From a post by Jamie Todd Rubin, “Going Paper­less: How Penul­ti­mate and Ever­note Have Replaced My Pocket Note­book,” I’ve learned the con­cept of the “Com­mon­place Book,” which he attrib­utes it to Jefferson:

The notion for the “com­mon­place book” comes from Thomas Jef­fer­son, who used just such a book to cap­ture pretty much any­thing: pas­sages from books he was read­ing, notes, sketches, you name it.

Wikipedia takes it fur­ther back in its entry on Com­mon­place books. The name comes from the latin locus com­mu­nis and the form got its start in a new form of fifteen-century bound journal:

Such books were essen­tially scrap­books filled with items of every kind: med­ical recipes, quotes, let­ters, poems, tables of weights and mea­sures, proverbs, prayers, legal for­mu­las. Com­mon­places were used by read­ers, writ­ers, stu­dents, and schol­ars as an aid for remem­ber­ing use­ful con­cepts or facts they had learned. Each com­mon­place book was unique to its creator’s par­tic­u­lar interests.

I really like this idea. I’ve been think­ing a lot about work­flows recently (and lis­ten­ing to way too many geek pod­casts on my com­mute). I’ve been mud­dling my way toward some­thing like this. I’m cur­rently using Ever­note to log a lot of my life but there’s scraps of inter­est­ing tid­bits that have no home. An exam­ple from half an hour ago: I was lis­ten­ing to Pan­dora the train when along came an unfa­mil­iar song I wanted to remem­ber for later. A Com­mon­place book would be a nat­ural place to record this infor­ma­tion (First Aid Kit’s Lion’s Roar if you must know, think Bon­nie Raitt steps out with Townes van Zandt for a secret assig­na­tion at a Stock­holm open mic night.)

Of course, being a twenty-first cen­tury dig­i­tal native, my work­flow would be elec­tronic. What I imag­ine is a sin­gle Ever­note page that holds a month’s worth of the bits that come along. I have some­thing sim­i­lar with a log, a sin­gle file with one line entries (lots of Ifttt automa­tions like logged Foursquare check-ins, along with notes-to-self of mile­stones like issues sent to press, etc.). I’ll start set­ting this up.

Occupy Philly as urban form http://​philadel​phi​a2050​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​1​1​/​1​1​/​p​h​o​t​o​p​o​s​t​-​o​c​c​u​p​y​-​p​h​i​l​l​y​-​a​s​-​s​p​o​n​t​a​n​e​o​u​s​.​h​tml

Google+: View post on Google+

Elis­a­beth is a painter and artist who spe­cial­izes in orig­i­nal acrylic paint­ings and giclee prints of nature and South Jer­sey beach scenes. Her exist­ing site was attrac­tive, but it didn’t have online order­ing and she wasn’t able to update it herself.

We put together a fea­tures list and then went through a round of con­cept screen­shots which I built in Adobe Fire­works and Pho­to­shop (you can see our work here!). Design in hand, I built a cus­tomized Mov­able Type site. A spe­cial­ized tem­plate allows her to enter infor­ma­tion about the each piece: medium, theme, price and the URL to it’s image (most of which are hosted on Flickr). Mov­able Type pulls these together into var­i­ous cat­e­gory and indi­vid­ual art pages, with automatically-generated Pay­pal “Buy” but­tons for avail­able pieces. We stressed search-engine vis­i­bil­ity so there are many cat­e­gories and they all cross-link with each painting.

Visit: Elis­a­beth Olver