Archive for October, 2003

Elec­tro­hype, Swe­den: Mac Clas­sic Christ­mas Calender.

Escher’s “Rel­a­tiv­ity” in LEGO

Banksy sneaks work into Tate

More Inter­net is a Sys­tem Pref­er­ences pane that uses Inter­net Con­fig to allow you to choose which appli­ca­tions are set as helpers for inter­net protocols

A house made com­pletely of CSS — no images. Nice one.

Dan­ish King and Queen to come: Danes are slow, Amer­i­cans are often sim­ple, for not to men­tion one-sided

I just fin­ished a client web­site, Smag & Behag — and I’m quite pleased with it. Not because of lay­out, archi­tec­ture or some­thing like that (although it hope­fully isn’t too bad), but because it val­i­dates 100% XHTML 1.0 Strict, sends application/xhtml+xml to con­form­ing user agents and has rea­son­ably semantic/meaningful (fol­low this dis­cus­sion of terms else­where) markup. Head­ers are actu­ally marked with the appro­pri­ate header tags or replaced with graphic through CSS, rollovers are CSS-based as well, the use of DIV and SPAN are kept to a min­i­mum. Evan Goer of goer.org fame has a list of com­pli­ant sites at goer.org: The X-Philes where I just added the site, one of the first com­mer­cial ones. Hope­fully the list will be utterly irrel­e­vant in the near future as I hope more and more sites will take use of web stan­dards. For now, there’s not even a real point (besides “because we can”) in send­ing the proper MIME type, as not all browsers under­stands it and the need for access­ing a fur­ni­ture site through XML must be quite lim­ited. But it seems as if devel­op­ers are slowly start­ing to pay more atten­tion to the seper­a­tion of con­tent and form, to proper markup and to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of CSS, my point being, that once you get the hang of it, there’s noth­ing hard about using CSS — and prac­ti­cally every­thing is pos­si­ble. Now all we need is CMS devel­op­ers and the likes to do their bit… and Microsoft to brush up on their .Net…

Changes have been made to the way this blog is organized. 

First of all, I’ve been think­ing quite a lot about the whole con­cept of “low thresh­old”. The side­blog just added to this site is exactly such a thing; a run­ning list of links worth men­tion­ing but not worth a reg­u­lar post. In a way they’re what blogs used to be, com­mented links in a steady stream. I also like the idea, that dif­fer­ent types of con­tent is now some­what seper­ated, mak­ing it eas­ier to know where to look for what. Hope­fully it will help get a more tight feel to the rest of the blog. At the same time I’m look­ing for­ward to see, how this divide will effect blog­ging. But back to “low thresh­old”. I’ve been cam­blog­ging for quite a while now and find the “moblog” con­cept a bit mis­lead­ing. Cause while mobile, my moblog posts are not just that. They’re visual, low thresh­old posts capa­ble of mon­i­tor­ing life as it hap­pens around me, rang­ing from “because I can” live con­cert posts over live, mobile cov­er­age of the city I live in to posts which holds some sort of visual idea. What if I did mobile blog posts with­out pic­tures — or did a series of pic­tures with a lot of thought in com­posit­ing, light­ing etc.? 

As it is now, the idea of moblogs reflects the tech­nol­ogy just a tad too much. So what am I gonna do about it? Not a damn thing, I’m still exper­i­ment­ing. The true inter­est­ing con­cepts here, though, are really “mobile”, “visual” etc. Com­bi­na­tions with regard to spe­cific projects will hope­fully be the way we will see these tech­nolo­gies applied in the time to come. For a start, I’ve added the newest moblog/pictureblog images to the right col­umn of my reg­u­lar blog, along­side the side­blog — it’s all low thresh­old, a sup­ple­ment to the writ­ten word, an oppor­tu­nity to freeze and doc­u­ment the city, peo­ple I meet, strange sit­u­a­tions. I tend to do a lot of cam posts that wouldn’t oth­er­wise have made it to the blog, “friend drink­ing bear”, “funny sticker on police car”, “nice sun­set”. And that holds a cer­tain beauty, actu­ally; leave things uncom­mented but with a small visual hint to what’s going on. 

I’ll keep think­ing (please help me) — I’d like to see true, mobile trav­ellers blogs, proper blog jour­nal­ism, more visual blogs. There’s a lot of value in the idea of blog­ging and a lot of tech­nol­ogy to back it up if applied right — and interestingly.

As far as this site goes, I guess I’ll have to do some­thing about the way the xml feeds are orga­nized, how the dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion scat­tered around the site is orga­nized etc. Over­haul ahead…

High speed pandas

Thun­dern­erds — Extreme Walk­ing: We’ve Got Sole