Category: Random

I spent a good three hours last night helping out Dan with his current evil scheme: Blogtrumps. He showed me his design for one of the cards, and I foolishly said I could knock him up an HTML version in ten minutes. How wrong I was.

Anyway, presenting Dan’s work in full – collect the full set of:

• 1) Tom Coates / Plasticbag.org [card],
• 3) Jason Kottke / Kottke.org [card],
• 2) Meg Pickard / NotSoSoft.com [card],
• 6) Blogger / Blogger.com [card],
• 5) Cameron Barrett / Camworld.com [card],
• 7) Matt Webb / Interconnected.org [card],
• 13) Katy Lindemann / kitschbitch.com [card],
• 9) Nikolai Nolan / fairvue.com [card],
• 12) Mark Olynciw / riothero.com [card],
• 11) Caz / prolific.org [card],
• 10) Luke Martin / CaptainFez.com [card],
• 8) Ev Williams / evhead.com [card],
• 4) Meg Hourihan / megnut.com [card].

MIRROR IMAGE: how I am described by Oh Messy life:

“TOMBOT: Rounding out the propaganda squad, agent Tombot WILL NOT REST until dirty deed is complete. Knows you better than you know yourself. Stares death in the eye and asks for a smoke.”

Not So Soft redesigns. I’ve seen this one a couple of times during the development process. It utilises this cunning Blogger template system that Meg and I developed where, by staggering table tags around the body of the text, you can format your first post on any page in a completely different way to the rest – giving you the ability to highlight your latest content. If you are interested in knowing how this is done, drop me a note.

I got to work about half an hour ago, and I haven’t had anything to eat yet today. I keep thinking I should duck across Tottenham Court Road to Sainsbury’s. But then again – I was so late into work this morning that it feels a bit cheeky to duck out again. Perhaps I should consider trying some edible insects [via Astounding Websites]. Alternatively…

Friday morning. About bloody time. I’m showered and refreshed, the world seems like a manageable place and I’m off to Oxford this evening with Corny to see the young Kitsch Bitch. Thank god for the weekend.

I’ve taken down Grant Cook’s design for a bit, while it gets fully debugged, and replaced it with ‘old blue’. In the coming days we have a few more redesigns from the general public. Next up to the mark is likely to be matt[at]interconnected.org.

Our first guest designer is Grant Cook from access afr. As ever with a new design, there are a few bugs, but we’ll get them ironed out in the next few hours. Don’t forget, you too can rebuild plasticbag.org.

Some of you may have guessed by now that I am not actually particularly keen on the current design of plasticbag.org, but that I felt I had to change the last one, which was generally not well-liked. Unfortunately the problem is that I don’t have much time to work on the site at the moment, other than to post, of course, so here’s a proposition for you.

You do it. Here are the three blogger templates that make up the current site: [main template: index.shtml] [archive include: archive.shtml] [consumption include: recently.shtml], exactly as they appear on blogger at the moment. What I want you to do is to come up with something better. Make sure all images are in a separate directory from the index page and includes so that I can swap designs around relatively quickly, and make sure to test out your design first in blogger before you send them to me. Also – make sure that you put something on the page which indicates that you designed the “skin” and include a link – as prominent as you like (as long as it fits in with the design). All decent designs will be used.

[E-mail your designs to tom@plasticbag.org] [PS. There is an irritating feature of the way all posts are currently formatted on plasticbag.org which means that there is a paragraph tag between each block of text and at the end of each post. Line breaks are NOT translated. This is not going to change in the short-term since it goes back over a year now and so it is important that any template can deal with this.]

Since the ancient times, the soothsayers of our culture have prophesied that the coming the apocalypse and the return to the light of the One True God would be heralded by the final completion of the redesign at lukelog. And now that time has finally come. Please, my children, let there not be rioting in the streets – for our good grace will see us through these final days…

Could someone please explain this to me. Newsblogger says at the top of the page: “New feature: Customization! Now you can select which categories you’d like to appear in the drop-down on the left.” Well… how?

[After much further discussion with Jason and Meg (completely independant of one another), I now understand how to get this working on a Mac. If anyone wants to know, drop me a line.]