Internet Archives
For Shame
By on May 12, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (3)
I’ve done some pretty ridiculous stuff in my time. Once, while showing off on a bike, I injured myself so badly that I required intense surgery on my knee. It was embarrassing as hell. More recently, I was really excited about seeing Lloyd and Michael play. Not that I had ever really heard them, or that anyone has. But I knew it must be good. Manta(r), Badger King, Dear Nora. How could it not be good? So, the embarrassing, shameful part came because I was so excited. I wanted to let them (i.e. m. ritchey) know that I (people in general) were excited. Build up some anticipation for both of us. Right? So I leave a comment the night before. The next day there is a post semi about the music so I leave another comment thinking I can delete the first and that this is a more appropriate place anyway. Then this happens, which isn’t a huge deal, just embarrassing. The best part is that we didn’t make it in time to see them play.
Then I cut my finger with a damn x-acto knife. THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED TO ME. I felt like an idiot. It is almost healed all the way now and I’m beginning to get over it, but I felt so ridiculous at the time.
All of that is nothing compared to today. The most shameful. Last night, we had a crazy intense dance party (by that I mean I was way too excited dancing to gangsta rap while everyone watched). Suffice it to say, it was awesome. The shame came today when I woke up. I AM IN SO MUCH PAIN. My lower back is all jacked. I’m 22! This isn’t supposed to happen until I’m 65 or something. So today I’ve been waddling around, feeling absolutely ridiculous. Trying to act like it’s nothing.
An organized life
By on October 23, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (6)
I haven’t been posting much lately. It’s the sort of thing that happened gradually. I have been doing a lot on the internets just not in the form of writing for Merde (Prescott Family dot org, 10/25!!!!). So, in the vein of getting back to it, I’m going to bring together a few blurbs I’ve written from around the internet. Little tiny guys. Hopefully you will see the connections. These closely resemble reviews.
I REALLY like Google Reader
I used Safari’s built-in feed reader, but being at school/home/work I wanted something I could use in all the places easily. Voilà! Google Reader. I really, really like it. I think I like it so much because I used (feature-less) Safari RSS for so long. Seasoned aggregators might not like it as much, but it has a lot of features you don’t see on the surface. I’m really just talking about the keyboard shortcuts. My faves are j and k, which are next and previous post. And in a close second n and p, which scan within a post. (Oh! and v, which is used to view the original post). Anyhow, something I just stumbled upon is gu. gu is great for isolating a single feed. Which is a REALLY good thing when Digg and BBC and such are filling up your screen. (Lifehacker has more about the keyboard shortcuts.)
buzzword
Buzzword is an Adobe product. It’s an all flash and all web-based word processor, which is good and bad. I am most impressed with font selection. Obviously. I haven’t actually used it to write anything serious, more to just play around with, but it seems to have potential. Also, I would like to see more formats than Word and RTF. (A note: I haven’t extensively tried Google Docs either, so I don’t really know how buzzword and Google Docs compare).
Browser Choice
I have struggled for a long time about browser choice. I like Macs. I like the look of the applications. I also like features and ease of use. Here’s what I said on 10/6:
I finally have completely given into Firefox. Don’t get me wrong. I love Safari. But I’m tired of Safari crashing on my bank’s site. Firefox is also very open source and can be used on any platform (for the part of me that want to use Linux all the time). (Also, I know Safari is pretty open and is based on Konqueror.) Plus, so many sweet plugins. I tried Camino, but it’s too close to Safari in the lack of really cool plugins. Not as many people use these browsers. I will still use Safari occasionally, but Firefox is my lady now. (Plus FF 2 isn’t as slow as 1.5 was for me.)…
Also, what happened to Firefoxy? It seems it hasn’t been updated since 2006 (probably the last time I’ve really used Firefox).
Obviously Firefox is good for Linux and Windows, otherwise I don’t really like it. There, I said it. It’s not Gecko or anything like that, it’s just too slow and ugly. On 10/9, I retracted my statement saying:
So I’m pretty much sworn back to Camino. It’s so tiny and fast. It makes my heart race. And it’s so damn pretty.
So that’s my choice. Camino. It’s small, fast, cute. It’s really a win/win situation. It’s uses Gecko, but is written in Cocoa. “Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac Style” Damn right. (With that being said, I’m not that hardcore. I use Safari and Opera occasionally, but only for testing websites. And I haven’t quite deleted FF from my applications folder. But 99.9% of the time I use Camino.)
(Use Camino with Google Reader with Reader Notifier.)
This is just mean
By on October 30, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (9)
Margot has been really into blogging lately.
I can be very particular sometimes. By “particular” I mean I can be an asshole. There are certain things that bother me to no end. Maybe talking about them will help?
Two Spaces
I really can’t handle when people put two spaces after a period. It frustrates the crap out of me. YOU AREN’T USING A TYPEWRITER. Welcome to the 21st century. We use computers. We don’t use monospaced type anymore. There is no need for the extra space. And it’s not a specific kind of person who does this. It’s everyone. I don’t really understand. When I have to remove all those extra spaces, oh man! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE remember! Never EVER put two spaces after a period. It’s WRONG.
Excel
I hate excel. I hate having to take text from excel and bring it into quark. Maybe it’s just not my thing. I’ve never really needed to use it for anything. I’m not really even sure what it’s purpose is. The only thing I’ve seen them used for is lists. Can’t you use word instead? There is so much less work in formatting when using word vs. excel.
“Free”
The other thing that has been getting to me lately is about cost. People forget that everything costs something. Nothing is free. The food in the fridge was bought by someone who carried it in their backpack on their bike in the sun. So when you eat it that really really sucks. Also, websites aren’t free. Not only are their hosting/software fees, there is the time it takes to make stuff. I have felt frustrated at times about EM and PF in regards to this. I’m going to stop here before it goes too far. Also, Mikey really has said it best:
Well, there is still a fee, it’s just invisible to you. A lot of resources go into creating this space (examples: hosting fees, design work, etc on UHX) and maintaining it.But we allow certain forms of advertising, such as when our friends make things, but we don’t allow other less targeted forms (like spam).
There is always a cost to getting the word out: paying for posters, sending CDs out for review, or just the time it takes… A lot of “fee-for-speech” advertising models (newspapers, magazines, etc) is more ethical because there is a clear line between editorial and advertising. On UHX that line is blurred because the editorial is making the product and the advertisements and it’s all blurred together.
How do you promote shows at the DOS w/o advertising them?
Is advertising okay if it comes from a trusted source?
While some of the ways in which advertising happens can be sleazy, is the entire idea of paying for promotion evil? And if so, where does that leave “news” and other ad-based media?
How can we know what is happening in far away places unless someone foots the bill? Removing advertising would be worse for the world than removing religion.(via EMX)
Back in our rightful spot
By on November 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Back in our rightful spot, originally uploaded by EXISTENTIAL MEDIA.For the past month or so existentialmedia.org was not on Google AT ALL. I figured out what the problem was after much sweat and tears. The problem was half my fault and half Dreamhost. I wanted to force people to view Existential Media at existentialmedia.org instead of www.existentialmedia.org. Somehow something Dreamhost did in changing this option made EM invisible to the googlebot. Or something like that. So I changed it back to both www and no-www, cleaned up a few templates, and submitted a sitemap
Oh well. WE’RE BACK!
A New Hope
By on November 29, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tumblr
I have felt overtaxed lately. I spend so much time sharing this and tagging that; I have lost track of everything I output. The internet feels too full right now. I’ve decided to make a conscious effort of slowing the hell down and actually writing, not just “sharing” everything. I’m saying goodbye to my Tumblr. I’m not going to delete it, but I’m not going to be posting anymore. I’m going to focus on this blog more. Focus on getting my work done, and not just getting through my feeds.
Spring Cleaning
In light of my Thanksgiving resolution, I decided to do some cyber spring cleaning. I wanted to clean up my templates, but once I started I kept noticing more things needing to be done. If you look around you will see slight changes everywhere. My intent was to make the layout more organized and readable.
The main page, the about page, and We Enjoy are all sporting a new 3 column layout. I could cry looking at it. It’s so much better. I had put off doing this for a long time. When I started EM, the main page was my blog (I trashed the archives a while back when moving servers). As we grew, it moved from being my blog to being the landing page for our site. Don’t get me wrong, the 2 column layout works really nicely for blogs. As I added more and more content to the main page it became too cluttered. It looked so pieced together, like the monster from Frankenstein. It felt overwhelming to sit down and try and fix it. I thought it would be too time consuming to change the layout. But today I sat down for a couple hours and made this new template. It wasn’t bad at all, and it was high time for an update.
Well, I’m going to get back to working on my portfolio. Expect to hear from me here more often!
Over it
By on December 2, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
I’m trying this out again.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Q: What is Class B?A: Class B is currently the optimal no-www compliance level. This classification helps remind users that, while the www subdomain is accepted, it is not necessary. In Class B, www.example.net is a valid address, but it redirects all traffic to example.net.
(via no-www)
What’s the name say on the gravestone? Lantry. William Lantry.
By on January 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
In response to the many 2007-list-posts I’ve read, I wanted to do my own. This is going to be a completely self-indulgent list of accomplishments of sorts. It was an eventful year to be sure. So, here it goes.
In 2007, I…
Erased my pre-2007 existence on the internet
Made a new Flickr
Joined Vimeo
Got Travis
Got into good beer
Remade Existential Media
Lost Travis
Found Travis / Gave Travis to my parents
Had the best summer of my life*
Went on a long bike ride carrying beer
Made new friends
Went to Portland
Got Engaged
Lost Ultimate Blogger 3
Made the Prescott Family
Got Margot
Graduated college
Went to Portland again
That’s my basic outline of the past year. I feel pretty good about it.
I’d like to account for my time.
By on January 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
The Prescott Family
I’ve been deep into posting Events lately. I’m happy to say we have 8 upcoming events 12!!!!! The most ever! This is how we roll in 2008. Indeed, 2008. I foresee great things happen for the Prescott Family in 2008. More tours, more albums, more writing, more organization. We are no longer babies. We are becoming more established (especially in our own eyes). “Now other people are mentioning our names.”
fcgi
Since I’m going to be living at my parent’s house for a little while I need to keep busy. Along with working on our wedding and looking for a job I have been working relentlessly on websites. I’ve been especially into the “backend” stuff, making the whole experience run smoother. I decided to try out running Movable Type with FastCGI again. It’s easy enough to setup and everything is running well. The major problem I had before was with my templates, I had done things weirdly and there was a ton of broken links. The templates as they are now are feeling very MT4 so we are good to run our scripts fast.
webelongtoeachother
AKA our wedding website. It’s going to be sooo dope. I don’t want to make it “live” until we get the date because that’s a huge part of the design. Think registry, blog, interviews, and more!
Existential Media
Redesigned that shit. More javascript! “Random” header image! SLICK.
im_in_a_good_mood
By on February 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
I’m in a good mood. A stupid good mood. A good mood that I’m afraid will end with this cup of coffee. I finally started reading A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY. That helped my good mood. Also I made a really spicy dinner. Let me describe to you my space right now. I’m at my parents house in my room. I have sketches of the ZINE website I’m working on for the PF, Kurt V. book, ash from the incense, cables, boxes, little papers, check lists. It’s a weird in between time. Not long enough to fully unpack. But disorganized. I keep thinking about this song from This American Life by Mark Robinson. My eyes get moist when it comes on. Every time. Right now I’m listening to the Sun Song, which is also a good song.
I’m in a pretty good mood, but my coffee is getting cold so I need to hurry. I wanted to write a post because a) I haven’t, and b) I’m in the mood. Apparently it’s February and tomorrow’s the Super Bowl. Will someone hire me? I will work hard. I like to. Maybe I should work on my portfolio website. The problem is I don’t want to design things straightforward right now. The worst part about graduating from college is not being constantly busy. I like doing different projects. The other worst part is I have no where to go. I like to ride my bike to places, but I have no destination. I’m not required to be anywhere. Oh well. Maybe that will be my part. THE DANCE. I’m really nervous about doing this and it’s soon and there’s that.
I LOVE THE INTERNET:
I hate Mondays, but I love lasagna.
OH, YEAAHH!
FABULON
my new eyeglasses
BFFs
Groundhog Day
What is your default RSS reader?
By on March 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (7)
I’m a firm believer in RSS. It has done me well. I’ve come out in support of different feed readers in the past and I would like to tell you why I’ve made my current decision (Newsfire).
Safari RSS
Pros: Built in to Safari, easy, straightforward, free
Cons: Feature-less, only available on your computer, no opml support
Google Reader
Pros: Available on any computer, nice keyboard shortcuts, free
Cons: Slow, web application, doesn’t display embedded content (except youtube)
NewsFire
Pros: Beautiful, fast update of feeds, auto-discovery of feeds, now free
Cons: Only available for OS X, not accessible from any computer
What is your default RSS reader?
UPDATE: Lifehacker ran a poll, and I went back to Google Reader.
Fighting bad design
By on April 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Hello Internet. Though Internet Explorer is an inferior web browser, I know many people still use it. I think most Internet Explorer users fall into two categories: They don’t know any better, or they don’t have a choice. The fact is many people use it. People who come to our site do. In fact about one fourth of all visits come from Internet Explorer users. Worse yet, more than half of these users are on IE6 or older. I have ignored this fact for a long time. I kept telling myself it was a fluke and to not worry about it. But over time it has remained consistent. So, it is time to reconcile.
About two weeks ago I set out to fix my templates to work and look the same for IE as they would for Safari and Firefox. I did most of this in one long day. Most problems were with css layout, but there were a few others that I had to get deeper on.
- I fixed alpha transparency on pngs. This is only a problem with IE 6 and older. I use pngs for the header images and for the peace button. Before the fix the images looked like they had a white box behind them. Now they have beautiful transparency. I looked at different solutions for this, but iepngfix was the best and had the least effect on performance.
- I fixed the flickering header images. This is another problem that exists in older versions of IE. When the header image was hovered over with the mouse, it would show the hover color underneath. It took a little tinkering to figure out this fix, but the tutorial I linked helped a lot. This was my first time using and understanding what !important means.
- I fixed the extra space on the header images.
- I learned to never use EMs for layout. It works inconsistently.
It took me a while to figure out these fixes. A lot of searching around. That’s why I’m documenting it here. To bring it all together for people who, like me, don’t bother with IE very much. This is by no means complete or comprehensive. And again, I apologize to all IE users who’ve had a sub par experience here on the site.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Graphic Design lately
By on May 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)
What is Graphic Design exactly? I really thought I knew, but of late it’s become more confused and gray. Why does Graphic Design exist? The purpose is utility, not art. The purpose of Graphic Design is clear communication. This isn’t meant to be a definite answer, but to start some sort of dialogue about what Graphic Design is.
Working with clients
In this view, a client comes to you with a job. You take the content you and try to mold it into the most compelling outcome. The main feedback that you get is from the client. From my (limited) experience, this is how the print world works. You can propose different ideas to the client and try to sell them on what would work best. It feels very intuitive. Your decisions are often based on experience and what you know has worked in the past.
The economics of Graphic Design
A Graphic Designer is not self sufficient. The very nature of the profession depends upon others. Graphic Designers work for the client, for the money. That’s what it really comes down to. It is love of the the craft, but it does make a living. Thinking about the economics of Graphic Design becomes much more interesting and measurable when it comes to the web. A lot of what I’ve been learning at my new job is this. Design is measured by its success. How many people complete the form? What are the numbers? Do people prefer red to blue? And what not. What is good Graphic Design in this model? Is it good if it sells a lot but looks like garbage?
Aesthetics?
What consideration should be even to aesthetics? In school we learned that good design follows rules (or breaks them eloquently). But what if beauty doesn’t sell? Ideally, design that follows the rules and is built on a grid and is typeset well will sell. I believe this deeply. But what if you can be mathematically proven wrong? If this ad makes a lot of money is it good design? If good design is clear communication and this ad speaks to people who are wanting to refinance their home it must be good design? I know you might think, “of course it isn’t good design.” But it has really got me questioning things. If weird poorly designed (ha!) flash ads work as a marketing tool than who am I to say they aren’t good Graphic Design. Is it me being an elitist? Does it really help anyone for me to ream somebody for having no consideration for typesetting?
Type
Ligatures, kerning, smart quotes, none of these really exist on the web the way they do traditionally in print. This is a real loss to me. I do what I can, but there are many inconsistencies to worry about. There is no way to anticipate for dynamic content. I mean, I have smart quotes happening, I specify font size and line height, but I can’t really force there to be no widows or orphans, especially on content I’m not generating. Also, I use Helvetica for this blog, but if you view it on a Windows machine or even in a feed reader chances are you are reading it in Arial. Helvetica and Arial are 2 fairly different typefaces (to say the least). They look and work in very different ways. They will even render differently render in different browsers on the same operating system. Ugh.
What do you think?
This is not to be a one sided conversation. What do you think makes good design? You don’t have to be a Graphic Designer to answer this. Are you attracted to ads like the one above? Do you gravitate to minimalism and clean design? Do you own a mac? Do you hate anti-aliasing on Windows?
A deeper connection
By on April 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
I helped
By on June 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Ongoing Organization: Gmail Filters
By on June 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
I’ve been really interested in organizing all my email messages. But I don’t really want to go through every single message to do that. Today I tried to make some filters in Gmail to at least get some general organization.
First I attempted to get all money related emails into one place.
To do this I looked for all the email addresses of my banks, student loans, online buying/selling, that kind of stuff. At first I was getting every address, but I realized it would be much faster to grab whole domains. So this is what I did.
from:(@cems.wamu.com OR @ebay.com OR @amazon.com OR @wellsfargo.com OR @mint.com OR @checkout.google.com OR @paypal.com OR billing@dreamhost.com)
Then I wanted to try and organize emails with attachments by file type.
For images
Has the words:(.jpg OR .jpeg OR .gif OR .png) has:attachment
For media
Has the words:(.avi OR .mov OR .mp3 OR .m4a) has:attachment
For documents
Has the words:(.pdf OR .doc OR .docx OR .xls OR .xlsx OR .ppt OR .pptx OR .oo3) has:attachment
For design
Has the words:(.ai OR .psd OR .indd OR .qxd) has:attachment
The one problem that I’ve run into so far with this is with PDFs. About half of the pdf emails are related design. This is also a problem with Fireworks PNGs.
This is by no means complete. It is only a quick stab at email organization. Hence “ongoing.” If you have any ideas on how to improve this or any filters you’ve set up that work well, comment.
The future of Existential Media
By on October 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
I’ve been liking Movable Type less and less lately. A lot of the problems stem from it being written in perl and performance issues related to that (I assume). I’ve been looking at different ways to make Existential Media work better (faster) and be more stable. I’ve done some optimizing lately of Movable Type and my templates (as far as I can with my know-how), but it hasn’t helped terribly. I’ve looked at different hosts and hosting plans, but there is always cost to consider, as well as effort it takes to move to a new host. So in the short term it looks like we are sticking with Movable Type and Dreamhost.
I’ve started to look at this problem and set long term goals. Although I have learned a lot about Movable Type and although it would be a pain to learn a new platform, I’ve been “shopping” around. I’ve looked at Textpattern, which though I like a lot, wouldn’t be good at handling something like Existential Media. It works better to power one site / one blog. Managing users and permissions and blogs seems like it would not be fun. There is also ExpressionEngine, but there is the problem of cost, so that’s a no go. I’m getting to the point now. I’ve been heavily considering using Drupal. Drupal is what is used to power the Onion’s website. I installed it and have been tinkered around with it for a last couple days. So far so good I guess. There is a huge learning curve. It’s a whole new deal. I don’t really know how to come at it just yet. And they focus on being easy on the resources, which is also a good thing. I’ve also looked at Wordpress MU, which is what they use to power wordpress.com. It might be exchanging one problem for another, but Wordpress is very fast and pretty. I’ve more or less decided to go with Wordpress (that is, unless Movable Type is rewritten in PHP or something). Also, the most recent version of Wordpress was designed by Happy Cog, which is pretty cool.
At first I thought heavily about going with Drupal, but I decided against it. Although it would work, Drupal doesn’t have blogging first in mind, it is a full featured CMS. I also was having trouble getting to know it. Before I decided against it though, I started writing this post. So I’ve modified it. Here is my original game plan for Drupal:
I have to figure out how this all works. I need to “port” my themes over to Drupal. I need to move all the data too. There is a Typepad/Movable Type convertor, but I’m not sure exactly how it will work. There is a list of things I can’t figure out just yet and I thought it would be good to present here.
- Giving a user a blog: I’m a little confused about this. I want it to be like it is now. I give Laura a blog named ladyparts and it has a certain design. And the content does not get intermixed with the rest of the site. I’m not really clear how to manage “blogs” yet. A project that I’ve been looking at is Drupal MU. This solves the problem of having a different theme for each blog. Somethings I’m confused about though. Like does the blog name always have to be the same as the user’s? (Like “Laura’s Blog” … existentialmedia.org/laura)
- Having many users to one blog: I’m not really clear on how this would work. Thinking about WIWT, how can I have a blog named “What I Wore Today” and have the url (/today) and have different users post to it? Is this possible?
- I need to figure out how to have a list of the most recent posts on the homepage with the blog colors, but that might come once I figure out the other things.
But since we probably won’t be using Drupal, there is no need to worry anymore about that. Here is why I like Wordpress.
- It is easy to manage, and although it is very different than Movable Type, I felt at home almost right away. It has the same idea of blogs and users, and trying out the import feature it imported all the posts and comments on my blog flawlessly.
- I did need to install one plugin right away to embed youtube, vimeo, etc which isn’t the most ideal. But was painless.
- Wordpress is very fast because it is written in PHP. I like this part a lot. No more rebuilding! I plan on installing one of the caching plugins too so we shouldn’t have any problems.
- The only reason we aren’t there yet is that I have to figure out the templates. It looks to be not that hard, but will take some time. I want to make the templates more easily customizable and this seems possible to do with Wordpress themes.
