A brief site update before bed. Microlith’s tiny little weblog is now up and running, the random Bomb quotes are functioning effectively, and the Dice Man choice-making machinery is picking up speed. “But what is Microlith?”, I hear you ask. Well, I have added the explanatory section to the site, and that will tell you everything you need to know. I’ll do my best to get the rest of the site up and running as soon as possible.
I honestly believe that there is nothing in the world that is too sensitive or awful a subject to be made a joke out of. Humour is built upon transgressive statements, but it is also built upon a common understanding of what the person who makes the joke actually believes. People are very negative these days about “political correctness” – but it was never about not making ‘offensive’ jokes about sensitive subjects, but about not saying offensive things and meaning them. Here’s a good example of something unbelievably funny from the Onion (for those of you who aren’t easily offended): Why Do All These Homosexuals…
I think I have finally reconciled myself to the fact that I am not going to be going to SXSW. I still feel that I might at any moment change my mind, but basically I think I must face the facts that I just can’t afford it. Now I have to work out what to do instead.
After what seems to be an absolute age, Shauna’s flaunt.net is finally broadcasting again. There was a time in the middle of last year when I visited her site almost everyday – she is one of the few people I know who have managed to generate a site developed completely from themselves, their interests and personalities, without seeming self-indulgent or dull.
She runs a couple of other sites as well. I had a piece on one of them a while back – ember.org is a site where people talk about their first experience of love, whether happy or … otherwise … It’s on a bit of hiatus at the moment, but there is still a years worth of oozing human experience to wander through.
Liz and I went to see The Talented Mr Ripley. It was a strange film in many ways – the pacing seemed really off, the film overlong and many of the characters acted in a rather implausible fashion. A while ago people were talking Oscar nominations, but it would really be an injustice if it got any. Having said that, Matt Damon acted superbly and Jude Law just oozed charisma. I guess one of my particular weirdnesses with the film was that it was about this gay guy called Tom who kills lots of people. Which is like me, apart from the killing bit.
I have fixed the Javascript error that people were getting when they tried to use the Dreamweaver generated rollovers – I had to replace them completely with a piece of tried-and-true code. Unfortunately in the process I made it easy enough to follow dead internal links that I haven’t built yet. Keep saying to yourself, “It’s not shoddy, It’s a collaborative experience in the process of web design”. Of course it would be much quicker if I didn’t have to work all day at timeout.com.
Everyone is talking about the redesign, and the site isn’t even finished yet. I’m really quite embarrassed. Hit a bit of a wall today when I stared at it for three quarters of an hour trying to work out what it is lacking. Can’t decide….
I make people happy!
Now here’s a (relatively) orginal use of new technologies. The Visual Thesaurus really illustrates what all those books about deconstruction and poststructuralist philosophy were on about when they talked about language as a system of differences, with meaning endlessly deferred. It reminds me a little of this program called “The Brain” that was some kind of online fad a few years ago (although this site actually has a point).
WEB DEVELOPMENT BLOG UPDATE:
I am aware of the errors that the page is throwing up at the moment, and I am aware that there is very little past the front page. All this is being worked on as we speak. In the meantime, let’s pretend that this is a really interesting learning experience for those of you who have just started building sites, and follow me through the process day by day. Now won’t that be fun?
BARBELITH WEB-SITE DEVELOPMENT BLOG:
“Damn Netscape!” and “Damn Cascading Style Sheets” and “Damn, Damn, Damn Blogger”. I have just spent the last two and a half hours trying to get the Blogged text to sit nicely in a style-sheet in Netscape. Have I succeeded? No I bloody haven’t. So for a while I have removed them, leaving the text all blocky and … normal … If anyone has an explanation for my problems getting a span class=maintext to work on all the fields in Blogger, then please god drop me an e-mail. I NEED HELP.
I’m also mildly grumpy with Dreamweaver. I almost never use it, because of all the code fudges it produces (although it is by far the best WYSIWYG editor), but JUST THIS ONCE I decided that I couldn’t be bothered to go through the process of hand-coding rollovers. And does it work? Well, almost but not quite. If I refresh the page I get lots of errors reported in Explorer. Bloody infuriating. I’ll probably just convert over to my standard ones, but if anyone could swiftly debug the Dreamweaver-produced code then I would be grateful again.
Well anyway – I have managed to add less today than I hoped, but the front page is nearing completion. And once that is done, the others will follow swiftly. Although having said that, I might be going to see a special preview of The Talented Mister Ripley tomorrow night, so delays might occur.
Self-referential weblogging site of the day goes to the GLBT Weblog Portal. Barbelith’s half-baked redesign project has been noticed so far by Evhead, Prolific and Riothero.