Webmastery

Hello?

Is this thing on?

Side notes

Sidenotes are run by javascript, and look like thisAnd then there's some text here. Clicking on the link again, or on another link, closes the box. This works pretty well, I think, except for the bottom of the page, where it pushes the bottom further down..

Get yer Gmail

I don't really expect anyone to respond to this, mostly because I don't really expect anyone to read this, but I have a stack of gmail invitations and no one to give them to. If you want one, email me at claxton6 at theotherleading dot com, and I'll pass it on.

Some consumption updates

Early on in this weblog thing, I criticized Consumer Reports for not telling me what was good enough, only what was better. I have to commend them, then, for their review of air filtration systems, such as the Ionic Breeze, from Sharper Image. When T & I started putting together our registry, we thought about getting something like that. (T seems to be allergic dust.) From the CR review, though, we learned that these machines (energy users, every one) don't do much more than basic tidiness with an eye towards keep dust levels down will, and thus decided against listing one.

Also, I'm trying out using wash cloths for doing the dishes, rather than sponges. I'm surprised how quickly they start to stink.

January news

So, from a productivity point of view, the holidays went really poorly. I mean, yeah, that's what they're there for, but I had hopes, which were pretty much dashed in their entirety. One of the hopes was some Decembers posts. Oh well.

School has started again, and I'm pretty much already in the thick of it. Everyone is complaining about being behind already, but I don't feel like that. I'm still in a wait-and-see position regarding how well I'll deal with the work load this semester.

In news that you're even vaguely conceivably in, posting will probably be slimmish here. My goal is about one a week (mostly likely a Friday or Saturday thing, as that's when I'm most free). Most of my link-foraging efforts are going into the weblog for our newly formed Planner's Network homepage. @You'll notice there's not really a whole ton of activity there, either.@

I think I've decided on a new, better name and tagline for this weblog, and am instituting it today: "Mackintosh Fruitcake: Reskilling daily life." Back to front: I've been thinking lately that a lot of my complaint with Daily Life in the US TodayYou heard it here first: All Words In Caps are the new "scare quotes." is a result of what I've starting thinking of as a process of deskilling our daily lives: Everything made today is designed with the goal of convenience, of relieving us of the burden of concern, of automating as much as possible. This ranges from all-in-one products that assure us that their combination is just what's needed to appliances that do only one thing, and do it without need of minding. We're sold this because we want convenience and free time, but what we wind up buying is a pile of unskilled, unthoughtful tasks to be gotten through on our way to ... what? Anyway, more on this in the future. Mackintosh fruitcake, to emphasize the connection with the Arts and Crafts movement and to link it with my own scattershot interests.

Also expect some design tweaks in the future, in particular for the rose icon to be reduced in size, because, let's face, that's just too much space for so little detail.

Have a good 2004, and I'll try to get regular here.

A story about some things.

A combination of busyness and site down-time, courtesy of the fine folks at CT-Web (who, at least, were kind enough to update the control panel), has kept me out of things lately. That's okay, there hasn't been any important news anyhow. This weekend, though, I hope to get moving on a couple of things that will get me to the point where I can quit worrying about form and start worrying about content. First of all, the index of tol.com is up for the first time. It's basic, but that's all it needs to be right now. If you take a look right now you'll see that I'm aiming to include the archives of notlost, a website created by snarkout to be a travel weblog. It didn't ever get much use; however, I did use it for my drive out to Reno two years ago. My first goal is to get that trip backed up. But if that goes smoothly, and if I get everyone else's permission, I'll probably go ahead and put the rest up, just so it has somewhere to sit for awhile longer.

The other thing you'll notice on the front page is that I've included an extended quote from Simon Dwyer. Anyone who has known me (and my writings) for any length of time will probably have seen this and will probably have heard me talk about Dwyer. For everyone else, I heartily recommend picking up a copy of Rapid Eye, the book/zine/thing that Dwyer edited and wrote for, until his death. Rapid Eye brought together a range of sub-mainstream writers and topics (Genesis P-Orridge, German cannibal-horror flicks, neoism) with the occasional well-known icon of subverse (William S. Burroughs, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories). In particular, for me, Rapid Eye, and by extension, Dwyer, introduced me to Colin Wilson, who has impacted me enormously.

Colin Wilson, though, has dropped off a little, while I keep returning to Dwyer. In addition to being completely overwhelmed and compelled by "Plague Yard: Altered States of America," his longest work, it just feels as if there ought to be a connection.

I spent my 1997-1998 school year in England. After spending two months there, friends and I travelled for a week to Paris. On our return, seeing headlines of the Asian market collapse, I purchased my first British newspaper, The Independent, largely because it appealed to my self-image. Buried within, though, was something that struck me more personally than this economics news: Dwyer's obituary.

As I think the quote out front demonstrates, Dwyer was both caustic and beautifully rational. He could move smoothly between that entirely moderate sentiment and describing Abraham Lincoln as "that syphilitic hypocrite" or Schindler's List as essentially a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. More than anyone else, and more than any substance, Dwyer skewed my perception. He opened up entire worlds, even as he dismissed them, but yet still left them with value.

A few months before moving to Reno, I received an email from Simon's brother, thanking me for a small page I have up in remembrance. He sent me the following picture:

KeyValues test

This is a test of key values.

More stuff down in extended entry, including a footnote.
New footnote test goes here.

Footnotes have been revised, thanks to the lovely KeyValues MT-plugin from Brad Choate. I now save a little redundancy in the stylesheet by specifying a class that controls placement of the footnote, with a unique id (whose name is specified in the MT Extended Entry field, then wiped out with the pluglin) that is the object of the javascript that controls display.
footnote=key_values

daily links

^Regular readers^ will note that the site is converging towards ... something. I've fixed the footnote issue. In a nutshell, footnotes show up over here. It's ugly, and I'm not entirely happy, but it works. Based on javascript stolen from frantic (now on hiatus; I know the sekrit handshake, and have access to the archives), it requires a unique DIV for each footnote on a page. Which ... hm, now it occurs to me that on category archive pages, this is going to be problematic. Even on the front-page, which is currently set to show only the past five entries, this is going to make for some higher level number tracking. Nevertheless, it works, and writing this out has me thinking that I may be able to fiddle something that'll work.And today's news is that I've got a daily links sidebar, driven by another blog. It's kind of a hedge between an atrios-style list of links with little commentary and the mini side-blogs (I like Stuffed Dog, Provenance: Unknown, and Anil). The blog will be a link or two, with some maybe very plain descriptive glue, followed by a link to comments (mostly a lot of zeros). Anything that I feel the need to comment on, and these will usually be vauge and unformed, similar to P:U's Incremental.

Anyway, that's the news.
footnote=daily_links

Site design and plans

My plan for beginning this thing, which I will derisively refer to as a glob, is to introduce each category and situate myself within each. This category, then, is Webmastery, and will deal with site design issues, maintenance and announcements. It will also bleed over into the little bit of web-tech that I can geek about. This announcement will also serve to outline what this glob is about.

First, though, the tech stuff, from the ground up. This site, theotherleading.com, is hosted by Connecticut Web, a (frankly) dirt-cheap provider. Given how little I pay them, CT-Web does surprisingly well. There are odd limits to what I can do, and there are too-frequent outages, but overall I can't say I'm too displeased. Of course, I don't run a particularly intense web operation.

tol.com, as I refer to it (and don't go to the actual tol.com; it's of no relation), originally housed The Toucan, a print zine I used to help put out; it still does, but I'm looking to branch out a little.

The glob, which is the current project and which I refer to variously as "800 by whatever" and "the new rose template", is powered by Moveable Type, for no other reason than that a bunch of friends talk about it a lot, so of course I had to dive in, too. It's a bare bones operation right now, and I'd like to keep it that way. The major addition I want to add is to create and link to wiki entries for each post, to use in lieu of comments, which I find to be ... a little tough to follow usefully, and meandering to boot. That's a ways off from being within my grasp, but feel free to manually create pages should the urge strike you.

This extraordinarily inventive template design is of my own creation coding, with substantial improvement by my friend null. It is all CSS, with a javascript switcher (also courtesy null) that allows the sidebar to be fixed (that is, non-scrolling) in Mozilla, but not in Internet Explorer (which does not support fixed positioning). I haven't yet checked the design in other browsers, particularly with respect to the fixed column.

Eventually, I hope that it validates for both CSS and HTML, but haven't really bothered to check yet.

The new rose, in the upper left, is based on the Macintosh Rose, a staple of Arts and Crafts design (see below). The rose column on the right is from squidfinger's excellent catalog of patterns, with some coloring adjustments.

Inevitably, I've arrived at the question of what this is all about. Again, from the ground up:

I've taken an interest lately in the turn-of-the-century-ish Arts & Crafts movement, which aimed, in a delightfully bourgeois way, to connect a workingman's paradise with an appreciation of fine craft. I look at craft in a broader sense than I believe the original members of Arts & Crafts circles did, extending the appreciation to something more like techne. This swirling combination of dare-I-say-it utopianism, appreciation, craftsmanship, and knowledge is what I'm trying to structure my life around right now.

The knowledge, though, is tricky. If the Arts & Crafts movements provides something of a structure to how I see the world, then that structure is given urgency by my other primary organizing idea: Georg Simmel's concept of the tragedy of culture. (Bear with me -- at this point, I'm working from a brief encounter with Simmel from seven years ago; I'll revisit this soon.) Simmel's concept of culture was split between objective and subjective culture. Objective culture was stuff out there--things and knowledge. Subjective culture was what each person carried around within them. The tragedy of culture was that objective culture grows exponentially over time, and knows no bounds, while people's capacity for subjective culture grows barely at all. That is, any one person's capacity to know about his or her world is constantly shrinking in relation to what there is to know.

Sitting at my desk, I cannot place my eyes on a single thing within the room whose production, to name but one aspect of any thing, does not escape me. Move away from simple knowledge, and consider things that I use, or tasks that I must do. I fret over my inability know what's going on when I wash my clothes. What goes into the detergent? Where does it go when it drains out with the rinse water afterwards? Does it harm something along the way, or when it disperses into ... the river? the valley? And the fragrance that the dye graces my clothes with--does it aggravate my girlfriend's asthma? Does it irritate my skin? Might it do so for a notional child, years down the road?

Someone knows this. Someone has studied and concocted and tested and poked and prodded. Someone has done it for everything in your life. The amount of effort that goes into the tinest things that we take for granted is astounding. And so part of the goal of the new rose template is to give me space to explore and make notes. Some of this will be research, some of it will be reporting on my own activities, some of it will just be mental wandering. But I hope that all of it will result in a slight mastery over those parts of objective culture around me that want to flit away.