Category: Random

Got a lovely e-mail from Meg, which has reassured me completely and made me feel less like a prurient scandalmongerer. It also included this line: “I’m so glad you copied that little girl bike post too, now everyone’s copying. Man the funniest, most unpredictable things, happen on the web.” For even more on the whole fiasco, there’s another thread on Metafilter.

What do you do when you have nothing left to say? I suppose the only answer is read – catch up with the weblogs that you’ve missed recently, and try and find some ones you haven’t read before. Underappreciated weblog of the day: bindi.

I’m seriously considering signing up to bigmailbox.com – and thus allowing all of my regular readers to have an awesome “yourname@barbelith.com” e-mail address. Does anyone know of any other companies that do this? Opinions?

Ways to really piss people off [courtesy of my boss]…

1. Do a check for Shockwave before letting someone into your site. If they don’t have it, tell them to fuck off. Otherwise let them into the site. Where, of course, there is no shockwave or flash. Snigger slightly.
2. Run a banner ad on your site. When someone clicks on it, trigger a pop-up with this message inside it: “Banner ads typically get less than 1% click-thrus, what makes you so particularly lame as to be one of them?” Feel smug.
3. Do a page extolling the virtues of Explorer but only make it work on Netscape browsers on the grounds that 95% of the population knows this already and doesn’t need to read it. Laugh maniacally.
4. Start a large corporate site which grabs your e-mail address when you enter a non-existing competition and sells it to evil far-eastern spamming organisations. Build a secret underground base to feel superior in…

Pictures from the meeting of Katy, Mark, Vance and I:

I’m working on a redesign – my first for about six months. I’m feeling a combination of delighted and horrified with its progress. I was looking around at a few sites that really caught my attention and screen-capping them, grabbing components of them in Photoshop and mucking around with them on my screen. One component really stuck in my head and became the focus of everything I did after that point, and has since dictated colour schemes, and basic page structure. The mock-up I’m moving towards looks very little like the original site as a whole, but has elements that are clearly similar. This worries me.

The thing is, initially I was just mucking around with some stuff to see what ideas came to me, and now I am loath to give up on the work I have done and throw the product of that work in the Trash. It’s less about copyright for me than it is about creating something by myself, for myself. I’m a bit torn. Opinions?

I don’t know what’s weirdest – that megnut and I should suddenly appear on metalog (because of the whole little girl thing) or that Jason didn’t. Find out more about the whole Little Girl Viral Meme at Metafilter…

I never really go to Bloat, but I was reading (properly for the first time) the notes at the bottom of Beebo’s weblog ratings page and thought I’d see how barbelith was doing. So I went and had a look. Nothing. Not a mention at all.

Well at least that was how it appeared at first. On a whim, I opened up the HTML for the page and did a search, and there I am floating invisibly between Rebecca’s Pocket and Evhead. Weird. I have to say that I quite like it. Completely invisible. And long may I remain so…

London based members of the Underground are summoned to the Spreadeagle Pub on Camden Parkway tomorrow (Sunday) at 2pm. Around ten to fifteen invisibilists will be there, eagerly awaiting your ability to buy more beer and destabilise western democracy.

[map] [find out more]

Hmmm. Katy‘s version of how we spent the evening with Mark and Vance is a little overblown in the fantasy stakes, I fear! A more balanced description of the evening would be:

• Having met them both at Tottenham Court Road, Katy and I took them to Soho, which is the most relaxed and liberal place in London, being the centre of the film industry, tv industry as well as being London’s theatre district and centrally located near to Leicester Square, Chinatown and Piccadilly Circus. Parts of Soho have a slightly seedy reputation, but we decided that being shown around responsibly by two adults would effectively remove the possibility of the two scallywags getting into mischief. It’s also one of the best places in London to find outdoor cafés.
• We took them to a shop called Paradiso Bodyworks to see how they would react. There was no age restriction on being let in, but they looked pretty embarrassed so we removed them. It was very amusing.
• We went out for dinner, where we stuffed ourselves on vast amounts of food, including Blackened Salmon, Eggs Benedict, Chicken Cous Cous, Chocolate Pudding and Bannoffee Pie. I gave Mark a copy of an Invisibles comic book, because he had specifically asked for it. Still waiting to hear what he thought of it.
• Katy and I had two cocktails each. Vance and Mark had diet coke because they are Americans and Americans don’t understand that only girls drink Diet Coke. Then they had some water.
• We talked at great length about which webloggers we read and whose designs we liked best, and then talked more about SXSW
• On the way between Covent Garden and the restaurant in Soho where we ate, we passed the Raymond Revue Bar. We took a couple of pictures of them outside it.
• We found a trashy souvenir shop in Soho which sold things like Princess Diana paper weights and London snowglobes. Katy bought them both tiny beer mugs and a pen.
• Ended up in the Trocadero where I kicked Vance’s ass at some fighting game, and then trounced Mark and Vance at a racing game. I rock.
• We stuck them in a taxi at ten past ten and went and had a rather sorrowful drink at TGI Fridays. It was a cool evening…

PS: Tom thinks Jerwin is pretty cool, actually.