Our sons, Đạo and Đán, will participate in the Laurel Ridge Run, Walk & Roll on October 11, 2019 to raise funds for their school’s education enrichment and teacher supplies. If you would like to support, please make a pledge.

I have been blogging for 16 year and still loving it. I put too much time and effort into it, but I have not been able to monetize it. I thought of serving ads, but I hate ads. I am sure my readers do as well. I have a reader-support section at the bottom of this blog, but it has not been too successful.

I am now trying Coil after seeing some bloggers using it and tweeting about it. Coil seems like a promising way to get paid for what I post online. I also added Coil to Vietnamese Typography and Professional Web Typography. Will see how it goes.

Tôi mê danh hài Chris Rock từ lâu và muốn chia sẽ cùng những người Việt không rành tiếng Anh. Hôm nay xem phần lồng tiếng của Phong Lê làm tôi cười té ngửa.

If you are looking for some enlightening reads, check out the following essays from The New Yorker:

• “R. Kelly and the Damage Done” by Jim DeRogatis
• “Ocean Vuong’s Life Sentences” by Jia Tolentino
• “What ‘Always Be My Maybe’ Understands About Making an Asian-American Rom-Com” by Jiayang Fan
• “Keanu Reeves Is Too Good for This World” by Naomi Fry
• “The Unexpected Profundity of Curious George” by Rivka Galchen
• “How Dr. Seuss Changed Education in America” by I-Huei Go

This letter from Susan made my day:

Hello Donny,

I’m Susan and I’m a college student from Louisiana. I’m emailing you to give you my thanks for creating your online book, Vietnamese Typography.

How I found your webpage was accidental so I’ll explain it to you. I’m a Vietnamese-American and my parents were refugees from Vietnam. They worked hard for me in so many ways, one of them being providing me with the tools to learn Vietnamese from a young age so I could be as fluent as possible. Watching educational videos from Thế Hệ Trẻ, going to Sunday School at my Vietnamese church, attending summer school for even further learning, and talking with my extended family are some examples of how I learned to read, write, and speak so much Vietnamese as an American-born.

Now fast forward to June 2019. My boyfriend, a Filipino-Canadian, has requested that I teach him how to read Vietnamese. He searched up some alphabet charts while I went to find some sort of guide to teach him about dấu. Your website appeared first on my Google search. Initially, I was completely unaware that this site was meant to help typographers, as the Google search only directed me towards the “Tone Marks” page. Upon further reading though, I can see that this site offers the utmost respect to our language and simultaneously teaches typographers how to create optimum designs for its use on the screen. My boyfriend casually remarked that he wanted to know the history of the Vietnamese language. I couldn’t impart such knowledge because I was never taught about it, and yet, there is a chapter dedicated to this subject readily available on your website. This is a wholesome page.

I’ve also reviewed your portfolio website. Your work is beautiful and your passion for our language is quite inspiring. I have never seen this sort of appreciation for Vietnamese by a Vietnamese person before. I’m glad to have found Vietnamese Typography and I’ve donated $5 via the support page. I wish you all the best, Donny.

Keep up the good work,
Susan

My response to Susan:

Dear Susan,

Thank you for supporting my Vietnamese Typography book. Furthermore, I appreciate your wonderful story. I am glad that your boyfriend wanted to learn about our beautiful language. When someone is willing to go that far for you, it’s true love. Congratulations!

My hat off to your parents. You probably didn’t appreciate their effort then, but you must be pleased now that they had instilled Vietnamese into you. I am encouraging my kids to learn Vietnamese as well and it is not easy; therefore, I understand and respect what they had done for you.

Reading your letter has confirmed that I made the right decision, which was to make this publication online for free. I am happy that it has reached you.

Thank you,

Donny Truong

Cal Newport writes in The New Yorker:

Despite its advantages, however, I suspect that the IndieWeb will not succeed in replacing existing social-media platforms at their current scale. For one thing, the IndieWeb lacks the carefully engineered addictiveness that helped fuel the rise of services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This addictiveness has kept people returning to their devices even when they know there are better uses for their time; remove the addiction, and you might lose the users.

I have not tried out any new IndieWeb social media platform simply because I still can’t get rid of Facebook. Twitter I can control, but Facebook is still addictive. I do lots of cross-posting on here and Facebook as well.

My friend Jim Van Meer started Thinkpoint Creative, the intersection of design thinking and design doing. I am proud to be part of the talented team as Web & UI/UX Director. We just launched the website. Read more about it on my professional portfolio.

Jia Tolentino writes in The New Yorker:

I also found myself feeling more grateful for my phone than ever. I had become more conscious of why I use technology, and how it meets my needs, as Newport recommended. It’s not nothing that I can text my friends whenever I think about them, or get on Viber and talk to my grandmother in the Philippines, or sit on the B54 bus and distract myself from the standstill traffic by looking up the Fermi paradox and listening to any A Tribe Called Quest song that I want to hear. All these capacities still feel like the stuff of science fiction, and none of them involve Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. It occurred to me that two of the most straightforwardly beloved digital technologies—podcasts and group texts—push against the attention economy’s worst characteristics. Podcasts often demand sustained listening, across hours and weeks, to a few human voices. Group texts are effectively the last noncommercialized social spaces on many millennials’ phones.

Good for her.

Meagan Fisher talked to Dan Cederholm on “Over Time” about her website and front-end development. She said:

I still haven’t bothered to learn JavaScript. There’s so many amazing front end developers out there that just knowing HTML and CSS has always been enough for me.

Meagan’s website is a perfect example of what you can accomplish with HTML and CSS. I concur with her. I only use JavaScript if I absolutely had to.

Jeffrey Zeldman calls for action on A List Apart:

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

#LetsFixThis