This was tough. I first started out using Yahoo Pipes to create a feed of all my feeds. Yahoo Pipes is pretty cool, but the feed it outputs doesn’t always work and can’t be styled or easily integrated with WordPress. So I looked around a bit, and found Mark Pilgrim’s Firehose. I liked the way it looked, so I found the post explaining how he did it. Unfortunately, he’s much smarter at the internet than I am, and his solution, though it looked promising, was beyond my ken.

My next stop was MetaFilter, since I hang out there frequently and the hive mind knows all. I found a couple of good resources pointing me to other possibilities; namely Sweetcron or reBlog.

I chose sweetcron and got to work. I even found a way to integrate my WordPress theme into a sweetcron theme. This setup process was not easy and hasn’t worked completely. The sweetcron-run firehose uses my WordPress theme brilliantly, but there’s some sort of conflict engendered by the WordPress mod-rewrites in the .htaccess files, which results in the page header always displaying 404 Page Not Found. How to fix this? The aforelinked integration mentioned a few steps to take care of this issue, but in my case they didn’t work.

I dug around in the WordPress forums and found out that Apache’s mod-rewrite in the .htaccess file for WordPress has often caused this error for any non-Wordpress subdirectories on a domain. None of the suggestions mentioned in that thread worked, so I think there’s some sort of conflict between the root-level WordPress .htaccess file and the sweetcron directory .htaccess file. I might be wrong, that sort of thing is out of my depth.

However, apart from the 404 Page Not Found in the page header, the rest of the lifestream/firehose works just fine. If you really want to monitor most of my online activities (and I know there’s at least one person in the County Administration Building who does), this should make it easier for you.

Always happy to help!

Well, it figures, some stuff isn’t working correctly that worked just fine on my development box. Switched back to the old design until I can figure it out.

Well, I finally figured out the bugs. @font-face should be working now, I’m using Greyscale and Midiet. The whole design is coded in HTML5, and I was using every CSS3 bell and whistle just for practice but ended up ripping most of them out. I plan on making a few more updates and to conduct an audit of all my posts, to clean them up, but that process will take even longer than it did for me to come up with a new design.

What used to be my favorite font is now played out (or has been and I’m just now noticing). I still like Eric Gill’s work, though. And by work I don’t mean the fact that he slept with his sisters, daughters and family dog. I mean his typefaces, woodblock prints and sculpture.

I’ve been, every once in a moment, when I have a moment, been working on a redesign. HTML5 and CSS3, excellent typography and a new iteration of the minimal design aesthetic that’s become the norm here. I’ve been working on it for months, but it is still only barely started. It takes more time to figure out where I left off than it does to make changes and updates to the design. It’s the cobbler’s children.

The questions participants were asked to answer were:

1. What role does design play in US economic competitiveness?
2. What role does design play in the US democratic governance?
3. In what specific ways, would a national design policy further enable design to play those roles?
4. What would you pledge to do to help design play that role?

I would also like to take this opportunity to state officially, and unequivocally, that I love squirrels.

Overview

At times I thought the content of some of the talks was a bit too conceptual and utopian; I mean that the tips about only taking jobs you feel passionate about and spending hours on the craftsmanship of a site sound good enough, but are only really applicable for folks who run their own, already established design business (Which were the folks giving the talks). I work on an in-house team of thirteen, my boss, 7 developers, 3 designers and a web-maintenance person; we have around 100 sites that we are responsible for managing. Since we’re in-house we can’t refuse customers and since we have so many sites to manage we don’t often have time to give them the polish they deserve. As a comparison, the team that Cameron Moll runs for the LDS Church has twice as much staff for the same number of websites. Folks were consistently amazed that there were so few of us on our team and that we dealt with so many websites.

That’s my only complaint about the content; in terms of logistics, I would have appreciated a map to the AEA Party the first night, but the presentations were available online for conference attendees and everything stayed on schedule.

Talk Thoughts

1. Jeffrey Veen’s (formerly of Google) talk about information design was excellent, and it made me think of a bunch of ideas for how we could display Election Information on the BOE site. He worked on the Google Analytics webstats project so he’s an expert on how to display large amounts of data in various customizable ways. He talked about how instead of telling the story of the data, we can enable the user to tell their own story. We sort of already do this with our customizable election results, but after hearing Jeffrey speak, I think our implementation could be a lot better.
2. Cameron Moll talked about dealing with in-house design groups. He manages a group of 30 designers for the Mormon Church and their 100 websites. Their process involves things like sketchboards, which sounds like a great way to sell a design, if you have the time to put them together.
3. Zeldman gave an excellent talk about how designers need to be empathetic to the needs and behaviors of the users of the sites we design, instead of just designing for what a board or committee expects to see. I understood his point, and even agree with it, but he didn’t really address the fact that it isn’t an option very often.
4. Jason Fried’s talk was similar. He’s the main man behind 37signals, a very successful CMS and workflow company. He talked about craftsmanship and how doing the little things and taking your time with a product will make it excel beyond the average. He mentioned how his company spent 4 or 5 hours discussing the best way to work the items in a radio list. It would certainly be nice if we had that kind of time to invest in the craftsmanship of our sites, but I gathered from just about everyone else there, that you only have that kind of time if you’re self-employed or run your own business.
5. Dan Cederholm (my hero! and the author of Web Standards Solutions and the Bulletproof series) showed us some neat new CSS tricks that can be implemented now for forward-compatibility, while at the same time looking just fine in current browsers. He kept stressing that it is okay if a site doesn’t look exactly the same in all browsers.
6. Rob Weychert compared design methodology to how folks play chess. This was a great talk.
7. Rob Hoekman did on the spot usability reviews. This is something I think we need to do more of on our sites. There’s a site called Five Second Test [source of the idea] that can give a good rough estimate on how well a site’s design works with the usability. Another site that was mentioned nearly constantly was UIE which has all kinds of helpful information about User Interface Design.
8. Cleveland’s own Eric Meyer talked about his use of reset stylesheets, which force most browsers to default to the same display rubrics. I’ve used them on a couple of sites and they are amazing. No more having to figure out why things break in IE! The Debug stylesheets are used to improve accessibility, by showing images that lack alt text, malformed table data and other stuff. They are only used as a diagnostic tool, but are very helpful.
9. Andy Clarke talked about how he uses comic books as inspiration for website designs.
10. There was a lot of talk about the using the Golden Ratio throughout the conference. I actually did a rigid Golden Ratio based design for the TWiFi project back in the day.
11. There was a demo of Adobe CS4 as well and there are some seriously awesome new tricks to make working in Photoshop and other programs much more user friendly. I’m excited about getting those programs if we ever have the cash for it.

Interesting Links

• http://wave.webaim.org/ – Accessibility Checker
• Firebug (Firefox Plugin that allows instant CSS checking and modification)
• Xscope is a tool that allows you to determine the widths and heights of elements onscreen, without having to click around or open files.
• jQuery is a javascript library that is easily integrated with CSS and is therefore easier for designers to implement and use.
• Web Accessibility Checklist PDF

Other Cool Stuff

• Using the CSS outline attribute doesn’t affect page layout the way that using border does.
• # is called an octothorpe
• Instead of using the CSS opacity attribute, which inherits to all children elements, you can use background-color: rgba(0,0,0, .7);

I flew in Sunday night and wanted to go to The Field Museum, but the Chicago Marathon had traffic so snarled that I spent 45 minutes on a bus, moved about half a mile, and was then told to get off the bus, cross the street, and wait for a shuttle that would then turn around and take us to the museums. This was at 3:30 and the last admission to the museum was at 4, so I was forced to walk up and down Michigan Avenue shopping. I also went to Navy Pier on Sunday Night. Monday Night I went to The Billy Goat, which is a famous bar where Chicago Tribune journalists have been going for years and years. They serve cheezborgers (that’s how they spell it) and steak and egg sandwiches. No Pepsi…Coke, No Fries…Chips. It’s cash only, and a really cool place. The Billy Goat Dark beer was really tasty, but I drank it all night without even getting so much as a buzz. I watched the Browns game a bit and hung out with some folks I know from MetaFilter.

The Blue Line Elevated Train ran from O’Hare just about to my hotel, so I saved some serious cash by purchasing a CTA pass instead of spending $60 for the round-trip shuttle or $80 on a cab ride. In Chicago, just about everybody rides public transportation.

All in all, a great stay. Chicago is a town that is pretty much impossible to dislike.

Even though I was beaten to the punch.

This paper posits that American citizen apathy and disenfranchisement with government are not due to citizens’ preference for the appearance of oligarchy as democracy or a belief in general consensus, [a view covered in detail in a book called Stealth Democracy] but is the result of a psychological effect; American citizens are generally linear thinkers, not systemic ones, which makes it difficult [and therefore less interesting] for them to engage in political and governmental processes.

He has some data to support this [naturally] and comes to the conclusion that eGovernment has the ability to enhance, and thereby improve the policy-making process, as well as other governmental actions by allowing space for citizen discourse in a non-intrusive manner, couple with a few specific requirements. That’s all very good, but it doesn’t address the fact that providing space for citizen input is often the last thing that government [as bureaucracy] wants to do. Possible avenues for criticism [such as open discourse] are discouraged, or funneled into controlled, limited settings [the media] where things like spin and talking points can effectively neutralize them. So while the opportunity exists for eGov assistance in citizen involvement, Muhlberger doesn’t offer any tips or tricks for convincing government to behave that way in the first place. An estimated increase in efficiency isn’t going to cut the mustard with the conservative nature of any government entity.

The article was very good though, and I already see parallels with the book I’m currently reading: The Elements of Typographic Style, which, in addition to being an exhaustive encyclopedia of typographic terminology, method and history, also offers some fundamental applications of typographic usage and display to assist and enhance user experience. It is also, appropriately, marvelously designed.

i haven’t made a film in 2 months and it is starting to bother me. i am ready for classes to start again. This semester i am taking two anthropology classes and three film classes. Anthropology: Society and Culture Through Films and Introduction to Archaeology. Film: Intermediate Film Prodcution, Film Noir, and Cinema Ideologies. This will complete my anthropology major and leave the 2nd semester open for 4 film classes and hopefully a poetry writing class. I am also anxious to have a room to myself, a space totally my own, where I do not have a roommate to cause trouble. wunderbar!

there are 5 new poems in verbal impotence

fencing is a hard sport for me to think about. is it a sport or an art? it is a basic act of violence using the sword, the traditional icon for warfare, refined into a thing of grace and beauty. how should i go about my fencing? Should i take it as warfare, to destroy my opponent by any means, or should i strive to achieve technical perfection and glory in the kinesthetic improvisation of the bout? Are the two even separated? Can the act of violence be a thing of beauty? Are the convoluted symbols and meanings a sign of our attempts at creating an Art of War? I should read Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Musashi again.