Feeding the Hand That Fed Me

Tue 8 Aug 200610:28 PM

It took me a little while to get this all cleaned up and ready for release, but I’m finally making the expanded RSS buttons that we’ve started to use at NYTimes.com available to everyone. You can grab the PNG file here (right- or control-click on the image at the start of this post to save it to your computer) and start using it right away, or you can download the artwork as an Adobe Photoshop file and start customizing the label to suit your particular needs.

Veerle for Illustrate Me

Mon 7 Aug 200609:15 PM

Before the Blackout

Fri 4 Aug 200601:05 AM

After my interlude at Comic-Con International in San Diego, I spent the rest of my week-plus vacation visiting my family in Irvine, California. It was a blast; I sat by the pool, took my nine year-old nephew to a magic shop, and watched a ton of movies. I’ve been back home since late Sunday night, but I’m really freakin’ swamped here, not just with work, but also with all manner of extracurricular and personal activities.

Which explains the lack of blog posts here at Subtraction.com (and this mea culpa post, the likes of which I normally avoid), at least in part. The other part is this damnable heat that dogged me in California and that’s dogging me again here in New York City. Temperatures have routinely been in the upper nineties, with the heat index breaking 105 F. Lovely. Makes it uncomfortable to do much of anything.

Super-Heroes Are People Too

Tue 25 Jul 200612:32 AM

Coming Soon to a Torso Near You

Thu 20 Jul 200612:01 AM

Vinh vs. Veen at Signal vs. Noise

Tue 18 Jul 200603:45 PM

If you’ve got a great idea, you’d better do it quick, before the guys over at 37signals do it better and with more fanfare than you can. Take, for instance, this brainstorm I had a few weeks ago to start doing interviews with designers and technologists here at Subtraction.com. Not long after the idea occurred to me — and before I could share it with anyone, much less act on it — I got an email from Matt Linderman from 37signals, inviting me to face off with Jeffrey Veen, formerly of Adaptive Path and now with Google, in a side-by-side interview over at their own weblog, Signal vs. Noise. Rats!

Illustrate Me for June

Tue 18 Jul 200612:54 AM

Icon Do It

Fri 14 Jul 200607:43 PM

Following up on a May blog post I wrote about revising our feed icons at NYTimes.com, we’ve since implemented the slightly altered version of the emerging standard for the visual indication of XML-based content subscriptions. They’ve been propagated to many areas of the site, though not all of the old ones have yet been removed.

Though it’s not clearly in evidence, I actually did take to heart some of the feedback garnered by that post which suggested that NYTimes.com should be looking to simplify our feed offerings rather than continuing to provide feeds in multiple, potentially confusing flavors (e.g., Atom, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, etc.). Ideally, we’ll soon do a bit of fine-tuning for our entire RSS/XML offering, but that’s a discussion for sometime in the (hopefully) not too distant future.

Plagiarism in Our Schools

Fri 14 Jul 200601:31 AM

This modest little slice of fame I’ve gotten comes with its drawbacks. One of them is the periodic plagiarism of the design of Subtraction.com by unscrupulous or unintentionally errant individuals. I handled my first exposure to this phenomenon last year rather ham-fistedly, overreacting to the essentially innocuous emulation of this site’s design by a basically well-meaning young guy abroad. I rather indignantly and publicly blogged about his offending site, and he graciously removed it — the same effect could have been achieved without the hoopla had I just sent him a private, polite email instead.