Out of Egypt:

CSS Revisited, or, the Woes of Web Design

In theory: an elegant language for describing how web pages should look. Everyone's favorite way to Separate Semantics from Presentation ^TM.

In practice: a giant hassle. A torture device for the graphically inclined. The gateway to bland fonts, boxy layouts, and browser quirks galore. The source of endless tedium that pleases no one but web standards geeks who like to show their superiority over everyone else.

The Web will not be a mature graphical medium until it has its own InDesign.

Of course, the awful state of the tools necessary for Web-based graphic design keeps many people gainfully employed. Good for them (someday, possibly me), but not good for organizations that don't have the resources to hire a Web development army just to get their message out on the Internet.

I suspect blogging platforms like MovableType & WordPress would be much less popular among businesses if it was actually easy to roll your own web design template. I'm going to have to give the YAML Builder a try.

By the way, A List Apart is overrated. Some of their articles are actually helpful; others just demonstrate how far apart "standards" and "simplicity" can be.

quick web development/SEO tip

I learned today that on a *nix system (including Mac OS X) you can use the Lynx browser to get an SEO report on what a webpage looks like to most search engine spiders (including Google's).

You just have to use the command lynx -dump "http://www.example.com" > file.txt to get the text-version of your site. Looks like the UrbanMinistry homepage/sections (in process of being created) come off looking pretty good.

Ok, so I broke the promise I made last night not to do any work today. But it was only a little bit :)

internet browsing re-resolution

Current Web browsing plans:

• Email++
• Social networking++ (Facebook, Twitter, my blog)
• Commenting on friends' Bloglines++
• Wikipedia--
• Tech blogs--
• Other boring non-social stuff--

So I had a run of about a month where I actually was going to bed earlier and avoiding getting caught up in the Web. But when I started frequent browsing again, it was even worse, because I was just reading about super-techie boring stuff. It was like working, when I wasn't at work. After my meeting yesterday, I have decided this must stop. Here's hoping I can stick to the plan.

one step closer...

Well, I just installed my first Drupal modules - it was surprisingly easy. Now I've got Views set up so I can have archives for my blog.

Next step, theming. And to fix some of the formatting on the individual posts; that might be tedious.

the deed is done

So happy right now. After spending an hour and a half installing and configuring Drupal 5.7 on XAMPP for my Mac, I was able to get the Movable Type import script to work. Below is the fruit of my labors, my blog in Drupal:

Now to get it looking pretty...

usability: need to read this book

"[O]nly two industries refer to their customers as users: drug dealers and computer companies. We hope to break this connection between the two."

~ The Design of Sites

and one more for the night...

This is my blog.

This is my blog on Lynx.

And here's the two side-by-side:

I'm excited to find out that my blog is actually browsable in plain text. Unfortunately, Facebook is not.

re: facebook - on the other hand...

"Social networking is sooo last year: Come on, people. Social networking? Everyone should just get a blog or a personal webpage."

I can see where "Student PR Blogger" is coming from (especially with regard to Facebook being a walled garden in the midst of an open Web). However, I think membership in a few social networks is actually worthwhile. The market's saturated now, so there's really no point for new groups to enter, unless they have some serious differentiators.

But Facebook is useful - it just depends on who you know. I don't see the "Web 2.0" landscape as blogging vs. social networking, but rather as a feedback loop in which the two borrow the best features of each other. For example, MyBlogLog gives blogs an associated social network, and Facebook "Notes" are like a minimalist version of blogging.

The core functions of blogs and social networks are different. Blogs are about transmitting ideas (or feelings, depending on the blogger); social networks are about connecting people. Many blogs are read by people who don't know each other in RL; social networks build off of pre-existing RL connections (at least if they follow the Facebook model).

This is what makes social networks a great promotion tool for what you do, and, more importantly, what you create. Most Facebook apps are useless, but the ones that build bridges between a person's online and offline interests and activities have great potential. I probably get more people reading my blog and my del.icio.us through Facebook than I get through Google. Or, if not, at least I get a different audience. And people who know me in RL are more likely to be loyal readers than people who find me through search - primarily because a level of trust has already been established.

So, in conclusion, blogging is great, but the social networks should not be neglected. They may be one of today's most powerful ways to promote your websites (and yourself) for free.

facebook manages to suck me back in...

Apparently Facebook just added a People You May Know block to their sidebar. Just when I thought I had found all the people I wanted to friend request...

The network knows me better than I know myself.

usability = simplicity

I recently fell back in love with my blog design. It's easy to get carried away when you're making a web page, adding all kinds of menus, links, feeds, and widgets that aren't really necessary. Always ask the question, "What are people at this website to do?" Then your design path will become clear.

how to make users hate you, pt. I

Got a ridiculous error message today while browsing a CCLI music store. (I would have a screenshot of it, but apparently the error message is copyrighted.) "The website you are trying to access can only be viewed in Windows operating systems. "

Talk about being insensitive to your user base. I've seen many bad websites in my day, but I've never seen a website that restricted access based on operating system. Is there even a good technical reason for that?

the holy grail of drupal development

Seamless operation across domain names.

I wonder if that's possible, or if security concerns rule it out.

changing my opinion about wikipedia

For a while, I strongly criticized Wikipedia for its inaccuracies, factionalization, instruction creep, mistrust of experts, and tolerance of anonymity/pseudonymity. Even more, I criticized Jimbo Wales for his messianism and his followers for their cult-like adoration of Wales and intolerance of any criticism of their project.

While I still believe WP has significant problems, I am willing to admit that, for many information-gathering purposes, it is good enough, and is a significant advance over what was generally available before the rise of the Web. Its flaws are least evident, it seems, in the sections on economics, law, mathematics, and computer science - specialized disciplines that are well-defined and which leave little room for debate. Thankfully, I already know a fair amount about the humanities from other sources, so WP's strengths and my weaknesses are well-matched.

how i weaned myself of the Internet in two easy steps

1. Put all the blogs, online newspapers, and other sites you absolutely must check every day in your Bloglines.
2. Don't check your Bloglines.

I wish all habits were that easy to break.

ok, now that's creepy

I just saw an "Angels of Lingerie" ad on Facebook. They must know that I watched "America's Next Top Model" last night. (Sarah and her roommate had it on.)

that's interesting...

Today I received an email from a Facebook group which contained the full text of the message. And at the bottom, a link to control which messages come from Facebook.

I didn't realize that Mark Zuckerberg was a reader of my blog :)

little facebook tip

Remember, when you sign up for a group, you're giving them permission to spam you without mercy. And Facebook doesn't even give you the courtesy of seeing the message. You have to go to the site to read it.

Facebook's closed system of notifications, not the targeted ads, may be the deal-breaker for me.

social networks that bore me

I finally went on LinkedIn today to approve some connection requests. Sarah's had been pending since October. (We're dating, but we weren't business contacts, apparently.)

The two minutes that I was on there were enough time to remind me why I never go on there. What a soulless place. And I don't know how useful it is, really. As one of my friends, who works at a tech firm, said recently, I don't know if people would even notice if I de-friended them.

Though Facebook can be tacky, it's still the only social network I use. I like to think that Facebook is a lot like me - it knows how to make time for business and pleasure. (Though I need to spend a little less time on business, if the number of TechMission widgets on my profile is any indication.)

web promotions advice of the week

It's not enough to own your domain; you must own your brand.

That is, you need to do everything you can (honestly) to claim the top two pages of Google results with links to your organization's websites or to material about your organization.

For example, I am trying to make sure that I am not only the #1 Evan Donovan on the web, but that when someone searches for "Evan Donovan," the various high-ranking sites that they find are all referring to me. I am also trying to do the same thing for TechMission.

So far, things look pretty good. We have a fair number of people blogging about us, we have a presence in several major directories/social media services/wikis - and we own several domains, each of which is hosting legitimate non-duplicated content & each of which is targeted to a different audience. The next step, of course, is to move beyond claiming your brand to claiming your keywords: things like "urban ministry", "Christian free and open source software", and "volunteer."

This, of course, is more difficult. It's a keyword free-for-all out there, and not everyone is playing fair. But I am convinced that quality content will win out in the end. TechMission's high ranking in Gospel.com will help somewhat, as soon as that site start to saturate Google's database.

wake up, web designers: your hipness is boring

Words of wisdom from Web Pages that Suck:
"People seeking entertainment generally have a wide assortment of computer games to choose from. The odds are that they're on a commercial website (yours included) to seek information instead. When entertaining them with "creative" forms of navigation interferes with their quick and easy access to that information, the web site fails."

The prevailing metaphor for web interaction is something like this: top banner w/ logo & search (login, if necessary) >> top nav links for sections of site >> left nav for navigation within a section >> content (most links here being to external sites) >> footer (with links to contact info & legalese). It's not exciting, but it's not supposed to be. If it stays in the background, it's working properly, aiding rather than inhibiting people's flow through your site.

Sure, it's not the only way that navigation can work. But it is a good way, and so has become the standard (just like links on the right seem to be fairly standard on blogs).

The task facing the graphic designer for 'serious' websites is thus not "what amazing new thing can I come up with this time?" but "how can I ring the changes on a familiar theme?" (through tasteful brand-sensitive use of logos, images, fonts, color scheme, etc.) It's not as fun perhaps as reinventing the wheel might be. But it's more likely to result in a good product.

Save your innovation for your personal page, gallery, blog, video game promotion, Burger King campaign website, etc. And let the rest of us navigate the Web in peace.

Oh, and if you want to see the kind of results that creativity can generate within constraints, check out Brown U's template project (a stark contrast to their ridiculous experiments with their undergrad & grad school homepages). Or, even better, check out the CSS Zen Garden. For all you Drupaliers, there's a similar site just for Drupal themes.

(I'm excited about the possibility of having my own domain up and running. Possibly in December, if, Lord willing, I've taken the GRE by then.)

teaching sells course is live - discount enrollment until Oct. 31

Ok, so Teaching Sells, that course I was telling you about below, is now a live course in creating multimedia content for the Web, available for only $97 for the first three months.

That is, if you sign up before October 31. Now that I've learned my Northeastern bill is paid by the grant (praise the Lord!), I think I can afford to do that.

If you have any interest in writing or communications or the Web, I strongly recommend that you join me in this adventure.

I also signed up for National Novel-Writing Month, because a friend invited me to. But I think this will be more productive. I don't think my box-factory novel will get written after all.

warning: paypal phishing emails out there

Today I received an email from "aw-request" (no visible sending URL) that said I had unauthorized activity on my PayPal account. There was a place in the email for me to enter my account information.

This was a phishing email - an attempt to gather my account info & compromise my account.

If you receive a similar email, forward it to spoof@paypal.com, then delete it.

I've heard of this problem before, but this is only the second time I've experienced it. Never enter account information into a form on an email - always direct your browser to the authentic site, and make sure that it reads https://sitename.com & your login key (if there is one) is visible.

word to the wise

The real power of the Internet is not how it serves as a rapid transit system for memes, urban legends, and other assorted forms of hype that people Digg, EPIC 2015-style.

Rather, it is the power to promote relationship - that through the Internet people can connect with other trustworthy people in their field, regardless of distance. And, once trust has been established, those people can charge for their services.

Don't rely on search engines and Adsense to make money. Search engines are useful, but only insofar as they enable people to find you. Once they find you, acting as a "human search engine" will be vastly more profitable than simply churning out free ad-supported content could be.

The Web is a great advance in communication. But it hasn't changed the rules of the game, only sped up the play. People will still pay for quality. Search just makes it easier for individuals to promote themselves - if they are actually talented and willing to put in the hard work.

To hear more, check out Brian Clark's free report, Teaching Sells. It pretty much crystallizes a lot of the thoughts I've been having lately about the future of publishing.

A lot of what the report says may seem obvious. But that doesn't make it less helpful. As Dale Carnegie said, "The obvious is what people need to be told." (Thanks Mr. Howard for the quote.)

the seduction of stats

Stats (say, Google Analytics, for example) are deceptive. Because they're so easily quantified, they can give you a false sense of success...or failure. Go up a few thousand hits per month and you feel on top of the world.

But if you want to know whether people are really paying attention to what you're producing, you have to dig a little deeper. Search is a great way to discover new content (or for new users to discover you), but users who come from search have no inherent loyalty - here today, gone tomorrow.

If I had to choose between running a destination site for a few hundred loyal users who create and contribute content or running a site that thousands discover through Google and then promptly forget, I would choose the former every time. Maybe it's because of my interest in the conventional publishing world, but I don't believe that "Web 2.0" has changed all the rules.

Quality will still trump quantity in the end. Wikipedia didn't become #1 because of its SEO, but because of its community. And as that community dies (a victim of its own popularity - Usenet all over again), I predict that Wikipedia itself will become a relic of the past. Not overnight, of course, since it's gotten so entrenched in people's minds (established as a brand, even - largely through word of mouth), but over time, as people discover other, more specialized communities that meet their needs better.

So, in closing, I would echo Copyblogger: "Getting someone to voluntarily pay attention to you over time is the greatest gift you can get as an online publisher. Do everything you can to get more subscribers, and quit trying to please Google."

So psyched about having my own domain. Now I just need to figure out how to get it linked to my webhost, and, possibly, to get Drupal working. Or at least pmWiki.

just wanted to let you know...

If you're trying to get in touch with me, I rarely check my Wikipedia talk page.

I was surprised to learn that pages in userspace can show up on the second page of Google results though. People could WP's insanely high PageRank to do some pretty irresponsible things.

Anyway, the Covenant College search results should be back to normal now.

social life 2.0

tired of finding cool stuff on the Internet yourself?

I know I was.

So I added the StumbleUpon plugin to my Firefox install. It's like channel-surfing the Web. Yahoo 2.0?

from my worries about Internet addiction

This evening I was worried about my frequent gravitation toward the Internet in free time, especially now that I have wireless. So I tried taking the Internet Addiction Test, which seemed fairly legit, and it said that my answers were within the normal range.

Then I learned that the IAT was apparently developed from the criteria for pathological gambling, a very different problem, and this made sense after I looked at the test more closely.

Perhaps, as the following quote suggests, the Internet isn't the problem at all:

"Since the aspects of the Internet where people are spending the greatest amount of time online have to do with social interactions, it would appear that socialization is what makes the Internet so 'addicting.' That's right -- plain old hanging out with other people and talking with them. Whether it's via e-mail, a discussion forum, chat, or a game online (such as a MUD), people are spending this time exchanging information, support, and chit-chat with other people like themselves."

- Dr. John Grohol, "Internet Addiction Guide"

And so, the question then becomes, "Is there anything unique about the modality of the Internet vs. other communications media?" Is it uniquely compelling or absorbing, to the extent that it causes people to become alienated from reality?

I am not sure. I know that the user interface metaphors that have been developed over the past 20 years, not to mention the nature of hypertext itself, cause computer-mediated communication to have a different phenomenological quality than, say, reading a book.

I like to describe hypertext as the "master medium" of our time. By this phrase I mean that hypertext is an unprecedented delivery mechanism for other media - text via Wikipedia, images via Flickr, audio via iTunes and last.fm, video via YouTube, socialization (concretized speech) via Facebook, Myspace, and the like. Electronic communication is becoming like a nervous system for the planet, as McLuhan suggested way back in the 1960s - one twitch, and everyone jumps.

This, of course, is what my SIP (senior undergrad thesis) was all about. These are issues I'm still working through, as is our society as a whole. We live in an age of great disruption, for good and for ill.

McLuhan said, "There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to recognize what is happening." I'm not so sure.

As far as I know, no new communications technology has ever been successfully resisted. The trend in society has always been toward more complexity, more dependence on technology - as long as war and disaster has not intervened.

So, again, I am left to ponder - what do we gain and what do we lose?

monetize your weblog - and lose all your readers

That's a lot of money, but I have no idea why. I certainly don't plan on making money off of this site. If it gets my name out there, that would be more than enough.

I've decided. GoogleAds will never sully the parchment surface of this blog. If I could make them look seamless, than maybe. But Google would never allow that anyway.

black hat SEO, defined

I was looking today to see if I could find a web app that would automatically generate some sort of blog description based on word frequency use, so I could put it up as a description in the blogging community widget I just added. (Which I wish had a PHP version, btw, now that I've seen how much faster they are.)

Anyway, in my search, I came upon this: Auto Blog Generator (just put those words together, add .com, and you have the name of the website; I don't want to do them the favor of a link). It's a program that lets you generate dozens of Blogger webblogs with a single click. Ugh. Perhaps Blogspot shouldn't be counted in Google's search rankings?

want to speed up your blogging?

Start using the blog bookmarklets which MovableType provides.

1. After logging in to your blog's control panel, click on Set Up Bookmarklets.
2. Check off the items you want to include: I picked Extended Entry, Text Formatting, and Category, since I actually use those settings on posts.
3. Click Create, and then drag the link which MT generates to your browser bookmarks toolbar (you may need to add it to the appropriate folder if, for some unknown reason, you are using IE. If you are using IE, you should just download Firefox before you do anything else.)

facebook for iphone: ajax slides may be the next big thing in interface design

Check out the new Facebook for iPhone site: iphone.facebook.com. It may not be designed for viewing on computers, but I kinda like its streamlined UI. And it certainly will make Facebook even more addictive for those of us who actually can view it on our mobile. It's like adding a whole new layer of social knowledge to your phone - for free.

It's also how I was able to generate this image: (after the jump)

Try creating one of these for yourself by loading pictures of you (or anything, really) into the Facebook for iPhone interface, taking a screenshot, cropping & editing into a grid. Then set the result as a desktop background (against white) for some truly crazy photo goodness.

There is no bubble

Google's introducing new products every few days, people are planning to make money tagging websites on del.icio.us, elaborate buzzword-laden business plans are being constructed. The Internet is exploding again; my SIP couldn't have come at a better time. Someone needs to put the money away, take a deep breath, and think about what they're trying to accomplish.

Even more so than a few weeks ago I want to study and write about media theory at the graduate level. Heaven knows we need it, or chaos will simply beget more chaos - and commercialism. And porn.

My Google Analytics data is up

Oh glorious day - Google Analytics is like a web counter on steroids. Now I know what browser you're all using. (Don't worry; Google keeps you all anonymous.) Apparently 40% of you are using Internet Explorer. This is unfortunate; here's why.

The short version: Microsoft, for one thing, refuses to properly support Web standards, so pages that display properly on Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox/Safari/Opera/Konquerer, basically every other browser out there, don't do so on Internet Explorer. Also, Microsoft has proprietary features such as ActiveX which malicious web developers can use to give you spyware or do other nasty things to your computer. Other browsers don't have this problem nearly as much. Also, other browsers, such as the one I use, Firefox (so glad the college installed it - use of non-IE browsers is even recommended by the U.S. government), have features like tabbed browsing, which enables you to keep the number of browser windows you have open to a minimum by keeping multiple page windows within the same main browser window. This is especially useful when browsing link-rich sites such as Wikipedia, which has a tendency to make one want to go in multiple directions at once.

So that's the story, at least as well as I can tell it. For those of you who are already sold on other browsers and want to have a good laugh, check out Spread Internet Explorer, a parody of the main Firefox advocacy site.

On Creating Ordered Lists

Through a little nesting of HTML tags and CSS styling, one can create rather classy outlines, as seen below.

A sample ordered list:

1. Spirit
1. God
2. Angels
2. Matter
1. Life
1. Plants
2. Animals
1. Wild
2. Domestic
1. Dogs
1. Greyhounds
2. Dalmatians
3. Bloodhounds
2. Cats
3. Bacteria
2. Non-Life

A sample unordered list:

• Animals
• Pets
• Dogs
• Cats
• Wild Animals
• Plants

The code behind these examples:

        ul {list-style-type: square}
        ul > ul {list-style-type: circle}
        ul > ul > ul {list-style-type: disc}

        ol {list-style-type: upper-roman}
        ol > ol {list-style-type: upper-alpha}
        ol > ol > ol {list-style-type: decimal}
        ol > ol > ol > ol {list-style-type: lower-alpha}
        ol > ol > ol > ol > ol {list-style-type: lower-roman}
        ol > ol > ol > ol > ol {list-style-type: hebrew}
        ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol {
                display: marker;
               content: "(" counter(counter, decimal) ")";
               counter-increment: counter;                     
             }
        ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol {
                display: marker;
               content: "(" counter(counter, lower-alpha) ")";
               counter-increment: counter;                     
             }
        ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol  {
                display: marker;
               content: "(" counter(counter, lower-roman) ")";
               counter-increment: counter;                     
             }
        ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol > ol {
                display: marker;
               content: "(" counter(counter, hebrew) ")";
               counter-increment: counter;                     
             }

Blast from the past...

I found this site off a link off a link on the lovely Victorian Web, which I'm discussing in my SIP.

I didn't know sites like this were still around. And with a domain name to die for and everything... For all I know their content may be excellent, but this "shove all the info on the main page and use some GIFs to pretty it up" approach isn't exactly making them looking good. It's the online equivalent of the poorly-photocopied newsletter.

Another question: technical

Does anyone know why the del.icio.us feed over on the right hand side of the page is not updating? Is Feed Digest not working or is it a problem with del.icio.us?

UPDATE:Ok, think I fixed it. Check out some of the beautiful stuff I've found lately. The world is my oyster.

I just hopped another bandwagon

Seeing what my SIP's about (which I have a 5 page outline for now and feel pretty good about, despite not having written anything), it was bound to happen. I joined the del.icio.us tagging community. It's a really nerdy group of people sharing bookmarks of sites they like on the Internet, identified by tags (keywords, basically). I'm doing it primarily because I have no computer of my own and thus can't save bookmarks locally. I'm also doing it for posterity :)

The only thing is, talk about systemic bias. Every other article being linked is about blogs, tagging, CSS, RSS, web design, or some similar thing. Hopefully the site will start mainstreaming in the next year or so and become more useful, because I like all those things, but their "delicious community" would be more delicious if it represented other communities besides the Web geek community. Of course, however, it's only logical for those people to start it out.

Evan *blushes*

Thanks for catching that, Krista. I hope I didn't get anyone in trouble who clicked on that link (in the deleted post below about the 2955 DDR score). I just figured it was some kind of bug in Symantec Web Security, considering that a totally reputable site (w3.org - the website of the people responsible for the World Wide Web standards) linked it.

I should have warned people about the possible nature of that link more carefully. I guess I just assumed people would read the whole entry before clicking. But, then again, I don't do that often, so it was a stupid assumption to make.

Lesson: never assume. I'm going to email the W3C and tell them to take that link down. I guess this shows that, since the Internet is always changing, links are not stable.

Sick of writing HTML?

I'm generating all my web text in this from now on.

Link cornucopia: article search, blog search, and more

[This entry under construction - expect the actual links to come later if I have time to revise it. But, as Carrie said, leave it unpublished and you forget about it.]

The Web is changing in good ways...at a nightmarish pace. And my academic life is suffering for it. I think about my SIP often, research not at all.

I think a good slogan for Google's Personalized Homepage is "Google Personalized Home...become incredibly informed about unimportant things." At least that's how I'm becoming. Although seeing the Internet Monk, Metalutheran, and the Evangelical Outpost's latest updates all on one page is good.

Anyway, I was doing research for Global Trends using FindArticles.com, from which I then discovered Furl - this site which lets you save articles, etc. as self-categorized, described, and rated bookmarks.

From there, I went to this site, where I learned a little more about the tagging phenomenon, which seems to be a little like a user-created web directory, but different. And on that blog, I learned about Google Blog Search, an idea whose time has come. And I love that it's searching RSS. Now perhaps blogs can become more of an interlinked conversation, rather than atomized, redundant, solipsistic musings: "ranting to dev/null" as one might say.

I wonder if Google can also exclude blog results from web searches? Maybe if all blogs could somehow be identified - probably not by host domains, but I suppose some form of metadata. Technorati is apparently the other big blog search engine. I'll have to check that out sometime.

Anyway, back to research...

(One last thing, if you want to see the Reformed blog with the most disgustingly good graphic design ever, look no further than Challies.com. And I can't believe I never went to Flickr.com before.)

oh bless you google: more ways to waste time on the Internet

In pursuance of this entry's title, we might start off with this article from the Register, How Computers Make Kids Dumb. Yes, the difference between knowledge and facts is a real one, and there's no substitute for the focus and reflectivity that reading books requires, though the Internet's manic linkage is definitely sexy (and unimaginable to say, myself of 1995 - or the books on the Net that I was reading at the time).

Tonight I've been playing with the Personalized Homepage feature on Google, not to mention some of their other services. Finally, I can use RDF/RSS streams without the advantage of a feed reader. This is too cool. Ultimately this'll save time, right? - since I won't have to go to individual blog sites to see if they've updated. Also I can bookmark sites on the lab computers (which I couldn't do before since the security software deletes all preferences on logout).

I wish I could show you my Google homepage now - I went a little crazy with it. On the first column, I've got: Covblogs, Michael Spencer's Internet Monk blog, Ryan Davidson's blog, Josiah Roe's blog, John Dagen's blog, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Joel Garver's Sacra Doctrina, and Josh S. and friends' Metalutheran. On the second column: Word from the Desert, the New York Times, CNN, National Review, Wired, Boing Boing, and Project Gutenberg. Finally, on the third: Gmail, Weather, Movies, Bookmarks, and Search History.

I've got a few suggestions to make for Google, though. It would be nice if you could put up little search bars to search specific sites, like Wikipedia, Amazon, Project Gutenberg, CCEL, Cyberhymnal, Bible Gateway, etc. (all of which are somewhere on there as links). Also, it would be nice if I could see more data on the feeds I was receiving, like dates and if I could use a drop-down system to both organize them under categories, and to make it possible to streamline the page which is pretty big right now.

So Covenant just joined the Facebook thingy...

I'm kinda embarassed to admit I spent about 1/2 hour working on my profile, etc. Well, now at least I know where some of the people from my high school went after graduation...

There are some things I don't quite understand about the site, however. Do you have to be someone's "friend" in order to view their profile? When I do a general search on Solanco HS '02, I can't get into anybody's except my own. But all Covenant people's profiles are open, even the ones I wish weren't. And also, is it possible to search for common interests wider than within your own college? I would like to see, to name one thing, who else likes Belle & Sebastian on Facebook, since no one on Covenant's branch has put them down besides me...yet. Also, is it possible to do substring searches, since people might put down the names of books, etc. slightly differently, yet it still be the same book? Finally, on the birthday field, what format do most people use, slashes or dashes?

I also need to remind myself to email them Apartments as a possibility for the Residence field, and Core as a possibility for subject. Yes, I'm neurotic. And I wasted my afternoon.

A history of my favorite punctuation mark

~

Speaking of Usenet, here's something I didn't even realized still existed: the rtfm.mit.edu Usenet FAQ archive. Too bad Usenet seems to have died around the year 2000 and hence none of these FAQs have been updated for around 5 years. Ah well, that's the Internet: always moving on.

Less reason for this entry than usual even...

So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text. So here's some text.

Debugging issues still to work out: why are the lines breaking as they do? And what about the padding, but that's easily fixed.

Blast from the past...

Back in 1996, I got a book about the Internet from one of my uncles. One of the sites it had in it was the WWW Virtual Library, created by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW. Much to my surprise, it still exists...

By the way, does anyone know of any good books/sites on CSS, XHTML, XML, etc.? The W3C's documentation is a little too advanced for me, at times.

An Open Letter to Microsoft

Normally I don't approve of shouting, but in this case I think it's justified.

PLEASE FIX IE's IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CSS-P BOX MODEL!

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In other news, I've decided that I kinda like web design again, despite its (incredible) frustrations and intend to do more with it. Perhaps I have another career option open to me... And if I learn programming, who knows?