No gods, no kings, no billionaires
You are keeping up with Joey deVilla’s account of his Worst Date Ever, aren’t you?
With lines like this:
If life were a highway, Crabs would be the guy in the eighteen-wheeler with a bottle of cheap Tequila telling the monkey in the passenger seat “Hey buddy, you take the wheel for a while.”
…it’s utterly hilarious.
Ken MacLeod has a beautiful anecdote about people being uncomfortable with using the word “socialist” to describe themselves:
“Over the years I have met a lot of women, and heard of a lot more, who are feminist in every aspect of their beliefs and attitudes but who firmly insist that they are not feminists. The reason they give is always the same: they don’t consider themselves feminists because they don’t hate men.
“Imagine if the left had taken the most hostile caricatures of what socialism was and what being a socialist meant, and proceeded to live up to them. Lots of people would now be saying things like, ‘I’m not a socialist, but I think capitalism sucks and should be replaced by a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by and in the interests of the whole community.’
“Oh, wait … ”
Whenever I start thinking about RSS, I know I’ve been spending too much time in the blogging world, and it’s time to unplug for a while. The fact that I’ve just redesigned my home page, and started using SharpReader to track a bundle of tech blogs is all the confirmation I need.
Luke Hutteman, the brains behind SharpReader, is aware of what happens when your feeds get out of control:
“One of the problems with using an RSS Aggregator is that it gives the illusion of allowing you to keep up with a practically infinite number of weblogs. Whenever you find a link to a new weblog with an interesting entry, the temptation is high to subscribe to this blog to keep up with other writings on it. After doing this for a while, you end up with a huge number of subscriptions and find that there is a limit to what you can keep up with after all, even when using an aggregator.”
Once you get to that point you can either cut back, or you can go mad spending every waking minute trying to stay on top of your feeds. I was there back in March (with a lot less than the 200 feeds Luke has). I haven’t quite reached that same level of blogsessiveness yet, but I know that I need to check my consumption.
On the other hand…
Your blog is like your house on the web. Every now and then you feel like giving it a lick of fresh paint, and rearranging the furniture. If you’re reading this in your browser, rather than in a newsreader, you’ll probably notice that things have changed a bit. (You can still see the previous version for comparison.) I haven’t changed the archive templates yet, but I’ll drag them into the new format as soon as I have time.
Any comments on the new design are very welcome.
While I was designing the new look, the following sites, articles, and pages were invaluable references:
In the whole design, the single thing that caused (and is still causing, dammit) the most problems is the <select> list showing my archives in the sidebar. Honest, getting this to size correctly in IE, Mozilla, and Opera is a pain in the neck. You’d think that one of the fundamental HTML Form elements would be pretty well nailed down after a decade of specifications, but no… As soon as you throw CSS positioning with floated elements into the mix, you can just forget everything they teach you in web school. I may well abandon it at some point in the (near) future.
Consider it abandoned. The <select> list of archives, that is. It’s just not worth the pain. Also, the Quick Reviews section of the sidebar is now formatted with <div> blocks instead of tables (big “yay!” for css vertical-align:text-top), and all quick reviews in the sidebar should now have an image associated with them (big “yay!” for MT Macros). Upon Frank’s suggestion, I’ve shrunk the date headers in the main body. And finally, I’ve also made the text in the main body more black. It was HTML #222, but I looked at it on my LCD panel at work today, and it looked washed-out and faded. See this article at WOW Web Designs for a bit more information on this issue.
Rands just had what he described as a “Holy Duh” moment with regard to weblogging, and what weblogs are:
The painfully simple question is, “What is a weblog?” The painfully simple answer is, “A weblog is the representation of a person on the Internet.”
…
Weblogs are Net_People. Just like your circle of friends, some are particularly good at original content, some are just great at relaying links to other information. Some say too much, some say too little, but a weblog is the singular voice of a person.
Every now and then the obvious is worth stating. Sometimes it can clarify a picture nicely. For me, this ties into something I’ve been wondering about lately. Namely, what is the appropriate etiquette for reading weblogs?
Here’s something cool and interesting: Bloggus Caesari. It’s a blog supposedly written by Julius Caesar, giving a day-by-day run-down of his exploits and campaigns. It has been running since 2001:
“I’m heading up to Geneva. One of the Gaul tribes is planning on cutting through Roman territory, in an attempt to go and fight some other tribe. I’m the governor of Gaul now, so I have to stop them… I’m caught a little off guard ? there’s only one legion up there, so I’m trying to raise some more at the same time.
“Well, it looks like I might be away more than I’d like, so I decided to set up this blog. My friends in Rome can keep track of what I’m up to amongst the barbarians..”
Caesar talks in a familiar, modern voice, while describing actual historical events from 2000 years ago:
“Suddenly new enemy troop movements are visible. A force about 60,000 strong has concentrated at the most awkward point in our siegeworks: a hill too large to include in our defences, so that the camp there is built at a slight incline. Simultaneously Commius’ cavalry has lined itself up facing the outer wall, while his infantry has left camp in battle order. And now troops once again pour out of Alesia. I’m looking for a position from which I can view all of these developments. This could be the big one.”
I’ll have to get Abi to give me some idea of the “real” time frame of the blog. It looks like the author has gone to some amazing lengths to provide vivid descriptions and thorough details of how Caesar’s campaigns unfolded. What a fantastic idea, and what a wonderful way to learn more about Roman history! (via Brad DeLong)