Category Archives: Subtraction

Back in the Saddle

It feels a little weird to sit down and write a post after a little over a month on hiatus, but here I am, doing it. I’ve finally got version 7.0 of this Web site in a state where it’s practically ready to launched. If everything goes correctly, I will stick to the announcement I made a few days ago and release 7.0 to the public on Mon 03 Jan, just in time for everyone to get back to surfing their favorite blogs after New Year’s day.

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Very, Very Soon

Now Christmas is past, what’s left to look forward to but a long and lonely winter? A new Subtraction.com, that’s what! I’m getting very close to finishing this redesign. Right now I’m shooting to relaunch on Mon 03 Jan 2005. If I haven’t lost you completely, please come back then!

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Design into Production

Most of the look and feel is finished. Now I’m rebuilding the templates in Movable Type from scratch, both to correct amateur errors I made the first time around and to take advantage of some of the new features in MT 3.1x. Tonight, I made big progress when I got a rickety version of the home page publishing properly.

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Gobble Gobble

A long holiday like this one would have been the perfect time to get lots of work done on redesigning Subtraction.com, but I’ll be heading out of town this afternoon to spend Thanksgiving with Joy‘s family, then we’re off to the Jersey shore through Sunday afternoon. We’ll be taking advantage of the off-season quietude to relax and take Mister President onto the beach. So, the redesign goes on hold, at least for a few more days. Have a nice holiday!

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Boxes, Arrows, Results

Lots of very, very generous people have written to me to say that we was robbed, that our entry in the redesign contest for the noted information architecture magazine Boxes and Arrows deserved better than to take the bronze in the final judging. I really appreciate all of those comments, so thanks to everyone for your kind thoughts. Thanks too, to Boxes and Arrows for holding the contest, and congratulations to the top prize winners. I can’t wait to see the finished product. By the way, if anybody out there is looking for a new design for their information architecture-focused online magazine, drop me an email. I’ve got one handy.

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On Hiatus

Between balancing my personal life, my office responsibilities, my blogging schedule and my attempts to redesign Subtraction.com, something had to give. So I’ve decided to cut out the blog posts and concentrate instead on implementing a redesign that’s been brewing for months on my hard drive. These interim posts will keep you up to date, but they’ll be narrowly focused on the redesign’s progress only. With luck, I’ll be done in a few weeks

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Hit in the Temple

Media TempleThe folks at Media Temple have always been responsive and courteous when I’ve had problems, but I᾿m at the end of my tether with them right now. In case you haven’t noticed, access to Subtraction.com has been markedly unreliable since Tuesday, owing to a series of vaguely explained technical issues they’re having with my shared server — whatever the problems are, they refuse to subside. You’re probably reading this now thanks to a spell in which everything᾿s running fine, but if my experience this week has been any guide, you’ll be lucky to find the server responding in, say, forty-five minutes from now. It’s very, very frustrating. I’m pretty sure this is going to put me in the market for a new host provider next week.

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Back, Sort Of

I’ve been back from California since late Monday evening, but yesterday my host provider had a ‘hardware malfunction’ with my server, which caused some major downtime. Even after it came back up, I had some MySQL errors that prevented me from getting into Movable Type and therefore from publishing new posts here. Things looked resolved this afternoon, and then the server went down again and required a complete replacement. Though I create back ups of my site regularly, the whole incident gave me a fright — I need to come up with a more rigorous schedule and better habits for backing up what’s on my server. Too generously, I put a lot of trust into hosting providers… I suspect I’m not the only one who does this.

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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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