i was looking up a book of ablum covers (techno style) i saw at the sxsw trade show floor, and i ended up finding a grip of cool rave/flyer design stuff. neet. i’m going to design an open-source version of blogger just so i can type ctrl-shift-p.
Category: Legacy
i find myself agreeing w/ a lot of matt’s thoughts, definitely capturing the whole introducing yourself to ppl who you know but don’t know you (my end).
i don’t think blogger is as limiting as some might thinkabout publishing long tracts. ie, you can easily set it to show one piece at a time, without a timestamp, etc. (like matt’s and brig have done) in fact, the main limiting factor of bloggin is just that you can’t change the text area by draggin either the window or frame/area. nothing that some dhtml wouldn’t solve for ppl w/ modern browsers (mozilla or ie). plus, add in a little cookie action and it would remember your preferred window size… or you could do it the old fashioned way and type it in a word processor, but who wants things like spell checks, grammar, and cogitation on the web? heheh. (proof reading is for sissie) ;-P
it just occurred to me that jz has been doing both a blog (daily report archives go back to july 97) and big stuff forever. of course, some ppl are just awesome like that. i just found myself changing the word guys -> ppl. how pc of me. oh, and there’s a line between inspiration and copying which i find strange jz might have missed. some of the designs that he mentions in his mar 15-19 post are more descendents of some of his design memes rather than rip-offs. not to mention, it’s a bit amazonish claiming ownership of solid borders and multi-tone solid colors in rectangles (which is the natural shape for tables). still, i suppose jz may feel a bit like rms sometimes, ie getting a bit shafted. don’t worry, we love you jz. 3.7 million hits and counting.
while i’m brainfarting (i always am, now that i think of it), i got my cdnow order while i was in austin. actually, i got 2 or the 3 cds. instead of getting the mdh soundtrack, they sent me nin’s pretty hate machine. of course it’s the cd that i really want that was screwed up. i’m enjoying the kcrw: rare on the air vol 4 cd. some kick butt tracks. a real cool thing is i finally found out that this lick that i really liked from the boxer trailer is actually by a song called st. teresa, by joan osbourne. (btw, the links to amazon only speaks to how difficult and crappy it is to link stuff to cdnow, seeing as they don’t modularize and put the sid at the end like amazon–i’m still on the boycott until the patent thing gets resolved. this means more than posting a carefully designed letter making pandering, empty promises. when they finally do what’s right, i’ll be able to shop with them again, until then, the wishlist builds — random complaint: wtf with moving all things on the home page i’m used onto the right side? and their still sneaking their ugly redesign. <sigh>).
wow, this turned into a monster. unfortunately, this half an hour came out of time i should have been doing work.
hard to believe there was a time when i didn’t like $ signs in front of variables. even harder to believe that was only about 2 yrs ago. now they seem to make perfect sense.
De Icaza opened with a lesson for the monolingual among his audience: “In French, you have two words for “free,” liberté as in “freedom,” and gratuit as in “free beer.” In English, you only have the one word, so the ideas get confused sometimes. Free software is about liberté.”
also on peterme, peter talks about the interface culture panel and also mentions scott mccloud (author of the awesome understanding comics). the latter made me think back to the animation, comics and film: narrative on the web panel at sxsw that taylor moderated, and which unfortunately sucked all kinds of ass. a very rich topic that had tons of potential instead became a stupid clipshow. wtf? in fact, i don’t even think there was a single discussion on the panel about narrative on the web. nothing about how interaction plays a part, or the shift from low to high bandwidth, or about the uniqueness of the computer-based screen medium, about experimentations with narrative, the combination of audio and visual data, how hypertext and dynamic data changes and effects how narrative needs to be considered, nada.
now, on the other hand, i thoroughly enjoyed the interface culture panel, as matt predicted, it was (for me at least, i overheard some people hating it) the best panel of the conference. tons of issues discussed, the most interesting being about creating webs of trust (an interest of mine for the past half-year or so). an issue for me was trust of the trust broker. it occurred to me that unfortunately, for most sites, you aren’t given the algorithms or exact composition of your web of trust. sort of also related to the profile that’s built about you by a company like amazon, which may or may not even be accurate. two thoughts occurred to me: when i doctor gives me any kind of exam or care, the medical data is mine, why then, for profiles that are accumulated on me that can be even more personal, is that information owned by the company? and 2) if i were to accumulate all this data and were able to keep it with me, how would i store it? ideally, i’d like to see some sort of transparency, ie at least if they collect all this data, i should be able to see it. perhaps, it might be possible for a personal profile to be formed that would reside at a trusted source. this is leading back, perhaps to a /. post that i mentioned earlier…
i was looking at the page through ns4, and saw that the image i posted was screwing everything up. i took a long hard look at the parse tree, but for the life of me couldn’t spot what was wrong. <shrug>
hmm, i recently set up a search for my site w/ atomz.com. it seems to work pretty well. the only problems for me is figuring out somewhere to put it. i have it on my archive page right now, but it doesn’t look right anywhere i tried to place it on my front page. here’s the actual search box that i style. i’m not sure if looks right up on top (this link only works w/ ie4+).
right now i’m considering either putting it up there and letting it be hidden, or just making it a dhtml popup from the top bar. i really want to keep the simplicity of the design. it’s getting a bit crowded as is.
well, it looks like the secret is out on who made the superfriends commercial
<rant>who is anyone to tell me what i can or can’t do on the web? i don’t think that ben made a good point at all when he basically said: if you aren’t publishing in my format (as opposed to any other) then you shouldn’t be doing anything in the at all. those were prett much his exact words at the sxsw roundtable discussion and i will tell you that rarely have i ever been so disgusted.
so, maybe his comments were good for some, but what he advocated was no better than what he decried. (oh yeah, this is the kind of self referential stuff that steve was complaining about, also at the same sxsw panel).</rant>
now that i got that out of my system, some more thoughts: it has occurred to me that while some people are longing for these big monolithic projects that used to be all the rage, what they are wishing for really isn’t what the medium of the web is most conducive to. when artists, creative people, started getting on the web, by and large they were coming from a screen medium – cd-rom projects. as time goes on, the web has acquired it’s own voice, which includes big experimental stuff like erik loyer’s marrow monkey, long tracts in word or the fray, but also communally moderated forums like slashdot, and other network-based (the natural mode of the web) models (amazon.com, epinions.com, etc.). weblogs seem to fall in between those two areas, having the important aspects of content (personal voice), and also functioning as a means of collaborative filtering.
now may also be a good time to mention some of my reservations of weblogging as a phenomenom, especially in the sort of celebrity / weird cliquishness it seems to engender. i can’t quite put words on it right now, and i really do think that any sort of self publishing on the web, whether it be the now passé homepage, journals/weblogs (it has a new name now, but people have been doing it since the web was put up)
, but i’m sure that something will come up eventually. anyway, my brain is still fried and i have a crapload of work to do, so off i go.