Category: Random

So it’s official. In the episode of Buffy broadcast in the States this evening, Willow will mention the practice of “Googling” for a name. And it will be funny. And lo, Google will be iconic.

Today, under the direction of Phil Gyford, I stumbled upon a fascinating interview with the man behind the redesign of Wired.com – a design that I am gradually warming to. There are parts of the design that annoy me profoundly – particularly on the front page (the unnecessary width of the left-hand column and the eye-straining colour combinations are especially irksome), but one thing I can’t fault them on – they’ve used valid XHTML and CSS, pushing the standards for the web ever forward. I tend to forget how scary such a move is for companies, who suddenly may find their site looking ugly in Netscape 4.x. I suspect I forget this because many weblogs – myself included – have been designing without tables for over a year now (although I never can be bothered to finally drag myself that extra foot over the finish-line and properly validate). But then it’s easier for us. Fluffier. More trivial.

Anyway, before I get over-excited again, here’s the interview with Douglas Bowman of Wired news, and a little quote to whet your appetite: “I remember one project for Lycos where we had nested tables 10 levels deep. I counted them myself. It wasn’t that every level was absolutely necessary to reproduce the intended design effects. But each table ensured the flexibility we needed if certain modules and pieces of content appeared or disappeared. When you get to that point, the amount of markup you have to sift through to find anything becomes ridiculous. Until this redesign, Wired News wasn’t even using CSS to style the content inside tables. The sheer amount of redundant <font> tags inside every cell was probably enough to double file size. “

There’s an interesting weblogs-related article up at 24ore.com. Except it’s in Italian: » un contagio da Blogs. Oh and except I only think it’s interesting because when I ran it through babelfish it came up with loads of incomprehensible stuff and the line:

“We make the case simpler than a person who starts a Blog writing of its life or its interests”, explains Tom Coates, expert of Weblogs.

Which is, you know, nice. Still that doesn’t resolve my fundamental problem – my desperate need to know what the badly translated phrase, “In this way, via continuous superimpositions, detailed lists are formed interest community, than they become rich to vicissitude”, means. Amongst other things…

So what I’m thinking is how incredibly cool it would be if someone needed to practice their Italian to English translation abilities and was prepared to stick an English language version somewhere on the interhighweb…

So why the paucity of updates? Why the off-the-cuff, commentary-free nuggets that I’ve been feeding you lately? There’s a couple of reasons, none of them serious. Firstly, the community project I’ve been working on at work went into its first stage of testing at the end of last week, which meant everything got a bit hectic. Hopefully I’ll be able to show some of it to the outside world in the coming weeks, but in the meantime it’s nose/grindstone time.

I thought I’d be more creative on the weekend but it turned out that my thinking-coherently gland, having been radically over-stimulated last week, kind of went into shock. So I spent most of the weekend watching The West Wing, while sorting through papers and bills (total cheques written out – £2001.94). My beautiful computer stayed mostly quiet in the corner of the room.

There are other reasons. Other things to do. I’m supposed to be writing a piece on the ways in which mainstream media interacts with weblogs. I’m supposed to be talking to Cal and Denise about (at least) two different spare-time-projects. And I’m supposed to be thinking of what I can do to celebrate this weblog’s third birthday, which is in a little over two weeks. It’s all very exciting, but my tiny brain hurts…

Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile: Michael Hart is one of those people who straddle the line between visionary genius and obsessive nutcase. “You know that episode of “Star Trek,” when they look in the computer to find some 20th century book that tells them what to expect when they go back in time,” Hart says. “How do you think those books got in the computer? That’s me.”

According to a TV show I’ve just been watching, the Beatles’ song “And Your Bird Can Sing” was a dig at Mick Jagger’s relationship with Marianne Faithful. If it’s true, it’s too wonderful for words – and has completely reinvigorated that song for me. But although it’s extremely entertaining, I can find no evidence for it on the internet. Please let it be true… Please!

Tell me that you’ve got everything you want
And your bird can sing
But you don’t get me
You don’t get me

You say you’ve seen seven wonders
And your bird is green
But you can’t see me
You can’t see me

When your prized possessions
Start to wear you down
Look in my direction
I’ll be round, I’ll be round

When your bird is broken
Will it bring you down?
You may be awoken
I’ll be round, I’ll be round

You tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is
And your bird can swing
But you can’t hear me
You can’t hear me

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again… If you’re cold and you are shamed, lying naked on the floor, then bloody get up and put some clothes on. I have a sneaking feeling that might help things a little…

Pub-rock kittens sing Independent Woman – another meisterwerk by Joel Veitch. The kittens have previously performed such epics as Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, Fell in Love With a Girl by the White Stripes and John B’s We Like the Music. Kittenmania sweeps the globe…

For the last two or three years, I’ve had Wired.com as my default homepage. I find that I glance through the main articles every time I open a browser window, and that this keeps me essentially up to date with most of the must-know goings-on in tech, net and science news. I never buy the magazine. I’ve cited the site as an example of the very clearest web production, with unobtrusive branding, clearly formatted articles and a good sense of how to write for the web.

None of this is likely to change… but despite their redesign, not because of it. That’s not to say that it’s bad – because it’s not. And when all the errors around the place were fixed (the permanent horizontal scroll-bar on Mac IE 5 that is the consequence of a 100% width div, the frequent SSI errors, the weirdly formatted advertisement tag that you can’t quite tell is intentional or not), then it’ll look classy and will be fairly usable.

But there’s still stuff that seems strange. We’re still stuck with the bloody terralycos bar, which looked roughly out of place on the old design and looks mind numbingly terrible on the new one. There’s major navigation / advertising creep, pushing the content full feet down the page. The colour scheme – ice blue, black, white and lime – screams retro-tech, but it also screams ‘cheap use of the colour-invert feature in Photoshop’. The advert, which has grown inhumanly large, sits really uncomfortably on the page.

And most importantly, the place where they put the actual content seems to have been shrunk and de-emphasised radically – with all the emphasis (and an unnecessary amount of space) dedicated to the fluffier aspects of the site. A more cynical man might connect that change of emphasis with the incredibly limited amount of articles currently on display…

A few days ago I was startled by this chart of homocide and suicide statistics across the world. It’s a surprisingly difficult chart to interpret – the disparities between regions are extraordinarily large and only really lend themselves to suggestions of massive cultural difference.

For example, in the Americas for every 100,000 deaths – 19 are homicides and eight are suicides. In Europe, on the other hand it’s the opposite story – many less homicides (eight) and many more suicides (19). The Western Pacific and Australia is littered with suicides but has an almost non-existent homicide rate, and it seems that the Eastern Mediterranean is the least violent place to live – less than thirteen people out of every thousand die violent deaths – from both suicide and homicide. And men world-wide are more likely than women to die both at their own hands and at the hands of others.

But where are such differences coming from? Is the lack of homicides in Europe an effect of strong gun laws? And if so what is the reason for the high suicide rate? Is it a factor of comparative comfort of living or is it instead that those who die from homicide in the UK would find themselves pursuing a violent death in the US?