For this round of redesign, I focused on two things.. simplicity and external content. With the last site, I had enough of all the spliced images, excessive shadows, and hacky html and CSS to pull it off. So this time I’ve stuck with a subtle color scheme, plenty of whitespace, and (practically) no images. I didn’t only to go for the simple look, but to also make the usage of the site more simple. Those efforts include sensible minimum and maximum withs, different sidebars for the home page and individual pages, and improve readability with vertical rhythm. I still think that I need to make many adjustments (boy is text rhythm hard with variable sized content) but things are good enough for now.
A few times in the past I’ve tried different efforts to update my blog more frequently, but here I go again trying something else. Even though I have not been blogging much at all the past year(s), I still have been creating and contributing content such as my pictures on flickr, bookmarks on del.icio.us, and interesting sites I’ve dugg. When I started to get into twitter, I considered replacing my blog completely with twitter updates. That started the thought process and even though I’m not replacing the blog, I am keeping things more “fresh” with other content. I really like the idea that I can put things on many different places on the web and yet still use it in one place. For those of you would really like to stalk me, you can keep tabs by looking at my tumblelog (same content, just organized into one feed of info).
I have it admit it was hard for the engineer in me to accept the fact that I’m not being very orthogonal. The “issue” here is that I’m putting similar content in different places. Some may say that del.icio.us, digg, and the shares from google reader all serve the same function so whats the point of using them all? The point is two fold… first in the case of del.icio.us and digg I really am using the two sites for different purposes. For me del.icio.us is my personal internet reference. Whenever I stumble upon a site that is useful (or could be useful in the future) I’ll put it in del.icio.us so I can find it later (google search is good, but searching your own bookmarked references is much better). On the other hand, I’ll digg sites that I find fun, interesting, or insightful. It is more of a way to share than to use.
That argument doesn’t work so well for gReader shares and digg. I pretty much am using them for the same thing. So that means I need to consolidate, right?¹ … No, convenience is a feature. And simply creating a share in google reader is just one keystroke/button click. Maybe someday I’ll try out the greasemonkey script that will insert a digg link inside the gReader interface, but for now I’m good. Don’t worry… embrace the entropy :)
So please give me some suggestions or criticisms, hopefully this will make those (few) of you that look at my site less bored :).
¹: For those of you confused why someone would think this way, you don’t work with engineers. We always (I mean always) put way too much effort in to solving problems that really have no need to be solved. It is the case of TMT (to much thinking) and even more so ITIKMTIRD (I think I know more than I really do)… and yes I totally just made those acronyms up
4 Comments
Nice. I use those sites exactly the same way that you do. I’ve noticed a slight distinction between digg & greader shares for me - the greader stuff is usually stuff that I find genuinely interesting and useful while digg is more of a source of silliness.
I probably do the same as well, since a majority of the technical things I’ll find interesting are already in my feed reader.. and digg… well thats the site for when I’m bored :)
Whatever happened to simply e-mailing or writing a letter to someone and asking them “how are you doing?” in order to find out what they were up to? ^^
Come on joo, thats so 2006! … You are right though, blogs/facebook are not a substitute for “actual” communication. But they still are pretty useful, since you certainly are not going to remember to tell everyone everything.
Is this a (not so subtle) hint? :)