Category Archives: Weblogs

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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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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Flirtations with Fame

Two minor flirtations with fame today, one for me and one for my four-legged companion.

First, the prolific Mike Rundle has posted an interview with me at Business Logs, in which you can learn more about my secret origins, recent Web standards stirrings at Behavior and the future of weblogs as we know them (caveat emptor). Combined with a dollar bill, the answers I give to Mike’s questions may not get you more than a cup of coffee, but it’s still worth poking around the Business Logs Web site, where they’re trying to use weblogs to bring real business benefits to the organizations that are forward-thinking enough to capitalize on this still-evolving medium.

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Facts on ’Fiction

PulpFictionWhile everyone was getting all riled up over the pricing terms for Movable Type 3.0 late last week, I was eagerly keeping an eye on Freshly Squeezed Software’s Web site for the release of their entry into the Macintosh news aggregator market, the unfortunately titled PulpFiction.

After a fair amount of hype — or routine buildup, depending on how you look at it — the small software outfit made PulpFiction available for download on Saturday afternoon. I was out most of the day, but as soon as I got home, I dutifully installed a copy on my PowerBook.

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Morning Routines

Here’s how my Web surfing habits have changed: somewhere along the way, I got completely out of the habit of reading the various design Web sites like K10k and Surfstation every morning, possibly because I so often find that their purposely terse and cryptic language leaves me wanting. This is also because I’ve been spending more and more time every morning reading political news, most prominently at ABC News’ excellent The Note, which has just started a new spin-off column that intends to offer the same brand of Beltway insiderism on a ‘real time’ basis. And then there’s the Progress Report from the Center for American Progress, which is exhaustive in compiling cogent cases against the Bush adminstration’s errant policies every morning. And of course there’s all those political blogs, too: Talking Points Memo, Political Animal, Instapundit and Wonkette, and wherever they lead me.

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All the News That’s Fit to Feed

NewsMacThe reigning king of Macintosh XML news readers is NetNewsWire from Ranchero software. It really is a solid piece of software engineering, but I’ve been looking for something that will let me organize all the XML feeds I’ve been collecting in a more orderly fashion. A search on VersionTracker led me to NewsMac, which has lots of great features but has been riddled with a few nagging bugs in its latest incarnation. But the author has been really responsive with fixes and updates, and has even laid out a pretty detailed road map for the application (when’s the last time a shareware developer laid out a road map?). This level of support has, over the past few weeks, gradually won me over, and I’m pretty sure that I’m settling on NewsMac as my reader of choice now.

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That Lovin’ Feelin’

In spite of the beautiful weather, I spent a lot of this weekend indoors, seated in front of my computer. Since we moved into this new apartment, it was the first full weekend that I’ve had complete use of my workspace, thanks to the wireless networking that I did a week ago. I’ve been working on a new project, a Web site for a new client, that’s driven entirely by a series of Movable Type weblogs.

A good chunk of my Saturday was spent sketching out the site with a paper and pen, trying to get my head around a clear method for interweaving at least three and possibly as many as six separate weblogs into a single, seamless site. The hardest part was figuring out a clear, concise method of visually representing the relationships between each; it was a fun challenge, and I think I was able to bite off a good chunk of it pretty successfully by the time I called it quits earlier today. Inside of thirty-six hours, I had a reasonably robust prototype up and running, and many of the major conceptual and technical challenges had been sorted out.

It made me think that I miss this part of Web design, the part that’s intensely personal, where a single person can take an idea from paper to Web in just a matter of days. This immediacy was the quality that originally drew me away from print design and to the Web, when I found that my ideas could be rendered online without interference or obstacles. It’s nice to be intermittently reminded of this original seduction; each time it happens, I rediscover at least a little, well-preserved part of my tarnished passion for this business.

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The Backpack that Made Me Question Blogging

BooqpaqHere’s an example of the perils of blogging day in and day out (or some schedule reasonably close to it) and succumbing to the tedium of constantly searching something at least mildly interesting to say. This morning I sat down with the intention of writing about the Booqpaq that I bought online last month. I’ve been toting around my laptop, digital camera, PDA and assorted other encumbrances in it for several weeks now, and I was pleased enough with it to want to write something nice about it on my site.

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Five Oh Oh!

500Five hundred posts is a milestone of some kind, right? At least it feels that way to me. When I launched version Six.5 of this site, there were only around 420 posts or so. That was just two months ago, and now I’m halfway to a thousand! I worried back in April that the new format and the writer-friendly Movable Type software would make it difficult for me to be able to keep posting to this site daily; together, the two changes practically demanded lengthier entries.

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Categorically Speaking

SubcategoriesIn an email exchange with Naz of Absenter.org, I got to thinking about some of the limitations of the categories feature (Subtraction.com refers to them as ‘tags’) in Movable Type. While powerful, this feature doesn’t allow me to do one thing that would be very handy for me: I’d like to be able to string together a few arbitrarily chosen posts in a kind of ’series’ — almost like a regular category, but more limited in purpose.

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