Category Archives: Subtraction

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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IE, That Is

Internet ExplorerInternet Explorer users: you have my pity, first, for using the worst modern browser available on the market today, and my apologies, second, for insufficiently ensuring that all of my posts render properly in your browser of choice. It appears that some of the div classes I’ve been using to include illustrations, which render competently in Safari, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Opera and OmniWeb, refuse to show up in Microsoft Internet Explorer, for some reason. I guess it’s a measure of how few of the visitors to my site use IE that no one has complained to me until today. On the other hand, it might speak more loudly to the size of my audience… and not necessarily in a flattering way. Heh. At any rate, I think I’ve fixed most of those entries (they don’t look perfect, but they work) so the 95% of Web users who were staying away from Subtraction.com due to Internet Explorer incompatibilities — y’all come back now, hear?

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Styled to a Pulp

PulpFictionBecause it’s exceedingly easy to do so, because I like to tweak and tinker, and because I am procrastinating from various other design-related tasks today, I spent a bit of time this afternoon creating my own style sheet for Freshly Squeezed Software’s mixed-bag RSS aggregator (and the one that’s become my regular RSS client), Pulp Fiction. It’s called “Subtraction” and, as the name implies, it’s designed to look something like Subtraction.com. You can download it here for the cost of absolutely zero, but it’s also presented absolutely as is, with no warranties of any kind.

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For a Better Tomorrow

Here and there, I’ve been fixing little details in the Movable Type configuration for Subtraction.com, trying to remedy some of the many, many imperfections and shortcomings on which I’ve procrastinating for so long. The comments feature is now much more reliable than before, when I had coded the form fields in a manner that might suggest a drunken night in front of BBEdit. And this evening I made some alterations to the long-neglected XML feed so that you can read the full entirety of every entry. I’ve been getting back into trying to make Pulp Fiction work for me — I’ll have some notes on that soon — and one of the things I’ve discovered is that I much prefer it when a news source provides the full text of an article, rather than just a snippet. Anyhow, more later… hopefully much more, as this low rustle of activity is a warm-up to a redesign. Soon. I hope.

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Board to Death

phpBBFor several months, I’ve been working on and off in my free time on developing a small Web site for a shareware developer, and part of that process has, recently, entailed trying to construct a reasonably attractive user forum using phpBB. This free community software is impressively powerful, but after having spent several hours today trying to make sense of its template construction, I have to say that it’s a mess. Have a look at the source code on a phpBB board and you’ll see a soup of embedded styles and nested tables that is mind-numbingly confusing to get through, to say nothing of the style sheet, which raises organizational distraction to an art.

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Work in Progress

AIGANon-disclosure agreements and a general respect for our clients’ privacy generally preclude any mentions of current Behavior projects here, but I’m going to make an exception of a sort for the work we’re currently doing for the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Since late last summer, the AIGA has been working on a major overhaul of their core Web sites, and we’ve been privileged enough to take part in redesigning one of the major hubs of aiga.org &#40I’m not going to say exactly which one). We’ve had the pleasure collaborating with my pal Naz over at Weightshift, and to design alongside the likes of Flat, which has made for one of the most interesting design processes I’ve been through. After some hiccups, I think we’re getting close to a really sharp solution, one that draws not only on the work of our aforementioned peers, but also on some of the ideas we started playing with on Gain and the work I’ve been doing here on Subtraction.com. There’s a long way to go, but I’m pretty excited about it.

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End-of-Year Errata

Thanks to those who pointed out the mysterious, unsightly PHP errors that suddenly started appearing all over Subtraction.com this week. I went back through and fixed all the code (I think) so everything should be more or less back to normal. While doing so, I was reminded of all the fixes and tweaks that I’ve been meaning to find the time to implement… well, December has been a pretty poor month for posting frequency, to say nothing of under-the-hood changes, and January looks like it will be fairly hectic as well… but never say never. Happy new year!

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October Backlog

With this past weekend’s trip to D.C. and the unrelenting workload at Behavior, the past week or so, it’s been hard to catch up on email and to find time to post to Subtraction.com. I’m hopefully going to be able to make some real headway on my to do list this week, but to clear out the backlog a bit here are things with which I’ve been preoccupied.

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To Sleep, Perchance to Dream… of Fixes and Tweaks

Subtraction LogoWhen I get the time, I’m going to make a few fixes to the Movable Type templates running Subtraction.com, including: Fixing the cookie problem on the Remarks feature so that it will actually remember information like it’s supposed to. Fixing the Search templates, which have become a total mess since upgrading to MT 2.64 (and possibly moving over to a Google search). Fixing the Elsewhere section’s archives, which doesn’t currently allow direct access to individual posts.

Also, I’m hoping to tweak and/or add a few new features, including: Integrating the Elsewhere archives — at least in some fashion — with the main posts. Establishing a ‘glossary,’ which is an idea I’ve come up with for cataloging concepts and ideas that I refer to regularly. Adding a widget that will allow readers to email links of their favorite posts to friends because, hey, who doesn’t want to do that? And finally, one day I’m going to get around to creating a gallery of masthead images from the home page, and maybe those old covers from version Five.0 of the site, too.

All of this will happen as soon as I figure out how to stop sleeping.

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