I make things on the internet
If you add a Flickr photo to your del.icio.us bookmarks, you’ll now receive a little thumbnail beside your link. Beyond the network stability, it’s one of those little benefits from Yahoo purchasing both sites.
It might not sit well with the old-school users that like the austere look, but I find the visual representation handy. I noticed it because I’ve been using my bookmarks to keep track of my comments around the web.
Five and a half years later, and Joe Clark’s The Web is Like Canada still rings true — chiefly, that the web may be best defined by what it is not.
For those unfamiliar with the conundrum of Canadian identity: we have an abundance of iconic symbols, but lack a set of generic traits to pigeonhole the populace. We are everyone, and we are no one. The online world isn’t much different. It endures a constant battle of redefinition, with no real end.
The first generation of buzzwords are now just a distant memory — convergence, portals and push. They’re the inbred cousins that you locked in a shed and forgot about. Yet, they still managed to pop out a couple of bastard children — AJAX, community and web 2.0. Just remember that most of it doesn’t mean anything to real people:
Among the crowd that actually runs Web “properties”, there are no alternatives, a lack that masquerades as a “standard”. Their Web is Starbucks; it is the three American broadcast networks before cable TV; it is a single-newspaper town. Their Web is Pleasantville before colourization. It is mainstream in the worst possible sense.
I’m not saying there’s a problem with the stupid nature of Vocabulary 2.0, language issues are part of what makes Canada great. We just need to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Startups are not new, neither is building to flip. A business has parallels to constructing a nation, but we need to remember that nation-building on a whim is going to give us trouble.
We old-timers wonder why the oligarchs are throwing so much money down the tubes in an effort to overthrow the existing Web. We believe in a certain kind of Internet, one that’s open to new ideas but not open to every cockamamie idea.
We’ve been down this road before, and we’ll be down it again. So, heed Joe’s words and let your voice be heard:
What I want to happen is for the wise elders of the Web, those of us who’ve been online forever and really do know better than the neophytes, to use the concepts derived from the perpetual struggle to define Canadian identity as an arrow in our quiver in efforts to shoot bad ideas out of the sky.
Blam blam. Arrowed.
It’s about a week into the redesign of Eightface and things seem to be going okay. It’s taking a bit longer than usual — the home page and post pages are coming together nicely, but the rest of the site is lagging pretty far behind. For now we’ll stick to the impetus for the change and some thoughts about structure, while saving the methodology for a later post.
Grunge is easy for me, it’s very forgiving. I needed something different, something cleaner and a bit more challenging. So far it’s very clean, there are almost no graphics in the css file other than the odd icon. I’m also making an effort to do a decent job in terms of accessibility, but I need to do more reading. Also, it probably looks like ass in IE right now.
If you like the dirty stuff, don’t despair. I’m currently in the process of releasing my last three layouts as theme packs. There should be more desktop wallpaper in the future too.
A couple months ago, I thought that integrating the posts and quickposts would induce me to write more often. It had the opposite effect, the quickposts became more like long posts, the links ended up in my delicious stream and I had trouble finishing any of the templates. After most of the content on the front-page drops below the fold, you forget about it — out of sight, out of mind.
I’m not saying that the one-column structure can’t work, but it was having a negative impact on my posting style. If you’re looking for one-column inspiration: Michael did a good job with invader and Justin’s minimalist look is awesome. As for me, it’s off to the greener pastures of a one-glance tabloid style homepage.
The single column integrated structure won’t disappear completely, it’ll be put to use for the monthly archive view, as well as a log view for those that like their integrated feed style reading. Although that main central column will have two outliers to display date and comment count.
Hopefully, the print influences in the design are obvious — you never know. I’ve always had a hard-on for black and white. Back in grade eight, I organized a team of five people and co-opted the school newsletter from the Vice-Principal. The first issue was a cut-and-paste nightmare, after that Microsoft Publisher 2.0 was my bitch.
Over the last week, I’ve spent a good chunk of time with my site open and copy of the Globe and Mail in front of me. The print edition has nice red accents, and thick black bars over allcaps in some sub-sections. Beyond that, Subtraction and Coudal have been the primary web influences for visual style and structure.
In terms of creating a proper grid structure, I don’t profess to know anything, so I’ll leave it to others. Mark Boulton’s simple steps to designing grids is a good place to start. Khoi offers up a nice technique to display a grid under your content. (you may have seen mine appear over the last few days). Adhering to the structure is a bit of a pain, but it works well visually.
We could call this a live redesign, or a live realign, but it probably sits somewhere in between. So, please bear with the ugliness while I get things sorted. A lot of the work I’ll be doing is actualizing things I wanted to have done with the last theme. The nitpicky bits: local searches, posting all my artwork again, going back through old posts to redo them, better subpages (links, archives), etc.
My priorities have been getting the home page and single post views in functional condition (some stuff is still missing). Next up are the search, page and monthly archive views (which should all be relatively similar). After that comes a few new additions, including a help/faq page and a more box on individual posts (to drive those ariving via deep link further into the site) and a forum of sorts, so I can provide better support for the various WordPress plugins and themes. And updates to the plugins of course. A lot of the subpages need work before I make the links to them obvious. All in all, the current implementation of the site is far from finished but the most trafficked portions are in decent shape.
That’s it for now. I’ll spend more time exploring the method behind the madness at a later juncture. To find out what’s going on with the site, check the changelog. If you’ve got ideas or suggestions, let me know.
One of the first things that the pedagogical overlords try to pound into our tiny brains is the concept of sharing. We start in pre-school or kindergarten, after that it’s mostly downhill. Over the last few years, there’s been a resurgence of that playground ethos as we gleefully steal music and movies from the entertainment gods.
After harpooning copyright spokemen and lamenting the evils of digital rights management, we jealously guard our precious stylesheets and provide aloof answers to the secrets of our ways. Not everyone is a bastard though. There are lots of great people out there producing themes, pretty pictures and contributing their time to open-source projects. Now, as they say, is the time to put up or shut up.
Last September, I modelled a theme around the famous portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower and called it Bastard. That look made it onto a number of CSS gallery sites, and helped me to get my name out there. So it’s only fitting that the look is the first one I give away.
This isn’t a theme release, it’s just some WordPress templates and Photoshop files. It probably won’t work out of the box, but it should give you some insight into the method and the madness. The theme never really existed as one template, it just kind of evolved and got picked up by the gallery crowds before it was fully formed. At this point, the theme is six months old and I can’t attest to the condition of the code, but it’s probably a mess.
For the cautious type that won’t get in a car without a map, I present to you the contents of the pack:
Download the Bastard Pack 2.3mb
Just so we’re clear… there is no support for this package, take it or leave it. There is also no license per se, but that doesn’t mean you can use it for anything. I haven’t made any money off the pack, it wouldn’t be fair if you did. Use it for your personal sites… if you need something professionally, you can do better.
There should be at least two more packs coming out in the near future, but don’t lose sleep waiting for them. I’d like to thank recent SXSW award winner Bryan Veloso for inspiring me to dump a .zip file full of crap on the unsuspecting public. That and answering five questions for Seal Club.
Recently, Nintendo celebrated the 20th anniversary of the NES arrival in North America. I found the GameSpot coverage mostly unremarkable (read: nerd wet dreams), but the Duck Hunt conversation hit home last weekend.
My mom’s off in Europe, visiting my brother at school, and taking a much needed break from teaching. Meanwhile, my Dad is left at home working. I know the peace and quiet drives him nuts, so I dropped by to cook steaks and show off my intelligence.
Our after-dinner discussion included the finer points of the other brother’s video system collection, how much wrath I’d incur from borrowing his GameCube and whether or not everything bad was indeed good for you. Conversation then turned to the NES, the lightgun and Duck Hunt — one of the few video games that he has actually played. His comment:
You could never shoot that stupid dog.
I’m probably paraphrasing a bit, but you get the idea. Of course, the internet allows you to satisfy your bloodlust and kill the dog. Maybe the whole Nintendogs craze is just an attempt to even out the company’s canine karma and cultivate some love for man’s best friend.
What’s the point? Even my dad hates the dog in Duck Hunt. That says something.
Don’t have the cash for a real tilt-shift lens or even a Lensbaby? Here’s a quick tutorial for achieving the fake model photography look. I didn’t have too many photos around with a downward perspective, but I needed to give the technique a shot. This is the result:
As Marc points out on the flickr photo page, it probably would be better with the top of the chimney more focused. Didn’t really have anything better to work with on short notice. There’s a Flickr pool dedicated to tilt-shift miniature fakes if you need more. It’s really not that hard to fake.
Update: Here’s a much better example, from a trip to Bristol:
Transmit is the best ftp client I’ve ever used. How’s that for a shill? If you’re looking for something a little more indepth, Paul’s review of the current release goes into more detail. For me, the best feature is the tight integration with text editors (I’m partial to TextWrangler). Overall, it’s simple and easy to use, almost feels like an Apple product.
Now comes the hard part where I tell you that Transmit has been my client of choice for two or three years and I’ve only just purchased it recently. Why? I’m a bastard, that’s why — one of those jerks that stiffs the little guys. It’s equal opportunity jackassery though, I steal from the big boys too. It’s mine now though, and worth every penny.
Photography class passed me by, so I never discovered the utility of a fixed focal length lens. Say what? For the uninitiated, it mostly means that you’ve got no zoom, just fine focus. So, you need to put a bit more effort into framing your shots. I picked up a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II on Friday afternoon, just in time for a weekend blizzard.
The low aperture makes it’s pretty solid for indoor portrait photography without a flash. Canon also makes a 50mm USM lens with f/1.4 but it costs about five times as much.
The lens is the lightest that Canon makes, and the Digital Rebel XT is the lightest camera. Thus I was walking around with the lightest possible dSLR camera and it still felt like a brick. The lightness comes from the plastic construction, it doesn’t feel cheap though. Apparently, the first version came with a metal lens mount, you might be able to find one used. The lens is probably the lightest on the wallet too, weighing in around $100 usd.
You may have heard people talk about the Digg Effect or the Slashdot Effect, but there’s nary a mention of the Nude Curling Effect. It must be one of those long tail niches that’s ripe for the picking. Umm, did you say nude curlers?
For those that haven’t noticed, there’s an international sporting something-or-other going on in Italy right now and said sports shindig includes women’s curling. What does this have to do with me? Getting my site shut down, that’s what. Yes, women’s curling is indirectly to blame for site outages and sluggish behaviour ’round these parts.
Around prime time EST on Tuesday evening, some entity in the sports media latched on to the fact that the women of curling had posed for a nude calendar. Regular eightface readers will note that I covered this news a few months ago. And there-in lies the problem.
The main offender: Women of curling nude calendar. It was a one-liner linking to a Globe and Mail article that has since disappeared. Hits started turning up from Google as the news made it’s way onto the sports stations in Canada, so I fleshed out the post with links leading directly to the calendar. Incidently, it’s still for sale via The Curling News.
Now, my post is one of the first three returned via Google when you search for nude curling calendar. When a broadcaster mentions nudie pics, of course people are going to turn to the internet and why not start with Google. That explains the traffic spike to some extent.
I noticed a number of hits coming in for the post on Tuesday night, figured it had to be the Olympics and someone reporting on the calendar. Put a Google Ad on the page (it’s my only one) via some WordPress custom field voodoo and went to bed. I thought the traffic would die off, and it wouldn’t hurt to make a couple bucks. But the traffic didn’t die off, it came back hard Wednesday.
Now, it’s Thursday and the traffic isn’t slowing down. The server started acting sluggish this afternoon, I figured it was probably my fault and decided to take a look at the resource usage (you get lots of space and bandwidth, but not lots of processor). Uh oh, first problem, I discovered WordPress 2.0’s .htaccess rules don’t play nicely with my stats directory and I couldn’t get at the data (solution via Dreamhost wiki). The resource usage info is cryptic, but it looked like I was over.
I started to look for a nice way to make static pages within WordPress, when I received a friendly email from Dreamhost support informing me that I was over usage and that they had effectively turned the domain off.
My solution will come in a second, but first, let me bash my web host. Dreamhost has grown a lot over the last year, it’s good for business, but it has left them lacking in the support department. Rather than proposing a constructive solution and working with me, they found it easier to shut me off and tell me to look at cryptic statistics. Sure, it’s probably the right solution for most of the processor abuse cases, but maybe there’s a root cause that isn’t user stupidity. It’s also important to note that you can’t check the stats with the directory disabled. I responded almost immediately and two hours later, have yet to hear back, short of an auto-response. Thankfully, I’m capable of interpreting cryptic numbers and coming up with my own answers.
With large amounts of disk-space and bandwidth available on low-cost plans, it’s easy to forget about processor and memory usage. If you’re on a shared maching, it can be troublesome when you’re receiving a lot of traffic.
Normally, a page that you request from WordPress doesn’t actually exist. When a user requests the page, the software generates it on the fly via templates and database requests. All of that requires processor and memory overhead. So, if you can identify one page that’s receiving most of the traffic, you can replace it with a static version (an actual file).
I created a new directory in my account called static, that will allow me to house lightweight version of various pages that are prone to traffic spikes. After creating a stripped down version of the curling page, I rerouted the post to the new page via the “Remap subdir” option in the Dreamhost panel.
The server seems to be more responsive now, but we’ll see what happens. The Olympics will be over soon enough.
There are tons of weblogs around these days. A large chunk of them have commenting systems. If you read and comment on a number of sites regularly, you end up forgetting about most of them. There’s also no way to let your readers know what you’re reading. So, we need a way to track what we’ve posted elsewhere. Enter coComment and another way to use del.icio.us.
coComment is another one of the closed beta-du-jours, a site that aims to do it for you (and track popular conversations, vis-a-vis popular posts). You read a few of the comments (Solution Watch, Tech Crunch, Scoble) and it sounds like the second coming of sliced bread: it’s going to be “HUGGEEE!!”, everyone needs it, filling a void, it’s a simple idea that will work.
The idea isn’t really new, Kottke started doing something similar awhile ago. Flickr lets you keep track of photos you’ve commented on. coComment will just be another site I have to check on a daily basis. This isn’t a jab at coComment, so much as an attempt to outline my solution and point out an alternative that isn’t in closed beta. coComment will serve a different set of needs; doing things like aggregating the comments, offering notification and some community aspects.
All niceties aside, I will take a jab at any Web 2.0 company that uses tables for layout. Oh, and there’s something called spacer.gif? For shame.
I’ve been making an effort to participate more in conversations on other weblogs over the last few months, and can attest that they’re hard to keep track of. Zach told me he’d been using del.icio.us to keep track of his comments and pointed me towards two posts offering a few more details. Basically, it comes down to tagging anything you comment on with @commented-on (see mine).
Del.icio.us already has a number of ways to integrate itself into your site, os and browser. You can also tag whatever you want, although coComment seems to be doing a good job covering all the popular services. If you’re a del.icio.us user, the extension for firefox can make the posting process relatively painless.
It’s simple, works for me and keeps track of my comments.
