Category Archives: Subtraction

Introducing Basic Maths, a Theme for WordPress

Things that have been keeping me from blogging: raising a brand new baby, having grown-up time with my girlfriend, walking my dog, holding down a day job and, now finally revealed: working on Basic Maths, a brand new theme for WordPress that I designed with my friend Allan Cole.

After months of plugging away at in during whatever free time we’ve been able to find, we’re finally releasing it into the wild today, to coincide with WordCampNYC 2009. (In fact, I’m heading over to that conference later today, and Allan will be speaking there early this afternoon, so if you’re there, be sure to say hello.) It’s available right now for purchase at this link — for a limited time only, it costs just US$45, which is less than half the price of other, far less awesome WordPress themes, if you ask me.

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Tuesday at Galapagos

Just a quick appearance note: next Tuesday evening, 28 Jul, I’ll be speaking at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. The event is part of Galapagos’ Career Camp, a five-part series running through mid-September that brings together New York City-area professionals (employed or otherwise) for networking, discussion, and brief lectures (conveniently, drinks will be available at the cash bar, too). Also onstage will be my frequent partner-in-crime Liz Danzico, up-and-coming design technologist extraordinaire Erin Sparling and — last minute addition! — the amazing designer Jason Santa Maria. It’s going to be fun! Tickets are just US$5 and are sure to go quickly, so register right away here at this link.

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Really Simple Sending

MailChimpLet’s say you’re one of the many people out there for whom the current dissatisfactory state of RSS readers effectively prevents you from using this site’s feed to keep up with what I write here at Subtraction.com. Or, let’s say my rather erratic publishing habits — sometimes several times a day, and other times not for days on end — make it difficult for you to remember to tune in on a regular basis. Well, have I got the solution for you.

For several months now I’ve been testing a new feature over at the just plain cute MailChimp service that they call RSS-to-Email Newsletter; which does exactly what the name implies — automagically convert what I publish on this blog into email form. And now it’s finally ready for the public.

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Care and RSS Feeding

Mea culpa: I messed up on the feeds for this site during my move over to ExpressionEngine. It’s embarrassing, really, how badly I underestimated how important the RSS feed for this site had become in the many intervening years since I first set it up. It’s funny, too: countless hours were spent on tidying up all of the many, many Web pages that make up this site, and yet it’s really the nearly invisible — and in many respects, design-free — RSS feed that is the most critical lifeline for readers.

The fact is, I just don’t have enough expertise to competently manage and edit my feeds beyond very basic editing of existing templates. For the most part, I’ve always stumbled my way into some kind of acceptable solution, and that was my approach when I re-launched this site on Monday evening. It’s true that there were many things throughout that needed further attention and that I thought that was perfectly fine — there was no way I’d ever launch if I waited until they were all done — but a defective feed should not have been one of them.

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Greatly Exaggerated

Here’s what happens sometimes: you try your hand at blogging. You get kind of good at it and get on a roll for, oh, six or seven years. You start getting more enterprising with your blogging, maybe even launching a second or third blog, and you start to upgrade your blog software, with plans to make everything faster, better. It all looks like it’s going to be great. You’re unstoppable.

Then you get incredibly busy at work. Ridiculously busy. And then maybe you meet a really awesome new person, and you rearrange most all of the priorities governing your free time. And then you and your new girlfriend even decide to shack up, get an awesome new place and make a happy little home together. Then you spend several weekends in a row packing, then moving, then unpacking and setting up the new apartment and making runs to Ikea and Home Depot.

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Four to Six Weeks

ExpressionEngineAnybody still paying attention to what blog publishing system I’m using here at Subtraction.com probably figured that my previously mentioned intentions to switch to ExpressionEngine have foundered. Not so. Behind the scenes, I’ve been erratically but intently working on porting the entirety of this site over to that more modern publishing system.

Between all of the other interests competing for my free time, it’s taken a lot longer than I would have liked, but it’s on its way. How long will it be before it launches? Well, what’s that that they say when you need to order a part from the warehouse? Four to six weeks. Or something.

Aside from just being busy all the time, what’s taking so long is that, as I’ve rebuilt the functionality of this site (with invaluable contributions from EE expert Adam Khan), I’ve also been re-thinking a lot of the way the site works. I’m not changing the basic look at all; this is not a redesign so much as a reworking, and casual visitors may not notice much of a difference at all.

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Revving Up ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngineNot long after I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I had that feeling familiar to most everyone who similarly relocates: “This is great. Why didn’t I do this sooner?” Once you’ve given up today’s Manhattan and its generally not-worth-it hassles, you understand how much more livable life is across the East River.

Well, I’ve got something like that feeling again right now, as I take the very first steps towards porting this site from Movable Type over to ExpressionEngine. (This is part of my recently stated desire to resolve the general slowness on this site.) It’s a daunting transition — especially for me, someone with more ambition than free time or technical facility.

To my surprise however, given a few short hours, I’ve gotten much further in getting ExpressionEngine to replicate my existing functionality than I thought I could. I literally started with zero knowledge of the software at the beginning of the week, and with less than six hours’ worth of labor, I’ve hobbled together a rough but serviceable, EE-powered re-creation of Subtraction.com.

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The Host with the Most

Among the problems in my life that I’d like to do something about sooner or later is server performance for Subtraction.com and the various domains that I host along with it, including A Brief Message. These are all hosted over at DreamHost which, as I and many people have mentioned before, is less than ideal; it’s slow, slow and slow.

I’m told, though, that the performance I get from DreamHost is unfortunately about the level of performance I should realistically expect from any shared hosting plan. It’s consumer hosting, after all, and even if I move up-market a bit and pony up more money, consumer-grade hosting is never going to be as responsive as my fondest daydreams hope it can be.

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Command Shift Me

Command-Shift-3If I had a lot more time on my hands, I’d learn video. It seems like a blast. But I’m struggling enough already to keep up with the relatively static brand of design I get paid to do; a self-initiated foray into the world of motion seems expensive and time-consuming.

Still, I had fun messing about in a completely primitive way with video last month. I was invited by Jennifer Daniel, Erin Sparling and Amit Gupta to create a short bumper message for their new site, Command-Shift-3 — which is billed as being “like Hot or Not, but instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot Web sites.” It’s a cute idea, and in the early days, at least, Subtraction.com was a leader in the head-to-head competitions.

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As Seen in Magazines

All my digital cheerleading aside, I must admit there’s nothing quite like seeing your name in print. There’s an intangible quality to the medium that’s predicated, at last in part, on how relatively difficult and expensive it is to get large numbers of printed items in the hands of actual consumers.

Take magazines, for example. In this digital age, their strange, delayed distribution often makes them feel like time capsules from a world that’s perpetually six to eight weeks behind our own. And yet, when one’s name appears in one… then it’s a thrilling moment, there’s no doubt.

This month, my name appears in two magazines, and I have to admit, both times gave me a thrill. They’re both design publications, of course — Reader’s Digest still refuses to run my heartwarming story of how typography saved me when I fell through the ice during a cold New England winter — and they’re both on newsstands right now.

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