Eight Year Old Physics Student Admitted to College
Yawn. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- show me a kid who's a genius in the humanities. Only then will I be impressed. #link
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Date: November 2005
Yawn. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- show me a kid who's a genius in the humanities. Only then will I be impressed. #link
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I had a set-up somewhat like this for the last design, and I'm trying something new for this one too. Keeping a separate file for colors will make swapping any changes much easier. #link
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More perspective on the unrest in France. I need say no more; these opinions reflect my own. #link
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Yeah, I know. I'm like two whole weeks late with this one. The Guardian has more reports, like this one. #link
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A supplement to this entry from a few days ago. #link
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Fuck the Arctic Monkeys. That’s right. Test Icicles are my new favourite band.
What can I say? They’re fresh, original; lots of noise, lots of groove; and very much unclassifiable. (Need a lazy-music-snob description? Okay. They sound a bit like a cross between the Blood Brothers and the Giddy Motors. But with lots of other crazy shit thrown in. Will that do?) Exactly the kind of music that doesn’t go down well with the masses. Which can only be a good sign. If some people can’t take it, that’s their loss. The debut album, For Screening Purposes Only, just blows me away, and that’s all that matters.
Don’t mind what they say about their gigs, either. Live music is overrated. You heard me.
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Oh Cory, Cory, Cory. If you'd done a little research on this, you'd know that JM Barrie, the author of the book in question, was a supporter of Great Ormond Street and provided for the donation of his copyright to the hospital after his death. So it's not like the British government just handed it out arbitrarily. The principle of your argument might be worthy, but the facts change things a little, don't they? #link
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I mentioned reinvention, didn’t I? One of my goals for this revision process was to find away to entwine my two weblogs together into a single strand, like it was in the beginning. I was disturbed by my neglecting of the main weblog in favour of posting links by the bucketful; on the other hand, having just a linklog isn’t enough for me and I need that space to record longer-form thoughts, or photographs, or pretty much anything that isn’t a link.
So what I did was, I changed the names. The old weblog becomes the macrolog, while the linklog becomes the microlog. Simple, eh? One weblog, two components: one for big thoughts, one for little. Suddenly the parts seem like a whole again. Which ever strand I add to — macro or mirco — I’ll be adding to the completeness. And because of this, I won’t feel so guilty for leaving huge gaps between longer entries. Everybody wins! It’s funny how semantics can change your perceptions like that.
As for the front page? Well, in a perfect world there’d be some Feedburner-esque method of entwining the separate strands together into a single rope, akin to what Kottke did for his main page. But I’m not about to spend a week hacking MT with my limited skills to get it working the way he did. I’m a ‘plug-and-play’ kinda guy. No pun intended.
So what I did was, I set up the main page to display only entries from the microlog. Then I added links to my macrolog posts to the microlog, with a nifty trick using CSS and the category label tag to style those entries differently from the rest. So now everything tumbles down the page, nicely twisted together. It’s an awkward way to do it, sure, but I had to improvise. Very crafty of me.
Speaking of tumbling, I think it’s pretty obvious that the new front page is inspired by what the tumbleloggers have done/are doing. But it’s not a tumblelog like theirs. It’s still the same old weblog I’ve been keeping for four years. Only it’s got some new boots and panties. Jack calls it a ‘tumbly weblog’, which I think is spot on.
Expect to see some new things going on here over the next few weeks. (For ‘new’, read ‘shamelessly stolen off other bloggers far better than I’.) Also, expect the usual tweaks here or there, as everything settles. And above all, dear reader, stick along for the ride.
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I had no idea this was happening again, I swear. [c/o mezzoblue] #link
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A good spot for jumping in. #link
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So my restlessness got the better of me. I liked the last design (which I only finished a month ago) but it was a bit too much. There was something a bit bland and staid about it, too. But above all it overemphasised the design, relegating the content to a mere element within, when the whole point of the site is the content: the links that I post, the entries and thoughts that I write here, and everything around and in between. It intimidated me, so I held off from updating anything for a few days, save the odd post or two. Then other things got in the way — work, life in general — and those days turned to weeks. Quelle surprise.
In the meantime, over at Kottke’s blog I read all about those fancy new tumblelogs that seem to be all the rage. Sites like project.ioni.st and Anarchaia. Even Jack has started one, and a nice one it is too.
Tumblelogs; just a fancy name for the weblogs people like me used to have back in the day, really, back when Blogger was state-of-the-art. Before Movable Type made us put a title on everything, and suddenly posting a link or a snapshot of your thoughts wasn’t ‘substantial’ enough. Of course then linklogs came along, and del.icio.us and Flickr and all that jazz, and it seemed like every component of what a weblog used to be had been spun off into its own format, its own identity. Like sit-com characters starring in their own shows.
Anyway, the idea appealed to me, and germinated in the back of my head. The idea of just tumbling everything down the page, regardless of its content — whether an essay or a quote or a link or a photo. That’s what attracted me to blogging in the first place, back when it was quick and dirty and long before the obligation to write essays made it a chore.
This is not a chore.
So I took that idea, and make it the basis of this (live) redesign. My remit? Nothing but content. The content is king. Nice big bold blocks of text. All the fancy stuff kept hidden. Consider this post obsolete.
And hey, would you believe it? Today just happens to be this weblog’s fourth birthday. Four years! Wasn’t that long ago, but I was a different person then, blogging-wise. Keeping a blog back then was, I dunno, more fun? I want this blog to be fun again. I guess there’s no better time than now to take stock. To re-engage. To reinvent. (More on this later.)
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