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I am one among many who writes about games and popular culture. How they are real and how they are not. Which is to say that most of what I write about isn't exactly archival level material. Here is a page for my more ephemeral stuff.

I try to vet all links, but be aware that link rot exists, and take this into account if viewing an older entry.

One Month

It has been pretty much one month since I decided to redesign the site. It will never be perfect, that was never really the point, but I pretty much see it as "feature complete." At least within the constraints I'm using. The aesthetics are good enough for my tastes that I could drop in most kinds of data and be happy with how it fits in.

I'm always surprised at how easy and at how hard it is to get a new design in place. You can do so much with so little styling that it can feel like anything should be doable with less than a page of css. And then you run it through a usability tester and are firmly reminded that there are many, many ways of looking at information.

Site is "done-ish"

As far as the design for this website goes, I'd say it's finally close enough to where I want it. Close enough that I no longer look at it and see something that should immediately be added or improved. Except, you know, the content.

The current issues are more about maintainability, creating sub pages, and tweaking. My basic tests, anyway, don't show anything being broken unless I hit a cache of stale css.

Standards for nonstandard websites?

It is common for hobby websites, and this one has been no exception, to point out their warts. Links might not work, the design might shift dramatically, information may be stale. "Here there be jank," we say in our particular ways, "it is inevitable and perhaps the entire point."

The jank can seem inevitable because the design includes whatever the creator thinks is cool, the message is whatever the creator thinks is fun, and the audience is whoever wanders in and wants more. The closest thing to a like button is your page view counter. Your "subscriber count" is how fast the page view counter goes up, and A/b testing is when two people bother to email after a redesign.

You gain authenticity apparently at the cost of exposing whatever you lack in refinement. I would not have it any other way! But at the same time, I have read a LOT of apology pages by web designers who just want to have some fun making a site. Maybe some of these creators want to move beyond these clichés without betraying the playground.

I sometimes imagine myself creating a kind of guide based on the choices and memes found on sites like mine. It would exceed the scope of this blog post to start writing it here, but there is much to be said about these patterns and how they can evolve. There's an understandable motive behind most of them, and value behind many, but the jank is real too. That's why we spend so much time apologizing for it. Maybe we would all benefit from paths that lead beyond the "under construction" signs.

For many years we did have an easy road. It was named Google. On any given day, any given person could put something globally useful on their otherwise unexceptional website. Before the conflicts of interest became too severe, Google was peerless at taking individuals to those creations they would like the most. Discoverability was the problem and Google search was the answer. It worked very well for a very long time. You did not need a perfect website, just the one that had what people wanted. It worked so well that people no longer seem to know how to design things for an internet which lacks universal search.

If I were to make one point here, it is that the foundation of the internet as we know it is not Google, nor content management systems, nor minimalism, but styled hypertext. HTML, like markdown and similar specifications, understands that plain text is powerful because it is lightweight and easy to work with both for humans and machines. If you practice the idea that HTML tags are for user-agents, that content is for your users, that links help everyone, and that styling is a suggestion, you are working in good faith with the web.

I think the small web, the indie web, or whatever term truly best applies to the idea of simply throwing the spaghetti at the wall is something that can thrive if creators can find viable ways to develop authentically. Standards are one thing, and I do commend them to you, but we could also use trustworthy guidelines about what you do next, and the why, after you've played with animated wallpapers and talked about your favorite cartoon. Nothing dogmatic, but rather intended for those who want to stop worrying and love the jank.

Slow refinement

Still haven't written a ton of content into the site, but I did spend some time trying to get closer to good, usable design. Proper polish always seems to take far longer than functionality, be it in web design or woodworking. Patterns are patterns, I suppose. The site now has a little external link icon that should share most of the styling with the links themselves.

Happy Flag Day Everyone!

June 14th is U.S. Flag Day. I do not normally celebrate Flag Day, but this year I decided to get into the spirit of things. So I read about flag creation and sketched up a flag. This is known as "vexillography," apparently. A word which takes longer to say than just "flag design," but there you go.

The only time I could remember hearing about Flag Day is in Strong Bad Email 32, so I drew a flag inspired by the CGNU free art test. It didn't come out as good as my imagination and I ignored some of the suggestions from the guides, but I still think it has something going for it. According to the principles of flag making, Pac-Man facing left implies that he is facing his ghosts rather than running from them.

I was delighted to learn that the flag drawers of the world have released some well considered guides for free. If you are interested, I took a look at "Good" Flag, "Bad" Flag and also Guiding Principles of Flag Design. I say it just goes to show that people who care about good design care about good design.

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