writing and long-form journalism: the subject of a very nice Poynter column recently.

Will it work? Not sure, but let’s see where this goes.