Saturday, August 29, 2009
Textpattern 4.2.0 has been published. The first most recognizable new feature is, of course, the new look of the back-end. I love the simplicity of it. Dressed In Value has not yet been converted, but I’m slowly adapting new client websites to it. The more I use it the more I like it. I’m only scratching the surface, but I’m developing a decent sense of knowing when to use Textpattern and when to stick with WordPress. I’m seeing more clearly that they aren’t really competitive software, even though they can accomplish many of the same things, but each are suitable to different kinds of publishing. Check it out if you haven’t yet.
Monday, August 24, 2009
This American Life have used a photo of mine to illustrate episode 42: Get Over It! It’s probably not that big of a deal (do a Flickr search for “broken heart gift” or “broken heart wedding”), but we were surprised and delighted by it. Thanks Ira!
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
I’ve finished reading James Howard Kunstler’s book The Geography of Nowhere. It’s a fantastic and depressing tale of how the American landscape has come to be. In his own words:
Born in 1948, I have lived my entire life in America’s high imperial moment. During this epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we have managed to ruin our greatest cities, throw away our small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat which we can no longer afford to support. Undulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the public realm, and with nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community. We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people.
This should be required reading for all Americans. If you care at all about design, the environments natural and built, agriculture, architecture, economy, beauty, history or the future, you should read this book.
More: suburbia dissected (amusing, enlightening TED Conference presentation); …
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
In April I had written against a reasoning that good web design should include signs of its being an “interactive” medium, particularly opposing the necessity of using alternate link hover-states. I took issue with the term “interactive,” saying it is a stupid and misused terminology as sanctioned exclusively for The Web.
Design Observer, publisher of fine essays on design, recently presented us with an all new design for their website, and I was delighted to see this giant among us publish a new website without any moving parts or flashy graphics. There are no alternate hover-states. There are no animated graphics. Nothing moves. It’s comparable to reading a printed page. It’s flat, static, and interactive. Despite “nothing happening” on the screen, I’m enticed to look around, see what’s new, find things I haven’t seen before. In other words, I’m encouraged to interact with it. All this achieved without any whiz-bang computer-exclusive design effects. Good, old fashioned, effective graphic design.
Monday, August 10, 2009
The rains came and flooded our town. I watched water runoff from our neighbor’s backyard rush through our fence, creating a little river that wrapped completely down one side of our house and eventually into the street. It was pretty cool to see. But then reports of damage came in. Thankfully we didn’t suffer any ourselves, except we hadn’t any hot water the next morning, and I was leaving for a few days. I scheduled someone to come and fix the problem so my wife wouldn’t have to move out while I was gone. Turns out it was just the pilot light. It had gone out.
