Name change

04 Nov 2005

I’d been keeping the name “StreetComputing” around because… it fit like an old shoe. I now think it’s kind of ugly, and it’s been hinted I should do away with it a handful of times, but I’d kept putting it off. Brand recognition and all that, at least with the folks at school, many of whom remembered it from Year 10 (when, it must be said, the audience from that part of the world was many times greater than what it has been ever since. Mostly as a result of the proliferation of videos in which stupid things were done, and, I would hazard, the fact that I wrote as though I were completely illiterate). But those days are done. And, further away from the Real World, your site could be called “The Hippopotamus Tsar; or, The Adventures of One Irrelevant Title to a Land Not So Far Away” and do perfectly well by the search engines, assuming you had the content to match it.

Rebranding in a commercial context is risky. But I just made this site look like a whitewashed wall, and have signalled my general lack of interest in complex aesthetics here at this particular point in time. Further away, perhaps, but that’s something entirely separate. I’ve got three designs in the works at the minute, one of which is this site, another of which is less austere but certainly not what would readily be described as “busy”, and another I envisage [having not yet commenced its design outside of my head] will be a fair distance from #fff (white, for those non-geeks in the audience) and hopefully more visually complex than the other two. I say this so everyone is aware I’m not a lost cause to this whole sparse design thing. I just wanted change, but change is isolated site-by-site.

So whilst I’m ripping down the establishment in that sense, I may as well do the same thing with the name! I struggle to define a purpose for this site, which is an overwhelmingly good thing (I think) at this particular point in time. It means I am not confined by the tyranny of Purpose and its twin, Rationale. Nepotism runs rife.

And, seeing as I have this domain here, it does make quite a lot of sense to make the blog name match the domain name, for as long as the blog remains the key component of the domain. StreetComputing would have been a convenient identifier had my blog related to computers and been of approximately equal or slightly less than equal (either way) importance within this domain space, but it doesn’t relate to computers for the most part, and I’m not keen on splitting up blogs into separate nerdery (language), geekery (pure IT), tech-ery (unsure about the appropriateness of that suffix there, but pertaining to A/V) and web-ery (CSS/markup/occasional server-side) blogs.

Though I am tempted. I could call one of them “Cascading Style Street” ;-)

Anyway. This is now called Joahua.com. And that was a really lengthy explanation.

My concern now is chiefly for Georgia’s capital J, on which the lower serif (there’s probably a more precise typographical term) seems disproportionally large:

That aside, this whole change thing is fun. Can you tell it’s [nearly] the end of my HSC? ;-)