Under Construction
I make things on the internet
This recent image of typesetters, from Shorpy, reminded me of a photo that I took at the National Print Museum in Dublin awhile back. It was of a boy’s indenture agreement to serve as an apprentice compositor in a Letterpress shop. Highlights of seven years service include: no fornicating, gambling or frequenting of ale-houses. I’ve transcribed the document and made the text available.
Michael Ruhlman writes that with all of the prepackaged food and simple recipes in a box that are available, people start to believe that they’re too stupid to cook. He goes on to outline the world’s most difficult roasted chicken recipe, which I’ve reproduced.
Turn your oven on high (450 if you have ventilation, 425 if not). Coat a 3 or 4 pound chicken with coarse kosher salt so that you have an appealing crust of salt (a tablespoon or so). Put the chicken in a pan, stick a lemon or some onion or any fruit or vegetable you have on hand into the cavity. Put the chicken in the oven. Go away for an hour. Watch some TV, play with the kids, read, have a cocktail, have sex. When an hour has passed, take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the stove top or on a trivet for 15 more minutes. Finito.
After you’ve finished with the chicken, you can throw the carcass in a pot (with a touch of vinegar to make the meat fall of the bone), add some carrots, celery, onion and salt, simmer it, and you’re left with stock. Then make some delicious soup.
Alanah visited the Smithfield Horse Market in Dublin yesterday and took a few photos. I’d never heard of Dublin’s pony kids before, but messing around with horses is apparently somewhat of a tradition for young knackers.
In a city blighted by drugs, the horses certainly provide an important form of escape for bored youngsters who might otherwise take to heroin and petty crime.
Here’s another excerpt, from an older article in The Independant.
The suburban horse culture is a fascinating example of what happens when the poor appropriate the pleasures of the rich. In Ireland, horse ownership is generally the prerogative of farmers and of the wealthy business and professional class. Quite how it became fashionable among the children of the urban dispossessed is not entirely clear.
It’s an interesting outlet for young people, and probably wouldn’t have cropped up in any other city. The main problem is that many of the kids live in housing estates, so there’s no proper stable to house the horses. The inability to properly look after the animals has resulted in poorly treated, malnourished horses wandering around and grazing at the side of the road.
Attempts have been made to shut down the horse fair, but they’ve been unsuccessful. The event has been occurring for more than a hundred years, and there’s no real organization — people know that it happens on the first Sunday of every month, and they show up with horses in tow.
Time to celebrate! The weblog is nine years old. It actually started on an old ISP with a tilde address, and migrated to eightface a few months later. Kind of hard to believe that it’s been around for about a third of my lifetime. I never had any sort of long-term plan — at the time it just seemed really cool that you could use blogger to update your site from any browser, rather than having to rely on FTP.
In other news, I’ll be starting a live redesign in the near future, it’s been awhile since I’ve done one. I liked the collage graphics in the most recent layout, but it bothers me that one of the main elements was the Morton Salt girl. Being Canadian, I had no idea that she was part of an iconic American brand. At the time, I was going for an early 1950s vibe, and it was just one image among many. Another reason for a redesign is that the overall look just doesn’t suit what I’m posting, the typography is a bit too serious. Nine years of posting has also produced a lot of legacy issues. I need to start going through my old posts to clean things up (tag the old entries, add titles and whatnot), before things get really out of hand.
Last year, I was contacted by Hans Lijklema about including my fonts in an archive of free fonts. His Free Font Index landed on my doorstep a couple weeks ago. I just got around to posting some photos now, there are some better spread shots over at The Fell Types.
What fonts you say? About ten years ago, I went on a font making kick, mostly hand-drawn stuff, and crappy erasure remixes. Some of them were drawn by my buddy Brian Stuparyk. People still download and use these in various projects, you can grab them here. They’re pretty rough and raw, no kerning, no nothing… didn’t really know what I was doing at the time. I should probably revisited the fonts and clean them up a bit.
If you get the chance, you should check out the book. There’s some great work in there by talented type designers, who created much more usable typefaces. There are also some cool interviews.
It’s time to release a new version of flickrRSS. It’s actually been largely complete for the last three or four months, but I was waiting for the new version of WordPress to come out, and then just got lazy about rewriting the documentation. Much of the credit for this release goes to Stefano Verna, who cleaned up the source code, reworked some existing features, and added some new ones.
This is a major release, we’ve tried to make it as backwards compatible as possible, but it will likely break for some people. Here’s a quick run down of the major new features and changes:
With the new presentation and parameters, it should allow you to customize the output a lot more. There’s probably room to add a few more meta tags, but it’s a good start. The system makes it easier to use things like Lightbox, although you’ll probably be breaking Flickr’s terms of use. Hiding unused features in the setup panel should make things a little bit easier for some people. The separation of code is mostly targeted at developers who reuse the code for other systems.
I’m pushing this out on the site first, before rolling it out in the automatic WordPress update system. Ideally, that will allows use to catch any unforeseen bugs before they become a major problem. The plugin should import your old settings without any trouble, but it’s possible that you may need to do the setup again (particularly widget users).
If you run into problems, please post on the new flickrRSS forum, I was running into a lot of spam problems with the old one.
Making it’s now annual appearance, here’s a roughly chronological list of the places that I visited during the past year.
One or more nights were spent in each of the cities listed. Places with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive nights. Not quite as many place as last year, but it’s a reasonable list overall.
In a recent post at Signal vs Noise, Jason Fried argued that the Drudge Report is on of the best designed sites on the internet. I’m inclined to agree, not because it’s an amazing layout or well-coded, but because it’s iconic. His post made me a remember a parody of the site that I worked on around the time of the 2004 presidential election.
For those that don’t know, I used to work for a humour newspaper in university, called Golden Words (whose website appears to be non-functional). The newspaper is widely read, with a circulation of about 9000 copies every Wednesday morning, and could be roughly equated to The Onion or the Harvard Lampoon.
After a turn at the helm as editor in my final year, I returned periodically to make sure things were sailing along smoothly. Around the time of the US elections in 2004, I stopped by to see if the new crew could use some help. I was tasked with creating something for the back page, which was typically full colour and devoted to some sort of graphical mayhem or illustrated comic.
The Drudge Report’s iconic layout, and room for small photos and one-liners provided the framework for a quick and dirty send-up of the site. If I remember correctly, Alanah and I spent about two or three hours producing this parody of the Drudge Report for the 2004 Presedential election. It appeared on the back page of the paper around Hallowe’en, hence the zombie references. The line about Bush supporting fiscal responsibility is oddly prescient.
I recently chewed through a copy of The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. The first night, I didn’t want to put it down, but ended up succumbing to the need for sleep. It’s an odd sort of book that straddles multiple genres, with elements of sci-fi, romance and philosophy to name a few. To a large extent, it’s left up to the reader to determine what sort of book that they want to read. I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s kind of like tossing The Matrix, Memento and Jaws, into a blender and chugging it down.
The official website and alternate reality game offer up the sort of viral marketing which is normally reserved for movies and videogames. Can’t say that these campaigns do much for me, but it may serve to pique your interest. For those that have already read the book, there is a wiki and a forum, if you’ve still got questions.
On a side note, it it probably would’ve been a fun book to design. It’s not incredibly complex, but does offer a little bit more flair than you’d normally see in a trade paperback.
Here’s a small photoset (slideshow) featuring lettering and signage from Belfast. I particularly liked the Fishing & Tackle and the Tyrone Produce signs.
It’s been more than a year, since the last redesign of my site. I really had no intention of keeping it around that long. The previous version of eightface was mostly a reaction to the state of typography on the web and wanting to use a different typeface, I wasn’t particularly enamoured with it. I’ve attempted a few different redesigns since then, but they’ve all failed for various reasons. The latest version began life two months ago, but didn’t really get going until the middle of August. Since then, the design has come a long way but it still isn’t finished. So, feel free to poke around and kick the tires, but don’t be surprised if the axle falls off.
One of the driving factors behind the new design is the fact that I want to make my site a personal space again. I’m sick of templated personal sites and everything looking the same. I don’t want to become a crotchety old blogger man, but I’m headed in that direction. I don’t do this to make money, I do it for fun. I’ve had a website since 1995 (yea, Geocities!) and started writing HTML before that. Seriously, I memorized a bunch of tags from a brief magazine article, went home, coded a webpage (minus internet connection) and loaded it up in IE 2.0. I was a dork. I’m still a dork. The point is that I need to enjoy what I’m doing, I don’t want it to be a chore. Unfortunately, maintaining a popular WordPress plugin (as well as some others) is just that. I’m not knocking it, but the people visiting the site for plugins and themes have a different set of expectations. For that reason, the people who want WordPress related content will be getting a much more Spartan presentation with emphasis on finding what they need. The people visiting the rest of the site will get a much cooler presentation based on what I want to show them. It also lets me screw around without getting a bunch of angry emails.
The core weblog components are mostly finished, although the footer content is likely to receive a fair bit of tweaking. I’ve toyed around with a 1950’s motif before, but not to the same extent. I decided to focus solely on advertising from 1950–1955. Other than the grunge backgrounds, all of the graphics in the header and footer are composed of bits of advertisements from that time period. I’ve also attempted to replicate the typography of the era, the default typeface is Baskerville and the title font is Futura, both popular choices in advertising at the time. You’ll get the best viewing experience using a Mac with Futura installed, but it will likely look alright on Windows, although it hasn’t been tested. The Windows testing will come, but it’s not a priority (remember the personal site argument). Obviously, this iteration of the site is a better response to the state of typography on the web than the last layout. That said, it’s achieved by not caring that it doesn’t look right for anyone other than me, which isn’t always a viable option. To offset that potential lack of typographic coherency, there is a 840px wide grid underlying the disparate elements of the site.
Lastly, we come to comments. I’m getting rid of them. It’s not that I don’t care what you have to say, it’s that I want you to care about what I have to say (and dealing with comment spam sucks). In truth, comments on weblogs aren’t what they used to be. Back then, the community was a lot smaller and less likely to fall victim to Godwin’s law. Regardless of the lack of comments, it’s easy enough to offer a response via email, twitter, or your own weblog. And yes, I truly am turning into a crotchety old blogger man.
I’ve been meaning to post this for a week or two now, but have been putting it off in favour of working on a redesign of the site. I registered the domain eightface.com eight years ago on August 16th, 2000, just before heading off to university. I wanted to move the site away from a subdirectory on my local ISP, get some real hosting, and a much cooler domain name. I had a lot of trouble coming up with a cool name and ended up just throwing two random words together. In typographical hindsight, eightface is a bitch of a word to work with, and I probably could have made my design work easier without a descender or the kerning issues when it’s in all-caps.
Eight years is a relatively long time — a drop in the hat for some, but it’s almost a third of my lifetime. As always, much has changed and much has remained the same. When I started the site, the “leader of the free world” was an impeached philanderer and not a cheerleader from Yale, you could bring water onto planes and Britney Spears was still somewhat innocent.
I have been with one webhost the entire time. I signed up for the basic Dreamhost plan, received 30mb of storage, very little bandwidth and almost nothing in terms of dynamic scripting. Now I have 733gb of storage, terabytes of bandwidth, and access to all sorts of dynamic programming. The price has remained the same and for the most part, the hosting has been been reliable.
This site has always been a weblog, although their scope of weblogs has shifted over the years. I started off using Blogger, when posts had no titles, no comments and were basically what we now seem to be calling tumblelogs. Having achieved a similar effect with a scribble.nu journal in a frame, I was drawn to the fact that I could publish to my own site from anywhere without needing an FTP client. From there, I moved to Moveable Type when Dreamhost let us have a database and perl access. I switched over to WordPress, because Six Apart began to charge for MT. I’ve considered moving on from WordPress (particularly for Habari, Django or EE), but the eight years of legacy leaves a lot to contend with. I could throw it all out the window, or move it to an archival subdomain, but the inept high-school and college-age ramblings are a part of me.
After a few months (or years) of pseudo-inactivity on the weblog, it needs a jump start. I started taking myself too seriously a few years ago, it hampered my ability to post and have fun with the site. Basically, I need to make this space personal again.
