Wednesday, June 15, 2016

PM Suka Menulis

Hari Sabtu yang lalu saya bangun dengan satu pertanyaan terbersit di kepala: bisakah sebuah akun Twitter dipakai untuk broadcast beberapa blog sekaligus?

Buka browser, cek: ah, tentu saja sudah ada yang pernah tanya di Quora. Dari situ saya penasaran mencoba, lalu bikin akun twitter untuk uji cobanya (@tetulisan). Yang menariknya lagi, saya jadi tahu kalau prosesnya bisa diotomatisasi dengan cara RSS blog tersebut digabung jadi satu RSS dulu. Lepas itu, baru RSS gabungannya dipakai untuk disambungkan ke Twitter.

Percobaan pertama saya pakai blog ini, blog Shally, blog Awe, blog Mbak Yanti, dan blog Angga. Persamaan kami semua? Sama-sama alumni pengajar muda, sama-sama punya blog (duh), dan sama-sama ada di grup WhatsApp PM Suka Menulis. 



Saya coba gabungkan dengan RSSMix, sambungkan ke Twitter dengan dlvr.it, tes. Sukses.




Siangnya saya buka tawaran untuk yang berminat blognya disambungkan ke twitter ini. Responnya macam-macam. Banyak yang sigap (dikomandoi oleh Hety), ada yang ga yakin Tumblr punya RSS (Rini), ada yang siwer dan malah ngasih alamat e-mail alih-alih blog (Hanan), ada yang beralih nawarin nonton teater JKT48 (Awe), dan beberapa mengaku galau dan ga pede karena "kebanyakan nyampah pribadi" (Fahmi, Rayi).

Di penghujung akhir pekan, ada 22 alamat blog berjejer (kurang lebih) rapi. Dari sini saya belajar beberapa hal baru:

1. RSSMix bisa ngegabungin RSS dengan sangat simpel. Total no-brainer. Tapi ternyata ga memungkinkan untuk menyunting RSS sumber ke RSS gabungan. Begitu udah digenerate, kalau mau ditambahin blog baru, URL mix RSSnya akan berubah. Ketika Senin pagi saya rekap jadi http://www.rssmix.com/u/8195385/rss.xml, kalau saya tambahkan feed blog yang menyusul belakangan, RSSnya akan berubah. Ini berarti kalau ada yang menambahkan dari RSS mix di atas tidak akan dapat pembaruan dari blog-blog alumni PM yang saya tambahkan belakangan. Saat ini feed yang terbaru saya taruh di halaman profil @tetulisan.

2. Untuk integrasi ke Twitter, saya coba tiga alat: dlvr.ittwibble.io, dan twitterfeed.com

2a. Saya paling suka dlvr.it sebetulnya, yang saya coba pertama. Tapi versi gratisnya maksimal cuma 5 RSS, dan RSS bersama dari RSS mix di atas ditolak karena lebih besar dari 512 kb. (sementara langganan per tahun $100). Kalau saya tahu bakal sampai 30an lebih anggota grup tertarik, saya mungkin akan menawarkan opsi urun dana. Tapi saya malas ngurusin printilan transfernya. Jadilah saya cari alternatif lain.


2b. Twibble.io ternyata mampu handle RSS gabungan, tapi dia nempel link campaign twibble.io yang bikin tweetnya terlalu riuh sampai jadi agak geuleuh. Plus, karena RSS gabungan yang dipakai, saya ga bisa set untuk nge-tag siapa yang menulis.



2c. Twitterfeed.com sebenernya UI-nya saya ga suka, tapi ternyata dia yang paling fleksibel. Sejauh ini bisa dipasang 35 feed (dan gratis). 


Dengan Twitterfeed.com, saya awalnya berniat mau pakai dari RSSmixnya saja, supaya satu feed saja gampang. Tapi ini membuat tweetnya tidak bisa dimodifikasi agar ada tulisan dari blog siapa yang dicuitkan. Maka saya jadinya masukin feednya satu-satu.



Komentar Shally, saya ini merepotkan diri. Memang sih, saya bisa pake Java untuk otomatisasi, tapi malas ah memfamiliarkan diri dengan bahasa baru di hari Minggu. (Plus berkelitnya mudah, mau coba R dulu).

3. Ada beberapa blog yang gagal dimasukkan. Awalnya, punya Suhar karena dari blognya ngga ada RSS-nya ("no valid URL was provided", kata chimpfeedr), sementara kalau dari Mas Arif (http://ariflukman.com/feed/) gagalnya karena "Your feed might be empty or missing publish dates or GUIDs. A feed needs to contain publish dates or GUIDs in order to work with twitterfeed, see help". Punya Suhar setelah diutik-utik jadi bisa juga sih.

4. Hampir tidak terkait, tapi ternyata blog yang alamatnya bukan nama si empunya itu barang yang lumayan langka. Termasuk saya dan Mbak Yanti, hanya ada enam blog yang tidak ada unsur nama di tautannya. Sebagian malah punya domain sendiri dengan namanya. Tapi saya mah sadar diri, nama saya sulit dieja, kalau pakai nama diri pasti orang lebih susah ingatnya. Sementara itu, gagang pintu kuning kalaupun nyasar paling cuma nyasar ke Inggris, Brasil, atau Kazakhstan.

yellow.door.knob di sistem alamat what3words.com
Sekarang, lalu apa? Ya sudah, saya tinggal ikuti akun twitternya (@tetulisan), dan lihat apakah ada tulisan yang menarik minat saya. (Sambil berharap yang pada nulis bisa membedakan di sebagai kata depan dan di- sebagai awalan. Karena ternyata masih banyak saja yang menulis "di jual" dan "dimana". Kedua contoh barusan salah, karena yang betul adalah "dijual" dan "di mana".)

Mari membaca!

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Writing

I think I read too much these days. More precisely, I’m swinging wildly between not reading enough and reading too much. In the past month alone I finished 20 books.

All these reading, naturally lead to the itch to write. And yet all that I could muster was that 257-word short post.

I used to be able to write more often, but I also hadn’t been able to maintain a personal journal since my days in Banggai. It’s not that I don’t write at all, I write emails daily, and work brings innumerable proposals, presentations, reports to write. But those aren’t going to cut it. I want to write more for myself, if I had the time.

Time. Of course I haven’t had the time. And the little time that I have, is barely enough for that. Case in point: it took me 4 hours and 19 minutes to write and publish that last post. I’m not a very fast writer, that’s why.

And yet, despite the length of time it was remarkably quick. I had the prompt on the Wednesday before and my mind decided that I want to write the post shortly after. It was only a matter of fleshing out the retort in the upcoming days.

But even with the skeleton of the idea ready I had not had the time to write it. I was in the field and as such, mostly on the road. Writing on my android phone feels clunky, and as I just recovered from motion sickness nausea a couple of days before, typing on a tiny screen in a moving vehicle seemed to be tempting fate.

So I decided to write the outline on my notebook. My scribbles didn’t have to be legible. I know that the act of writing by hand alone will give me sufficient memory anchors. The scribbles will help when I type them on my laptop.

***

In writing that post, somewhere along the way, I decided I was going to reuse one of the narrative styles that I had used before. When I reflected back on my volunteering experience from Tohoku, I juxtaposed what was impossible with what was possible. Each paragraph highlights either a possibility or an impossibility.

Same goes with that last post. Each paragraph expands on one aspect of possible reason why living in the village could be boring. But I abhor repetition, and I fired up my thesaurus and dictionary as I write that. I want the regularity of a pattern, but I did not want it to sound repetitive. I don’t know if I succeeded.

As it were, I took the longest time trying to track down the appropriate links for the body text. Blog archives and Ruang Belajar pages. Kuat’s Facebook note. Facebook pictures.

I collected more, but decided to discard some. I wanted to include Auliya’s phallic corpse flower, but it made the first paragraph too long. I wanted to include the time when I taught my students digestive systems, but the MyOpera links were already down. I wanted to put in more, more, more.

Part of it is the feeling that I don’t do my year justice with that very short blog post, because how do you boil down a very eventful year to 200-something words? In my scribbles, I noted how I wanted to put a paragraph for Pak Tasmin the headmaster (who eschews inflating marks for the students’ national exam), the teachers (Bu Ade was married last week! The teachers were all so kind to me.), my despair of constantly being on my wit’s end, the forests that was cleared to make way for oil palms, the rivers, the people!

But I couldn’t put all that in. It was already past midnight in Labuan Bajo, and my laptop battery is almost tapped out. I didn’t bring my plug adaptor—it’s already a miracle that my laptop lasted the whole week without being recharged. So I had better post that blog there and then.

I hit the ‘post’ button, and shortly after the screen went dark. I went to sleep afterwards.

***

I can write quick if I paid less attention to coherence in the message. When I returned to Banggai a couple of months ago (has it been really that long?), I poured my week into 21 pages easily in a matter of days. The only trade-off that I took to produce that 8,615 words in 10 days was that I was mainly a silent (sullen?) companion to Danti on our way back to Jakarta. But I think she understood.

When coherence is at stake, though, the length of time that I need haemorrhage. I volunteered to write the narration for PM V Halmahera Selatan in mid-2015, and I only finished writing the 7,716 word-long piece 221 days later in early 2016. Naturally, I was feeling absolutely high.

Similarly, I had the idea to write about my impressions testing EGRA and EGMA shortly after I returned from Kuningan in August 2016, but the completion was delayed. First I meant to catch the momentum of nostalgia waves from the 5-year anniversary of PM I’s deployment in November. I missed that. Then I meant to seize upon the enthusiasm of PM XI’s training. I missed that, too. I changed course to ride on PM IX’s return to Jakarta, but still it was not ready in time. Only then after IM celebration event I finally finished writing that email.

***

All these writing, and for what? Vanity? Posterity?

I like to think that writing—my writing can change the world. It’s the ideal that I subscribed to when I was active writing letters and pleas to/on behalf of Amnesty International’s prisoners of conscience.

I don’t know, I like to think that my letters helped. I hoped that my letters helped.  That, despite the clunkiness of my language. I am acutely aware that the way I write is very often overly verbose and prone to veer off at tangents.

We’re not being taught to write enough. I was taught only to write very little. In 5th grade, I dreaded the Indonesian class when one day my teacher had us write a short story. Perhaps the only other Indonesian lesson that I hated was when they made us take turns to recite Taufiq Ismail's poem Rendezvous in front of the class.

Is it any wonder now that you never, ever, ever see me writing fiction or poetry?

Of course I don’t hate fiction or poetry. Fictions, at least is the staple of my reading. I understand its power, and I stand in awe before its majesty (that fiction is so malleable and thus can provoke minds and imprint complex ideas is nothing short of majestic to me).

But given how I detest writing anything that resemble fiction, naturally this leaves me with an imperative to improve my non-fiction writing. This is what led me to this course.

Am I excited? Yes. Am I ready for such intensive course? Hell no. Would I be able to commit to the whole program? I hope so. Am I ready to have my ego bruised and battered from going to the course? Hahahah.

But you can just ask me again if I’m excited, and I’ll keep on answering yes.