This won’t mean a lot to a lot of people, but I just thought I’d report (with a certain amount of glee) that I just wrote a template for a friend’s website and ran it through a validator and it validated immediately! Admittedly it was written in XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and not anything strict or terribly difficult, but frankly, I’m astonished. It’s a far cry from the normal validation horror I experience, where I find myself many hundreds of errors away from web guru nirvana. I’m quite proud of myself. Having said that – I would of course be more proud of myself if I could sort out the validation issues around plasticbag.org…
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On Joel Veitch, Cultural Icon!
I got quite a shock on the bus yesterday. As we passed Selfridges I glanced at the new window displays only to be startled by the awesome presences of Blode, a Giant Bee, a Frightened Boy and many other smiling, brightly-coloured creatures. That’s right! Joel Veitch, insane kitten manipulator of rathergood.com has now ascended to the status of a cultural icon. It really brings back those days colouring in crabs on Exmouth Market with only custard tarts for pay…
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Another year, another proposal…
Another year rolls by, and with it comes (and passes) another ETCon Proposal Deadline. The afternoon of the deadline seems to be becoming nothing more than a pan-world panic proposal-writing session – with about half the people on my buddy list (many of whom I met at last year’s event) frantically trying to knock their thoughts into some vaguely coherent order before the O’Reilly Geek Gong sounds. I’d love to mention everyone’s names, but I guess it could be seen to be pretty tactless if I were to reveal just how random and unprofessional we all appear to be.
I’ve put a proposal in this year – which unfortunately isn’t about the work that Matt and I have been doing at BBC Radio and Music Interactive. In the end, although we’ve got a fair amount we’d like to say, we haven’t really been working in the area long enough to be able to feel confident in our proposals. Maybe we’ll do that next year. As to this year, we hear whether or not our papers have been accepted around the beginning of next month… Successful or not, I’ll be attending whatever happens (particularly after winning a free ticket at last year’s event). You try and keep me away.
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On work and weblogging…
So without denying for one moment that I am very lucky to have the job I have and that it’s extraordinary, it does have one drawback. Working in a team that only has the function of thinking up new things for an organisation means (obviously) that you get to think up ideas for a living, but it also means (obviously) that they are first and foremost for that organisation. So I can see really interesting posts like this one at kottke.org on ways of registering the popularity of songs broadcast on the radio and get quite excited and want to explode with thoughts and comments around it and I’m just not sure if I can. And if in principle I could, I’m not sure how to do it in an ethical, business-friendly way. And because thinking-up things professionally is different from building something (which allows a reasonably clear distinction to be drawn between what you’re there to accomplish and what you do that’s your own), almost everything we think around is – to a greater or lesser extent – kind of work-related. It’s a bit of a quandary…
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On the weirdo in the perspex box…
This is one of those posts that gets me into trouble with people. If you don’t like rude words, or have any particular love for David Blaine then walk away! Walk away!
So I want to talk a bit about David Blaine. Hardly the most auspicious reason to get myself back into the weblogging habit after a difficult week, I admit, but I have to vent. I mean – can it really be true that the British are evil for finding him so… ludicrous? Hasn’t anyone noticed? I mean, surely it’s obvious? You talk to American friends over AIM and they’re all, “Oooh, you’ve done it now… We’re pulling out the Blaine inspectors. And then we’re going to have to invade!”
The British don’t have a “healthy disrespect” for celebrity and if you’ve been told that, then you’ve basically been lied to by a professional Englishman-abroad or by some weird kind of Dick Van Dyke cod-Anglo-faker. The British don’t have a healthy disrespect for anything at all, they’re just grumpy old sods who don’t really like anyone who sets themselves above the rest of the herd. Basically if we don’t fancy them and if we don’t want to be them, then we pretty much hate their guts. While they’re funny or cool or interesting – well that’s great – but a chink in the armour and we strike. That’s why British celebrities after a while have to either treat the whole thing as a bit of a job or as a bit of a joke. The most successful take the piss a bit. They go, “It’s Ok! I understand! I get it too! They give me lots of money and I sing songs and have lots of sex, but I’m just like you lot! I think it’s all dumb too!” That’s why people get a bit bored when Robbie Williams writes songs about his inner pain. Whatever you do, you mustn’t believe the hype. Or you mustn’t show that you believe the hype or the cry of ‘wanker’ will resound from hill and dale, from weir to West Wittering…
Meanwhile across the Atlantic, the press is confused. Surely the British are terribly terribly polite? But they’re always so modest and quiet when you see them on television… Well now you know why! The secret need for fame may burn bright in our hearts, but for many people it would be far too embarrassing to admit it. There’s always the secret desire for the banana skin lying provocatively in the path of those who think their farts smell of summer blossom and happy fairies. And there’s always the fear of that self-same skin lying in wait ready to cut us – quite rightly – back down to size. It’s just not the same in the States – where aspiration is celebrated and failure mourned. There each person who becomes huge is an indication that you too could make it if you just ate less mexican food and got your teeth fixed. If you did that in England you’d just get duffed up by some bloke with a bit of a lazy eye who thought you were checking out his girlfriend. Inevitably.
Weirdly, though, the whole trans-Atlantic miscommunication has a menacing side. Several of my American friends have asked me – quite genuinely and quite nervously – whether the vilification of Blaine is somehow representative of the British position towards America. But I must confess it is not – while the image of the USA giving up on the Stars and Stripes as a symbolic representation of their country and instead stringing-up Blaine has a certain visceral appeal to me, I can’t see it happening. Blaine is not being attacked because he is American. But there is a connection with the slathering excesses of fringe America – and that’s to do with the fundamental connection between American celebrities and total and absolute unmitigated bullshit.
I’ll give you an example. Jennifer Lopez somehow managed to claim that being ‘for real’ was – for her- ‘like breathing’ – that she was indeed still Jenny from the Block. But in fact she was possibly the least grounded human being since Yuri Gagarin – and everyone knew it! But it didn’t matter – they still lapped it up shamelessly. Blaine is radically post-Lopez (po-lo?) in the scale of his attempts to turn pure shit into gold – hence the in-box nappy – and that’s the aspect that the British can’t forgive. So why is he hated? It’s not because he’s American and it’s not because the British are evil. Fundamentally, simply, basically, finally he’s just hated because he’s a twat. It’s just that in America, many more twats get famous…
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Hence the paucity of updates…
The last few days – it has to be said – have not been the easiest of my time on the web. I’ve been spending more time that I would like dealing with problems on Barbelith trying to work out where to take the board next. The board has experienced long-term problems that only recently have reappeared – in the process forcing me to recast our battle in terms of an ongoing stalemate. There seem to be only two options available to me at this point – neither of which I’m particularly comfortable with. I either have to fight – using every mechanism in my power to resolve the situation once and for all no matter how difficult or unpleasant it gets – or I have to accomodate myself to the possibility that the situation may simply never end as long as the board survives. This in turn brings up the possibility of turning the damn thing off. Since the end of last week, this has been pretty much the only thing on my mind – whether to attack, whether to continually defend or whether to abandon the whole project. It’s been taking up more of my headspace than I would like and meant that a weekend that had been planned to be creative, exciting and rife with projects has been spent sweating, feeling desperate/trapped and being completely unable to concentrate. Hence the paucity of updates…
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Quote of the day…
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” said Benjamin Franklin.
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A brief design history of plasticbag.org
I’ve wanted to do this for ages, but I’ve never had time just to push it out into the open. So, without further introduction, here’s a brief design history of plasticbag.org neé Barbelith.
Barbelith, it has to be said, had designs that predated this one. It had a number in fact. Unfortunately none of them have survived the test of time very well – files have been lost and archive.org hasn’t recorded their passing. The first vaguely well-constructed one (click on above for full screen-shot) was built by me hacking around with tables and adding things from the top down, feature at a time. It was considered quite good at the time, and remains the only single thing that I’ve designed in my life that has garnered universal good-feeling.
My weblog started as a piece of filler to sit on the front of my barbelith.com domain, which had within it a comic-book fan-site and what was later to become The Barbelith Underground. After a while it became clear that the people who were coming for the online community or the fan-site saw my weblog as incompatible with the rest of the community. So I decided to split my efforts over two domains – and plasticbag.org was born. I spent a considerable amount of time getting a design that I was exceptionally happy with assembled over several weeks. No one liked it. No one at all… It remains one of my favourites…
The main criticism of the pale-blue plasticbag.org design had been that it was too cold, so when I came to version two I made a conscious effort to make it more friendly. During the process I got terribly excited about ways of using black in tasteful and creative ways, the integration of random images into designs and the potential of right-aligning sites. I got particularly interested in ways of crafting a site that looked well-finished, which was why I put such a lot of effort into the bottom of the page – an area normally considered with distain or indifference by webloggers (with a few notable exceptions).Of my plasticbag.org designs, this is the one I look back on most fondly.
Version three of plasticbag.org came about because I was desperately pining for elements of the pale blue design which I’d always seen as representing the kind of modern disposable slightly artificial mood I’d always wanted to generate. This time, however, I was working with a classy designer of considerable repute (Denise Wilton) and she was patient enough to round robin designs with me until we came up with something I really liked and thought captured the mood of the site well enough. It had several ‘innovations’ for me – it was my first pure CSS site and the most difficult to build of anything I’ve ever made. It never worked perfectly in any browser. There was always something that made it feel wrong. It also used different style-sheets for the internal site and the front-page, so I could put content on half of the index and let it fill the page when you went into the archives. It was a nice trick, but fundamentally flawed. The text on the front-page was not a suitable width for long-reading, and I came to write smaller, more condensed pieces simply because it was all a reader could manage. Images had to be tiny to fit the width and then looked out of place internally. It was a glorious folly, but it was a folly nonetheless…
The design that replaced it is the one you’re looking at today – which brings us to the end of our little tour. I have nick-named this one “kottkesque”, it has some fairly obvious influences (kottke.org) and its creation came as a bit of a shock even to me. I spent an idle couple of hours thinking about what it meant to design a site for the weblog format – which was concentrated around putting long tracts of readable content on a page with almost no navigation at all, but instead quite a lot of ambient persistently useful peripheral information. And the more I thought about it, the more Jason’s work just seemed so practical – as if he’d uncovered a kind of ideal format that we should all now be looking at and working around. His was tables-based (and still is), so I pulled it over, rebuilt it in (slightly flawed) CSS and then started to try and push it in extreme directions – looking for ways to improve it in terms of branding, navigational areas and contextual information.
I’m not sure I succeeded in making that much of a contribution to what-comes-after his design scheme, except maybe in terms of abstracting navigational items in that top space. Quite possibly Jason’s design remains the clearest and most admirably platonic form of webloggery yet devised. However, I have my suspicions that his linklog/remaindered links format is pushing his format in directions it wasn’t really built to withstand, and that its showing the strain. This might be an indicator for where new investigations into weblog design should be concentrating their efforts. Perhaps erikbenson.com might have alternative lessons for us in this regard…
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Going to the Blogs…
I’ve just noticed there’s a Spiked online weblogging event going on tomorrow at the South Bank called Gone to the blogs: The blogging phenomenon in perspective. The panelists will include Brendan O’Neill, Perry de Havilland, Bill Thompson and James Crabtree. I will be there, probably looking surly in the back…
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On "At Home With Hitler"…
So Simon Waldman has been asked to take down the At Home With Hitler spread by Homes and Gardens. The full story is here. Someone’s already put up a mirror, which I can’t help thinking is a good thing. The most irritating thing about the whole debacle is that I don’t think they have an obligation to make him take it down – instead I think they’ve just decided that they don’t want to publically have their magazine linked with Hitler. I suppose I can understand the anxiety, but it is unfortunate. The article is a fascinating piece of history that we will shortly no longer have access to. I don’t know that we ever really think about that aspect of copyright – that it stops us having unmediated access to recent history…