07 Feb 2006
For the first few sites it didn’t really matter, I figured it was just getting into the swing of things. Nope.
Implementing designs that, at a glance, feel like table-based designs are probably built with that in mind. I can do all kinds of zany crap à la various things in the Zen Garden, but it doesn’t help when that [zany crap] isn’t expected. Even the One True Layout only solves so many problems… there are somethings that are easier achieved with rowspan/colspan. I’m not doing them that way, of course, but it’s just I’ve spent today agonising over how to make a not-that-complex design just work… and it’s not all falling into place as I’d like it.
Admittedly, I am trying to build it as a fluid layout, etc., etc., but… is there some level of CSS-design-wizardry at which all this suddenly becomes easy/straightforward?
Having said that, things are more exciting here not knowing entirely what’ll happen if you change a certain bunch of styles… which is where I’ve been for a year or so now. My CSS-wrangling isn’t anywhere near as bad as my JavaScript mangling, because I always have a very clear idea of what I want to achieve and how it’ll work when building styles… but getting there is forever an adventure!
06 Feb 2006
Well, not really… I’m just in less of a bad mood with it and have realised that TextPattern really isn’t that great unless you just want a blog and nothing more. And I’m loathed to use Mambo or the like… though I imagine that’s probably largely poor brand perception on my part (having seen the horrible stuff people can create with it). I lump it into the same basket as phpBB and other bloated/insecure/inaccessible crap like that.
It’s probably not really, but I’ll persist in my delusions until forced to learn otherwise (either by myself or others!)
Anyway, syndication services (Atom, RSS) rock my world and should be more broadly used even internally for things that you mightn’t think would require it. This is the conclusion I’ve come to having started putting together a new site (the one based around WordPress I was whining about) for my church and wondering how best to integrate an upcoming events calendar on the front page.
It remains to be seen whether or not I actually do it that way, but it’d be nice if syndication was already so heavily a part of WordPress’ processing that it became a trivial thing to run a parser function on any page. I’m still trying to decide whether to setup custom queries in WordPress to read future-dated posts for events + make them accessible (able to be accessed, that is; not especially applied to broad audiences, assistive technologies, etc.) prior to when they’re scheduled to appear… or whether to simply build my own app on the side that either spits out an include I’ll grab with PHP in my templates — boring — or an Atom feed that WordPress can parse, and lots of non-IE browsers (Well, prior to version 7! Can’t wait!) can do UsefulStuffâ„¢ with, and that can integrate into a Dashboard widget for Mac users and a Konfabulator widget for PC users, etc.
Yeah, people mightn’t use it lots but it’s a cool idea ;-) This is what doing one website for a TV network has done to me — it’s all about eye-candy and out-gimmicking the opposition!
Speaking of the Opposition (NineMSN, I guess) and Gimmicks, Windows Messenger 8 Beta looks like it’s shaping up into something I could actually use without complaining too loudly. They’ve pulled off the disposing-of-normal-UI-occasionally thing far better than Windows Media Player ever has, and everything feels as though it gels really nicely.
I’m a little concerned they’re trying to pull users into their own ‘portal’ thing with Spaces and various other Live.com crap, but it’s hardly as if they’re the only ones doing that. It’s ironic that we’re getting into an era of allegedly-more-open citizen-powered media that’s becoming progressively more isolated because of service providers. For example, what the heck do Yahoo! do? I don’t get it. I don’t know anyone that uses their Messenger service, or their blog service (Yeah! They have one! What the heck?! Discovered this last week and was suitably shocked), or their email service. Same goes for AOL (nearly… I know a handful of people that have an AIM account and supposedly use it… but it’s literally a handful, as in I have enough fingers to count all of them, and I don’t know whether they actually use it or not, not having an account myself!). And as for MSN Spaces… hmm. Well, my MSN Spaces page says “This isn’t my real blog, go elsewhere.” I flicked through a couple of other peoples today (Messenger Beta makes that pretty easy, though not significantly any better than the latest stable release) and found more than a few who were uncertain as to whether they should keep their MSN space or just go with Blogger. Every non-geek I know who blogs uses Blogger. More power to Google.
But I’m sure these demographics vary enormously depending on who you know: the point is, I’m not seeing any crossover, which is a little worrying. Of course, I only ever search using Google, so go fire conspiracy theories around all you like… I reckon most blog content on these services isn’t at all compelling, and doesn’t need to be. Blogs are, for the most part, mass-CC:-email substitutes that really shouldn’t be archived… and these easier to use services are probably exacerbating that problem.
I don’t excuse this blog from that entirely, of course, but there’s more than a little bit of content here that draws search engine traffic and is “timeless” in a sense that “my dog ate crayons for breakfast this morning and went to the vet and they said this happens all the time” could never be. But I digress, hugely (a failing of the medium, no doubt!)
So that’s all very interesting. Interested to hear if others know people in multiple “service provider universes” or if everyone’s friends are, for the most part, confined to a particular service (and what that service may be). If you’ve got a blog, this’d be a great time to play pingback/trackback tag instead of just commenting here… I’d love it if this could get a little viral and we could see what platforms people are using and “why”. For me, it’s mostly just that everyone I know is using a particular service. What is it for you?
06 Feb 2006
What a stupid contraction. Seriously. Will not does not become won’t. Show me where the “o” comes from, someone! Anyone! Etymology nerds, arise! From whence did this moronic, bastardised contraction emerge? And how do we stuff it back in a box and tape up the box and throw it overboard?
Or have I missed something, and it’s actually a perfectly sensible contraction of… something other than “will not”?
05 Feb 2006
Okay, I’ve tried it properly now. It sucks. Sure, it’s probably more usable for someone-who-really-should-be-using-WordPress.com-or-Blogger-or-Spaces or something, but not for anyone who’s self-hosting. Its WYSIWYG editor is doing a grave disservice to the web as a whole, the default theme, Kubrick, is a semantic thing-of-nightmares, and its AJAX administration interface fails to degrade fairly comprehensively. Yuck.
I’m using it now because I want to put something quick and dirty together, but there’s no way I’m seriously considering changing anything else to WordPress 2.0.x, nor, in the future, will I consider building other sites around it. There’s one blog-only site (this is unusual: we’re not that groovy and Web 2.0 — RSS feeds seem to be an uphill battle!) we’re going to do this week at work: that can be my initial foray into TextPattern.
From there, who knows (Who knows all). If I don’t like it/it’s not flexible enough (Fortunately, WordPress is rather flexible. I’m not stuck with it’s crappiness, I’d just prefer not to have to deal with it in the first place.), it’s probably back to the land of roll-your-own solutions again. There are a few decent-looking Rails-esque frameworks for PHP floating about out there at the minute, so I might try using one of those. Apparently Rails/Ruby is ridiculously slow compared to PHP, so I’d rather not use it and really like it and be trapped in this framework that’s very Web 2.0, very expendable, and very crap.
Can you tell I’m embittered with web (2.0) products at the minute?
04 Feb 2006
I’m trying to write about this movie (I just deleted a post and started again) and can’t do it justice. You absolutely must see it. Take tissues. It’s been described as a prayer for peace, but I see it equally as a testament to how messed up and sinful humanity is. This passed between Mathieu Kassovitz’s (Birthday Girl; Amélie; The Fifth Element) character, Robert, and Avner (Eric Bana — Australian. Troy; voice actor in Finding Nemo; Black Hawk Down):
“We’re Jews, Avner. Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong.”
“We can’t afford to be that decent anymore.”
“I don’t know that we ever were that decent. Thousands of years of hatred doesn’t make you decent. But we were supposed to be righteous. It’s a beautiful thing. That’s Jewish. That’s what I knew. That’s what I was taught. And now I’m losing that… and I lose that and… that’s… that’s everything. That’s my soul.”
— whilst Avner’s mother speaks of them fighting for a place… on earth. And all the while Avner is away from his child, whose voice brings him (and the audience) to tears. He speaks to his daughter afraid she won’t ever meet him/remember him, hear his voice in person.
This is the story of one man and the impact all this evil had on him, beautifully (hauntingly) told. His story feels real. There is nothing contrived here. His wife is not a device, a catalyst for a romantic sub-plot, a draw-card for a different audience. Daphna and Avner and their child are a part of a relationship that this violence threatens to break. That is a part of what Avner is torn away from every time he plans to kill another ‘target’. Targets, towards the end of the film, cease to be ‘targets’ and become people. The ‘safe-house’, shared with the enemy. The ‘local-honey trap’, murdered arbitrarily seemingly to avenge Carl’s (Ciarán Hinds — The Phantom of the Opera; Calendar Girls; Veronica Guerin) assassination. She is left naked, which seemingly exacerbates the depth of their actions and subsequent guilt. Hans is dead. It’s implied he was killed, though perhaps less than certain. Avner’s descent past the point of coping has begun, and an earlier allusion to someone who slept in a closet out of fear comes to fruition as Avner takes refuge in the same place. The bomb maker, Robert, dies at the hands of a ferris wheel. Any detachment from the murders of people we might once have had is now thoroughly dismissed, on both sides. The only ‘bias’ that potentially exists stems from the perspective from which the story is told… but Spielberg is sufficiently rancorous towards the Israeli establishment — in fact, probably a little more so (could just be my reading of it: either way, it was fairly neutral, but I sympathised more — if I did ‘sympathise’ at all — with the ‘opposition’ in this film for whatever reason).
Go watch the movie. It’s definitely not a pleasant film, nor, at 164 minutes, is it particularly quick… but it’s worth seeing.
