Issue #2
February 24th, 2024

Hi all,

Welcome to Fantasy Sunday, the newsletter where I share the progress on my books, my recent learnings and life hacks, and introduce new blog articles.

This week, I've not been too well 🤒When I felt ok, I spent time on my recent article What Is a Website? which covers some very simple concepts behind websites and the internet. Given you are receiving this newsletter, I will assume that you are a savvy internet user. If you've ever wondered what websites are and how they work at a high level, give the article is look!

I've also released version 0.0.2 of my website, andreacerasoni.com, which comes with three new enhancements

• The search now includes Articles, allowing you to browse and search through the blog
• Blog articles now contain a Table of Contents, to easily navigate across the article
• Blog articles now show the updated date at the top, rather than the original published date. This allows you to see when the last time I made an update to the article.

📖 Novels

A Wizard's Hunt 🏹

Progress: 14%

There has been little progress on my upcoming Novella, A Wizard's Hunt. The second chapter will be released on the website soon. Look out for updates in next week's Fantasy Sunday issue!

🗞️ Blog

What Is a Website?

What is a website? Exploring what they are, how they work, and what happens when we connect to one.

✒️ Writer's Circle

Our discord community, Writer's Circle, is currently being built out. Look out for updates on future Newsletter issues!

🎓 What I've Learned This Week

Blog articles are special, in that they are living and breathing pieces of content.

Other popular types of media, such as pictures, videos, and podcasts, are static. You take the picture, shoot the video, or record the audio, and hit upload. There are ways to come back to them and edit them, but this often requires significant effort. It's also difficult to tell your audience exactly what changed between the original version and the edited.

Blog posts, on the other hand, can (and perhaps should) be edited regularly. And it's relatively easy to include a note on what changed between the original and the edited versions.

Imagine you are writing an article named "The best phone to buy". You might want to go back and update it when new models come out on the market. However, even for topics that are pretty much settled, such as "How do car engines work", you can always learn new things about the topic and add depth where required.

This is particularly fascinating to me, as I'm beginning my blogging journey. I've started off thinking articles are lengthier versions of social-media posts, hard to edit later on. Understanding that this is not the case helps me be more comfortable with putting out articles that may not be the best I can make them (yet).

💡 Life Hacks

Index Cards as Bookmarks

Next time you head over to a bookshop or cafe' with your favorite book, bring a pen and a deck of index cards.

When you're finished reading, write your thoughts down on the index card. Then, use it as a bookmark.

Whether you're reading fiction or non-fiction, jotting down your thoughts about the book as you go along is always a good idea, and can help you absorb and retain information.

Having limited space to write your thoughts challenges your brain to really think about what you learned and how you feel about the book, which is also why I prefer paper journals over digital ones, where entries can be potentially infinite.

After a while, you'll have a lovely deck of index cards with your true, unfiltered thoughts about the book, which you can browse and go back to when you want.

Index cards as bookmarks!