Category Archives: Subtraction

Un Rip-off

An anonymous somebody or other posted this link to one of the comment threads here this weekend. I removed it immediately, partly because it didn’t have anything to do with the topic of the weblog post to which it was appended, and partly because I wasn’t sure how to react. If you click on the link, you’ll understand my situation: it’s a French-language weblog that looks very much like what a weblog would look like if its designer was trying to rip me off.

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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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Word Processing for Fun and Profit

Design in FlightI spent a good chunk of time this weekend writing an article for Andy Arikawa’s Design in Flight magazine, an upstart PDF publication covering the wide world of design. I’m a big proponent of scrappy digital publishing endeavors like DiF, so it was a real privilege to have been asked to contribute. After considering a few overly ambitious article ideas, I settled on a simpler approach for my first contrubution. My article is a more thoughtful, better-researched take on a post I wrote last month about improving your interviewing technique, and it will be published in the magazine’s April 2005 issue. Eventually, I’ll make a copy of the article available online here at Subtraction.com, but for those of you who can’t wait, four-issue subscriptions are available for only US$10.

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The Nav that Almost Was

While cleaning out some files on my hard drive this evening, I came across a discarded navigation bar for the version 7.0 redesign of this site that I had nearly forgotten about altogether. It was one of the first gee-whiz improvements that I pulled off in prototyping the redesign — I should say “nearly pulled off,” actually. Ultimately, I tossed it out entirely from my plans for the site, considering it too cumbersome to update (it requires no fewer than six separate images to be manually generated each time the cover image is changed) and woefully inadequate in terms of manipulating CSS to conform to my intentions.

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The Many Crimes of Internet Explorer

Internet ExplorerSome people just think that my efforts to warn Internet Explorer users that the fidelity of this site is compromised when viewed in that Web browser is just a showy way of picking a fight. Maybe a little. But I’m being genuine when I say that the way Subtraction.com renders in I.E. is maddeningly imperfect, and I just haven’t the time or patience really to try and troubleshoot the problems. What I do have time for is a nitpicking catalog of those imperfections.

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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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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love I.E.

Internet ExplorerUsers viewing Subtraction.com with Internet Explorer will now see a notice just above the navigation that says, effectively, that that browser won’t “display this site quite as it was intended.” This is obnoxious, I know, but when I made a game plan to produce this redesign, I deliberately chose not to take too seriously the way it would look in Microsoft’s still-dominant Web browser.

This is partly because it’s loads easier to design for modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera and OmniWeb, and with so little time with which to make the redesign a reality, I decided to save myself an additional 20% heartache and pretty much ignore IE.

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Grid Computing… and Design

The layout grid I used for Subtraction Six.5 was improvised and inconsistent — I hobbled it together without much consideration or foresight, more interested in getting something finished than building something that would continue to make sense as I got more and more serious about the writing I post here. Over time, by virtue of repeated use, I became increasingly and lamentably invested in its tremendous shortcomings. When you make fairly liberal use of illustrations in your posts, you essentially wed yourself to the particulars of the CSS you’ve established, creating graphics of a certain width or ordering content in a particular method. It works in the short term, but it presents problems when you sit down to redesign.

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