Category: Random

Don’t ask about yesterday. I decided to pretend that it never happened and get on with my life uninterrupted. Although I should briefly say thanks to Liz, Nick, Katy, Evil Nick and Ed the barman.

Barbelith’s weblog has been named by Bloat as one of the top ten weblogs for the week, and the site has finally started to register on metalog’s ratings page. I am pretty cheery about these things.

Opinion is divided as to whether or not talking about stats is taboo – but webloggers are talking about it all over the place. To start off with, check out the comments (and occasionally figures) of: prolific, riothero, evhead, bump.net, Ghost in the Machine, Oh Messy Life, Wetlog, rastorweb.

I think I am going to break some kind of weblogging taboo and discuss stats. I don’ t know why it should feel so odd to do so, but it is almost as if (when you pass a certain stage) you feel a need to keep this information to yourself. Perhaps it is the online version of not standing directly next to people in urinals [I wonder what the female equivalent of that is]. Anyway – let’s get this over with – there are around 250 visits to barbelith’s front page every day (phew – I came out and said it), another 200 to The Bomb and the same number again to The Nexus. I hereby send this challenge out to everyone else in the weblogger community. I’ve shown you mine…

Weblog of absolute note today has to go to mood-indigo.net. It’s a an extremely well-designed and elegant log, with areas reflecting all the interests and aspects of Rachel. But I think the thing that attracts me most to the site is the same thing that attracts me to this form of communication in general – honest and personal online self-expression. Rachel is more than comfortable with exploring her cultural identity online – just as I (I hope) I am on occasion with my sexual identity. And she has managed to make the design of the page emerge from that identity, which in return reflects back and clarifies her sense of herself. A wonderful site.

Complex studies have revealed the least visited page on barbelith.com. It is, I suppose unsurprisingly, a page on fin de siècle, an old site of mine that I have only recently reloaded, and which at the moment is only accessible from this page. Look for the entry for February the 3rd. You could be the third person ever to have seen it!

I have actually just returned home from an evening out attempting to distract myself from incumbent life crises. Today has, in many ways, been one long attempt at distraction – not all of it successful. I’ll be more honest than I probably should be in saying that I have never felt such loss about a ex-lover before. So anyway – in order to take my mind off things I have gone to see Toy Story 2, spent the afternoon shopping for Minidisc players and the evening drinking trashy Barcardi Breezers in a friend’s house in Kensal Rise. It is now 1am and I haven’t had to think about anything for almost twelve and a half hours. I am horrified to confess that this is one hell of an accomplishment.

Admit it. Every single one of you out there knows that you would like to send one of these Valentine’s Day cards to someone. I personally can think of a couple of contenders. In the same spirit, an old web chum is holding her yearly Anti-Valentines Binge (involving much wagging of the fingers and sticking out of the tongues) on Monday. Happy couples in Soho. Watch out – here we come.

Occasionally when talking to people who aren’t as anally-obsessive about the net as I am, or whose angle is almost entirely corporate, I realise that there are things that no civilian will ever get about web page design. The 5k award is one of those things. The concept is simple and elegant – to design a page, complete in execution, concept and design, in which everything (HTML, graphics, scripts) must not amount to more than 5k. And the prize? 5000 (5k) cents. $50.

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.