Category: Technology

Gas Station & The Flip

I got Steph a Flip video camera for Mother’s Day (yes, somewhat early) because I wanted to be sure we had something easily on hand to record all the little moments in life that don’t quite merit pulling out the HD behemoth, and many of those moments are soon arriving. Plus, now we can capture stuff from two angles. Clearly, this is not excessive. No! Perfectly reasonable.

Then, this evening as Steph went inside at the gas station to grab something to drink for our trip home from Maplewood, I couldn’t help but pick the little thing up and start talking to it. It is truly a delightful gadget. The lighting conditions here are not ideal, but if you want to see a video produced under more proper, normal conditions, clearly Stephanie can provide such things. I am bound to disappoint you in those respects.

Upgrading to WordPress: the Good, the Blog, and the Ugly

WordPress 2.5 was released about a week ago, and it looked absolutely delicious to me. Seriously, I salivated. I was using Movable Type at the time, but it was extremely old (Perhaps four or five years old! Software! Web software!) because I had neglected to upgrade it. I should also point out that, having worked for years in a group whose sole purpose was to facilitate the updating of software, this is the height of irony. And yet I trudged along with MT 2.64 (or whatever) for years.

May I tell you what I’m getting out of this upgrade? Please? That would make me happy. Note that these aren’t necessarily new things in WordPress 2.5, they’re just new to me in terms of blogging software. These are mostly older ideas.

  • Blogging via email. I did this post almost entirely from an email message! It’s like the blog software just disappears and I’m just writing email. That means I’ll probably post more frequently, and it’s more likely I’ll do so while I’m on the road or away from a regular computer. I can do email on the iPhone just fine, but I don’t want to write 500 words in a textarea in Safari Touch.
  • Akismet spam blocking. Anyone who followed my old comments feed knows that while I often crowed about blocking so many thousand comment spams, quite a few still got through every day. For every fifty I would block, five or ten would sneak through and hang out for half an hour before I noticed and removed them. Still, I’m not one of those people who wants to moderate every comment and only show comments I approve. This is the Internet. It’s supposed to be a little Wild West. That’s a strength, not a weakness. I want you all to be able to have a little comment party with each other when I’m not around. I can’t do that if I’m playing monitor. I’m hoping the algorithmic brain in Akismet will work its magic so I won’t have to, and we can all feel satisfied knowing our comments are published immediately.
  • Friendlier archive URLs. When my tracking software tells me someone went to /archives/001545.php, what does that tell me? Nothing. That’s what. And that URL doesn’t tell you anything either. But if I see someone visited /2008/03/26/bus-etiquette/, I know exactly what that is. And so do you. It’s nice.
  • The rotating tag line is back. See, up there at the top? Yeah. Don’t get too attached: it could disappear just as easily. Just enjoy it for a little while. Also, it doesn’t change every time you reload the page. It’s something like every 5 minutes. So don’t drive yourself nuts. Just read early and read often.
  • No more “rebuilding.” Movable Type 2.whatever always made me rebuild my blog. Perhaps because it was created before the widespread dissemination of PHP and MySQL on small-time hosts? I don’t know. Either way, rebuilding is a dead concept. Yay!
  • A huge plugin repository. If I want to augment the functionality of my blog in any way, it’s likely someone else has already written it, and it’s up there now. Sometimes the quality isn’t what you’d want, but it’s all open source, so I can geek out on the code and fix it if that’s needed.

The design you’re seeing on this blog (shown here for posterity) is temporary. It’s really just a half-hearted attempt to get things looking somewhat normal (without looking identical to the default, that is) before I have time to redesign the thing. Hang in there. I don’t like the way it looks now, but I’ll be making tweaks over the coming weeks, and steering it towards where I want it to be. I’ll keep the archives and search functionality this time.

Enjoy! And thanks for reading.

Simplicity in Design

A couple nights ago I sat down and combed through some of my old entries, looking for a particular one, and just having fun reading them while I was at it. It’s not something I do very often, but it’s really wonderful to be able to go back over your personal history, see how far you’ve come and what you’ve been through, read your own story like a book, take the power those memories give to you, and then turn your eyes forward to your future.

One of the career-related entries I most enjoyed reading was Redesign (Whoomp, There It Is). I’m so glad I included a screenshot of the original. (Ow, background! Lesson learned: when you’re talking about visual things, include a static copy of that visual thing for posterity. Don’t assume it’ll always be there.)

Still, the fact that this blog’s general design is almost four years old strikes me pretty hard. On the one hand, I feel like it has held up amazingly well. It doesn’t look outdated to me at all. It’s very sparse, and that helps it to age well. The only significant changes I’ve made since the “HOLY COW ORANGE STRIPES” design were to mercifully turn it green about six weeks after I had created it, and six months later, make the background slowly shift through the color wheel. (What, you haven’t noticed? Come off that RSS feed and just sit on the actual webpage for a minute.) OK, I also added a simplified, floating drawing of my own disembodied head in the upper left-hand corner, and recently fixed it to display properly in Firefox, too! Also, IE 7, but we’re not on speaking terms right now.

I have to acknowledge amidst all the cool stuff going on here, the design has some downsides. I talked to Kevin Hendricks over email today about some of the issues after he really baited the hook on Twitter. (Apparently living with me for a few years has given him knowledge of my reactionary nature.)

I think it’s fair to summarize our conversation by saying that Kevin believes my blog would be benefitted by having an “about” section and some kind of archive access for old entries, perhaps visible and accessible on each page. (Correct me if I’m wrong there, Kevin.) Such things come as part of the standard package on blogs, and you’ll notice they’re missing from mine. Almost everything is missing from mine, in fact, and that’s purposeful.

My response to Kevin was that while I understand on very rare occasions people will go spelunking around in my well-hidden archives (as I myself did recently), it’s not what the vast majority of my audience is doing. 99% of you guys are coming here to get the latest news, and move on. So I want to dedicate something reasonably near 99% of my UI to that task. Kevin rallied that archives and “about” info are useful in many situations. He also agreed that they don’t necessarily require a traditional “side bar” (where archives, widgets, and other little info bits gather on blogs), as I let slip I was planning something more unorthodox and dynamic.

In the past, I’ve promised a side bar. Now, I’m considering reneging on that altogether and never having one at all. It would take up about 200 pixels of width on my screen, and it takes those precious pixels from the main content area where my almighty text, awash in its own splendor, resides. I want that space. I’m protective of that space.

But even more so, I’m zealous about displaying less where less will do the job. I’ve got plenty of ideas on how to bring out additional functionality and widgets without forcing you to lose those pixels. What I need to hear from you is simple: do you want access to my archives? Is that useful? Have you ever missed them? The rest (an “about” page, additional personal info, etc.) I’m pretty much sold on, but I’m not sure about the archives.

What say you, gentle reader? Do you pine to scour the depths of my textual time capsule, or are you content in the here and now?

Twitter in Plain English

I don’t expect that you’ll all immediately go, join Twitter, and start posting. I don’t even expect that you’ll start following me there. I’d love that, of course, since it’s where I do most of my updates these days. But until then, I figure I’ll just show you what Twitter is about, and that’ll be useful enough. Enjoy the clever “Twitter in Plain English” from the fine folks at Common Craft.

Watch: Twitter in Plain English