toasty

30 October 2003

Reading my NNW feeds this morning, I was greeted by the marvellous headline from BBC News: “McCartneys toast new baby“. Mmn, crispy. (It got changed later in the day – now that’s lousy microcontent for you).

lottarticle

30 October 2003

Useful article on Writing for the Web by Diana Lott; basics that you observer but might not consider, especially in public site production.

hurrah

29 October 2003

And with that… Tom had wireless ADSL. Happy bunny.

typedesign

28 October 2003

Wonderful article on the basics of type design, with beautiful hand-drawn examples.

In Short…

27 October 2003

There’s a problem with long-running serial texts: where do you begin when you’re a new reader? If you’re writing comics, self-contained story arcs with constant reference to explain why things as they are might be one way (as well as, of course, introducing characters slowly and having a large cast to choose from but only featuring several at a time).

Peter Lindberg decided the way to do this with his weblog was in a summary page. The interesting (but when you think about it entirely obvious) thing about this is that it’s written entirely by hand; no automatically-generated-by-Moveable-Type here. Lindberg has sat down and gone over his posts and links. It’s in part interesting because of what Lindberg himself seems to be discovering about his writing/thoughtprocesses and the way they emerge over long periods of time (as opposed to the shot space of the individual blog post). It may be a time-consuming process for the weblogger, but it’s the most effective and certainly the most literary way of generating context I can think of for a text-based medium.

joypadfun

27 October 2003

Not just retro, but retro, stylish, and functional – and accurate right down to the 80s’ cases of Nintendo Thumb it will give you: a beautiful, beautiful Retro PS2 joypad. Like when pads really were pads… remember NES controllers? Yeowch.

Normal service will be resumed shortly. Been a bit out of the loop recently – a busy, full weekend, preparation for said weekend, trying to get various things sorted with things on and off line, deal with ideas, learn some CSS, look for employment. Should have time to blog and post something interesting (or at least an interesting photo) from Monday. On Tuesday I should be all broadbanded-up, and then webtweaking gets a lot easier.

Still, I have got some new content for you – just go and check out the new Omnivore; it’s a light little number, and it’s by yours truly.

Shortening

22 October 2003

It may be a brief entry, but it deserved attention:

Singer-songwriter Elliot Smith has died at 34, apparently of suicide. A wonderful recording artist, he’ll be sorely missed in all manner of places. Including over here. If you haven’t heard his work, go and start with Either/Or and work either way from it.

town

21 October 2003

A wonderful entry on the recently discovered and rather good Memex that reminds me of the many reasons I too loved my time in Cambridge. I’m going back in three weeks time, and it’s going to be wonderful – not just the people, but the place itself.

Omnivore

20 October 2003

Shameless plugging it may be, but I’ve got to get some publicity somehow:

Omnivore, a weekly-updated creative writing site on the theme of taste has gone live today. So check it out, and do bookmark it for future reference… as time goes on, more features should be added, like an RSS feed for them that wants it. But please go and read. It’s worth your time, trust me.