Category Archives: Weblogs

Something to Blog About

One of my new rules for getting more things done in the incredibly limited time I have between waking and sleeping is: don’t sit there trying to come up with something to post about on your weblog if you have nothing to post about on your weblog. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past ten minutes, when I realized that, shit, I could be answering emails to people who have been very patiently waiting for replies. Or I could be making some of the little tweaks that constantly need to be made to this site. Or I could be watching another episode of Ken Burns’s “Baseball” documentary, which I’m enjoying immensely. Or I could be working on any of the several Web projects I’ve been scheming in my head for months.

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Fictitious Weblog Name

DickensIn a roundabout, flirty kind of way, what I was asking in yesterday’s post was, “What is a weblog?” The question itself is so open-ended and suggests no definitive answers that even those who pose it seem to do so a bit wearily, which explains why I didn’t come out and state it that way. It deserves to be asked though, and I think a reasonable if still evasive way of answering it might be, “What is a book?” The most literal answer might be: it’s a technological vehicle for the delivery of ideas. But the form itself suggests few inherent purposes, uses or opportunities beyond the very basic one of communication, so why should a blog? Both a book and a blog can take just about any form that can be contained within their own rudimentary technical limits.

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Wheres and Whys of Blogging

Last Friday my girlfriend and I drove to Northern Virginia to see family, leaving just before the “Blizzard of 2005” hit and returning just after the snow finished falling. Before I left, I didn’t get a chance to update my weblog with one of those “Gone fishin’” posts to let readers know I was going to be away from my keyboard for a few days. I’ve never liked those kinds of posts, especially the times I’ve gone back over them while performing housekeeping tasks on my archives — they seem irrelevant and superfluous beyond the immediate present. I’m a bit precious, I suppose, about the idea of making my archives readable, free of that kind of cruft.

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Feeding the Hand That Aggregates Me

For news aggregator jockeys out there: I’ve just spent the afternoon overhauling the main Subtraction.com feeds (and brushing up on my meagre XML skills). You’ll notice, on the home page, a new little table in the right-hand column which lists links to the XML feeds, available in the standard RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom flavors. They even describe what you can expect in terms of feed content, so there are no surprises. (If you’re looking for a different kind of feed, perhaps one with comments appended, just let me know, and I’ll pass the request on up to the Feed Development and Publishing Department.)

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Dear Outdated Online Diary

Eagle-eyed readers may notice that I used to boast of having started posting here way back in December 2000, but with this redesign, the Quick Access area in the right-hand column now says July 2000. The reason is an early, abortive attempt at an online journal — a kind of proto-blog — that I tried to keep that summer, without the aid of any kind of blogging software. It started when I was under the illusion that the great heights of the Internet bubble were sustainable enough to set me up in style at my then-employer’s new offices in Singapore. Ha. That turned out to be not quite the case.

As I prepared to leave the States, it occurred to me that an online journal would be a good way to keep friends and family abreast of my progress in the East. This was before I was smart enough to use Movable Type or any kind of software that might have made my life easier. I wrote and produced this journal over the course of the next six months using only BBEdit and a painfully time-consuming willingness to code the pages by hand. The entries were fairly long and heavily edited, and each one took way more time than I spend on a typical post today.

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New, Improved Original Flavor!

Version 7.0This is it, the site is launched. As soon as I’m done posting this, I’ll send out an email announcement and update the feeds so the new posts will start showing up in news readers. Not everything works perfectly yet, but it’s mostly here. If you’ve been patiently waiting for this day, I thank you for coming back.

Things have changed around here fairly dramatically, but I’ve tried to keep some sense of the old design. For comparison, here’s a post from last year with the Six.5 design, and here it is again with the version 7.0 design. Different but the same, right?

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The New New NetNewsWire

NetNewsWireFor a few days now, I’ve been using the beta release of Ranchero software’s NetNewsWire 2.0 RSS aggregator. I’d tried it before in its 1.x release, but its relatively straightforward approach to organizing subscriptions left me unimpressed, so I gravitated to the arguably more creative NewsMac, first, and then PulpFiction, which I’ve been using day in and day out for months. PulpFiction, which in many ways remains one of the cleverest pieces of software of its kind, allows a powerful level of control over subscriptions, which is something I really liked a lot. However, though it has improved over time, it unfortunately remains dogged by speed issues and, on my PowerBook at least, regular crashes.

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The Secret to Writing…

For a moment, please indulge a little bit of my ranting: Every day I fire up my newsreader and try to catch up on what my favorite authors are posting, and I’m amazed and bewildered by how much writing some of these authors can turn out. The load of my own business and personal obligations is hardly monumental, but if some of these authors are juggling even half of my what I do during waking hours while also turning out these reams of blog posts and, in many cases, producing beautiful design work too… well, then I salute them. They’ve mastered a level of time management that I have little hope of matching.

I can barely scratch out four or five posts a week, and it often takes a dogged determination to find a twenty minutes scattered between tasks to get them drafted, edited and posted. Mostly, though, it’s not the quantity that I lament… it’s the time. By and large, very few of the posts I knock out benefit from the time and care with which I’d like to invest any piece of writing I put in front of public eyes. Just this evening, I was hammering out that capsule review of “Elephant” when the dinner I ordered arrived, and immediately I felt compelled to wrap it things up quickly so I could put a little food in my stomach. That…s not a proper way to write anything.

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Building the New This

Subtraction LogoOkay, so fifteen months later, I’ve begun a major redesign for Subtraction.com. I’m pretty satisfied with the progress, though I admit it’s going slow enough that I’ll be surprised if it’s all done by Halloween. The new overhaul will maintain essentially the same information architecture that you see here from a site and page perspective, but I’ve made some usability improvements so that it will be easier to read, which has become increasingly important to me as I get older — I’ve started that inevitable old codger’s shift away from a young designer’s fascination with teeny, tiny text.

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No One Likes a Cheat

I’m cheating a little bit this evening, because I had written most of this post before I headed off to dinner and then to the movies to see Michael Mann’s “Collateral” (a review to follow soon) — so I’ve back-dated this a bit. Please don’t sue me. In any event, I wanted to say thanks to the very nice response that’s come over the transom to my post from Monday, “New Boxes, Same Arrows.” I really hadn’t expected it, but I was more than happy to see incoming links from the nice folks at Mezzoblue, Airbag and Waxy.org. The traffic and kind comments are very much appreciated.

Chris FaheyAlso, I wanted to correct one point on which I feel that I’ve been unduly clear or on which I’ve been unintentionally misleading: these comps aren’t mine, at least not in their entirety — they were a joint effort. I’m a hundred percent sure that there wouldn’t have been an entry at all without the help of my good friend and Behavior co-founder, Chris Fahey, who provided at least half the brainpower that went into the comps… and really, I think the brains are what makes them. It was also his idea to enter the contest in the first place… so he’s really the one responsible for that fourteen-hour working stretch of my life that I’ll never get back. Thanks, Chris.

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