plasticbag.org

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.

Evhead has gone and redesigned his site again… There’s no keeping him down. The new look is pretty sharp, although it would be cool to have his photo back – I always think a photo makes a blog more personal. I’d do it myself if I had a better photo handy.

Ev also makes a couple of interesting points about my use of Blogger. He’s completely correct of course, although it hadn’t occurred to me to try it the way he suggests. Possibly because it was one in the morning, I wasn’t thinking straight.

Weirdest news of the day comes via Jason at kottke.org. There is talk of a war between Simpsons creators and fans…

Sheesh – you can’t even tell where the links are. I’m too tired to fix it now. Hope everyone is having a good evening. I’ll fix it all tomorrow. Please be patient!

One of the slightly annoying things about using Blogger is that you sometimes have to redesign your site on the hoof – so you can check everything works when you upload the new templates. As you can probably tell, I am halfway through the site front end redesign. Quite a lot of it isn’t fully functional. Very sorry! I will finish it off tomorrow night. (I can’t believe I am being so unprofessional).

It’s such a pity. Weblog Junior High is a great idea. It really is. At last, an interesting metaphor for directories of weblogs. Unfortunately, the idea is undermined by the execution. I mean, how rude can you be?

And the reaction hasn’t exactly been positive either. Powazek isn’t thrilled about it. Only usr/bin/girl/ seems even the slightest bit into the idea.

Sheesh! They are all at it! Now megnut has had an overhaul as well. I will confess I am not as keen on the look of it as I was the last one, but the content remains as fresh as ever.

I don’t know when it happened, but Evhead has gone and done a complete site overhaul. It’s a pretty good look as well – it manages to keep a selection of complimentary colours going at the same time without looking gaudy. And it’s always a good read…

So the Nexus get together in London was a bit flat all things considered. I neglected to remember that the initial bar was going to be heaving because of Popstarz’s move the the Scala. So Nick (The Tower) and I wandered around amiably for a couple of hours, stumbling across friends of ours looking slightly lost and waving a piece of paper around with “*NEXUS” written on it. Unsurprisingly it didn’t work that well.

We did find one sub-cultural colleague, though – SleazeNation (alias Rob) appeared, and I think he had a pretty good time. After a while we all wandered over to the club and bounced around for ages. Bis were playing, which was cool. I got to hear them play Eurodisco live, which was fun. I also met a young man called Luke and we had a conversation about how we were both apostles (and then we had to reconsider as we couldn’t remember whether Luke only wrote a gospel or whether he was one of THE TWELVE). Introductions over, we pounced on each other, which was entertaining. Nick thinks he looks just like Max, which is a little alarming.

Epinions.com has a new feature. You can now “distrust” people whose opinions fill you with bitter revulsion. In theory, of course, it’s a great idea. Whether or not it will work without being horribly abused – well we shall see…

How self-referential is this? Blogging Blogger just to say congrats to riothero who should be very proud of himself for getting himself noticed by them in charge, thus progressing nicely down the path of web-celebrity-hood.

He dropped me a note to ask whether or not he should go to SXSWInteractive in Austin. I didn’t really know what to say – I don’t know what the atmosphere would be like. Anyone who knows whether or not a 15-year old web wunderkind would fit in should drop him a note.

Still wavering over whether or not I will be able to attend myself – if anyone fancies crushing my anti-establishment demeanor under the boot-heel of sponsorship then I would probably consider it. In the meantime there is always SXSWb to read – the community weblog for the event.

The Nexus, you will be glad to hear, seems to be working again – although not without the odd judder and near-collapse. Still no idea what is going on.

I’m taking a couple of days off work to rebuild Barbelith. I have lots of cool ideas, but I have been suffering web-designers block for almost a year now. [Sites like vitaflo don’t help. Bloody talented arseholes.] Only Jack Fear’s tough love approach (“build that site you pussy boy”-esque) managed to get me to rebuild the site last time. Can I do it by myself?

Is going to the gym evil? I have been attending occasionally for the last six months or so, but I am now confronted with the possibility of joining for a full year at a hugely discounted rate. But it seems somehow immoral. I can’t decide.

Final note to Kerry. Get a grip man. xx