infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted, and it may be a long while before I post again, but I feel it is my duty as the proprietor of infobong.com to voice my disapproval of today’s Supreme Court ruling that the word “bong” does not have First Amendment protection. While David Beaver over at Language Log contends that “bong” is not slang for a particular kind of marijuana paraphenalia, I would contend that the word bong doesn’t necessarily imply marijuana use. A beer bong is a device for consuming large amounts of beer in a short time, a vodka bong is presumably for quickly consuming vodka, and infobong fails in its goal to be a way of consuming information quickly.

Hopefully a new president will take over in 2009 and appoint justices who will reverse this ruling.

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I’m still wrapping up the semester, so it’s going to be a while before I have anything remotely resembling a thoughtful post, but I had the idea to post a list of blogs and whatnot I’ve given up on.

• Diesel Sweeties
  I used to think this comic strip was charming in its skewering of indie rock and other subcultures, but I think it’s getting stale. This comic will definitely go in my “TVontheWeb” folder, but I’ve bid it goodbye from my LiveJournal friends. Besides the author was a condescending jerk when I wrote him a fan email years ago.
• bOINGbOING
  I’ve been reading bOINGbOING since picking up the print magazine in high school, but the blog started ruining the fun of blogging a few years ago. While it used to be links that Cory and Mark dug up from the bowels of teh Internets, now it seems to be a filter of offbeat links its huge user base submits. It seems like any internet meme eventually finds its way to the site, making it the Top 40 for Web geeks. I feel lame posting a link to this blog that has been or will be on bOINGbOING, so I’ve decided to stop reading it.
• Slashdot
  A few weeks ago, Sean remarked that he was surprised that Slashdot was even still around. At the time, I think I had just deleted it from my reader. Part of my lack of interest in the site is my waning interest in Linux as a user, but I think that it posts far too much non-news both about computers and geek culture. I know the links are geared toward prompting discussion, but, these days, it doesn’t even prompt reading, which is too bad because I’ve learned a lot over the years from reading the site.

There are more feeds I’ve dropped, but these are largely people I know personally and don’t want to call out publicly. I find it hard to say “no,” whether it’s to people or information sources, and I’m working right now to shed a lot of wasted effort both on- and off-line.

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I thought I would check in. I’m swamped with school, but I’m also going through one of those phases where I’m rethinking what I want to do with this blog. I find this blog rewarding, but I’m wondering how much attention I need to give it for the rewards I perceive.

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I’ve written before about my frustrations with Blogger. And while I think it was a good solution the last time I taught RTF 319, I’ve given up on Blogger mid-way through the semester, which doesn’t make me feel very good about myself. Regardless, it has become a complete hassle, and I don’t think there’s anyway to salvage it. Beyond the reliability problems with Blogger, it introduces a few major problems with my teaching. The downtime provides students with an convenient excuse for not getting their work into me, and it fills up my already bulging inbox with nuisance email from students. Moreover, it gives the (not unwarranted) impression to students that I’m not on top of the class.

What I like about using blogs is that it provides a way to deliver assignments with a timestamp and usually minimizes the hassles of managing projects. The last time I used Blogger for deliverables, it worked beautifully. Now it’s turned into a nightmare, and Google’s increasingly strict identity management policies make me worry about protecting the privacy of my students. I think I will look into using Moodle if I ever teach this class again, which does seem like an adequate platform for posting work and discussion questions.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve come up with a new CSS project. It’s pretty lame, but I think it is appropriate for lower-division students.

CSS Project
• Create a folder in your UT Webspace called “RTF 319” and an index.html home page.
• Create a page for each one of your projects so far. At this point, I am considering the Illustrator and Photoshop assignments as projects. You can create pages for the “homework” assignments if you please, but it is not required.
• Each page should include a description of your project and your design approach to the project.
• OK, here’s the part where CSS comes in. The power of CSS is that allows you to create consistent styling across a Web site using a single file. You will be graded on how well you can apply CSS to this project. You will use only one stylesheet for the whole site.
• I want to see a minimum of seven styles, IDs, or redefined HTML tags in your stylesheet. Feel free to use more.
• You will be graded both on the attractiveness of your design, and on the sophistication of your CSS code.

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Although I thought I would be taking a break from this darn thing, I saw a blog entry I thought was worth commenting on. Alex King asks what would be the proper behavior for a Twitter WordPress plugin. Given the inanity of my Twitter posts, I think the proper behavior would be to be not seen and not heard, but I imagine more felicitous users can say meaningful things in one-hundred-forty characters.

King would like a plug-in that checks his Twitter JSON feed regularly, imports his “tweets” (love the jargon) into a separate database table, and displays his status in a sidebar widget. This seems like the way to go, except given the ephemerality of tweets, I’m not sure I want to archive these posts. I understand owning your data and all, but I think setting up Creative-Commons licenses on the site is a higher priority.

One of King’s readers, Derek Punsalan, wants greater functionality from a Twidget. Punsalan would like readers to be able to leave comments on tweets, so asks to import tweets as blog posts. Lordy, lordy, lordy, people complain about blogs that merge posts and del.icio.us feeds. I can’t imagine the reaction to adding the banality of tweets to blog feeds. While I obviously think that doing daily del.icio.us linkdumps is a good medium between adding bookmarks as separate entries and ignoring del.icio.us altogether, I think a sidebar widget is definitely the way to go for tweets.

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Jon Gruber has an insightful post on default blog templates, and how they can undermine the branding work that goes on on blogs. He and Joe Trotter complain that default templates often look too standard, making it difficult to convey a sense of uniqueness. Gruber raises some important points disentangling the design of software like WordPress and Movable Type for the design of the presentation (i.e. the template.)

I’d add two things to this conversation comparing WordPress and Movable Type. First, WordPress’ templates (or “themes”) are very difficult to edit. Before someone jumps on me and insults my skills, I mean that the templates require too much literacy and investment for your average blogger, someone who’s made a Web page and may be wrapping her head around CSS. WordPress is very modular, so users need to hack up multiple PHP files, plus a stylesheet to make a substantial change. I haven’t used Movable Type in over a year, but the platform had relatively straightforward template files, and platform-specific tags, which didn’t require the user to parse PHP.

Secondly, the themes available for WordPress almost always use brittle CSS. They’re designed by people who want pixel-control over presentation, they often have weird leading and spacing issues. These themes look great “out of the box,” but if a user tries to tweak the typography or images, she often winds up dealing with broken presentation that requires more mucking about with CSS.

It’s no wonder so many WordPress blogs look like Kubrick or Hemingway with the colors and banner images changed. The templates are just too hard to edit. I’ve looked for a loose “wireframe” theme for WordPress to no avail. When I started banging on this theme, I thought I would create a theme, I could publish as a resource for other bloggers who want to get to know WordPress’ theme structure and be more creative with the platform, but I still haven’t found the time. I’m surprised I’ve found the time to write this.

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I logged into WordPress today and noticed my last five posts have all been automated linkdumps. I’ve been so redonkulously busy that I didn’t even realize I hadn’t posted in that long. My new policy, I think, will be to post an old photo on Flickr to break up the link dumps.

I hope both of my readers are doing well.

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Yikes, I just upgraded WordPress to the 2.1 version, and things are looking weird. In particular, I’m unhappy with the way that the “linkdump” posts are displaying. I need to tweak the stylesheets on this site anyway, so I guess the upgrade puts it on my to-do list. A few months ago, I started messing around with link colors and other CSS, and I never really finished. I never meant for the current stylesheet to be in use for so long, so I apologize if the weird palette has made you ill.

Apart from weird list formatting, the only other new feature I’ve noticed in 2.1 is gradient backgrounds for buttons, which give it more of that that Web 2.0 je ne sais quoi.

In other news, I upgraded Adium this morning to the 1.0 version, which I think was released on Friday. If you don’t know, Adium is the multi-protocol chat client for OS X all the cool kids (read Mac dorks) are using. My old install was pretty hacked up with customizations, so I was a little shocked by the multi-colored buttons in the new version. I almost immediately installed this icon set for more tasteful chatting.

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Atrios posted an interesting idea today. He has declared February 3 Blogroll Amnesty Day, when bloggers “are free to make adjustments to their blogrolls and ignore any complaints about those adjustments.” Atrios has a long blogroll that lists blogs he says he no longer reads, but apparently he’s anxious about upsetting bloggers whose blogs disappear from the list.

I don’t really have the same problem. I link to a few blogs in the “friends” section that aren’t regularly updated and should be dropped, but I’m not worried about hurting anyone’s feelings. This is a good reminder to delete the old blog cruft.

I wrote more about this, but my site was down while I tried to post. My comments on clearing out my public Bloglines folder were too tedious to write through again.

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It’s been several days since I’ve posted something to the blog, so I thought I would point you to the t-shirt I just ordered online. For a few months I’ve been brewing an obsession with the Apple ][e I had as a child, so, when I spotted that shirt for a mere ten dollars, I didn’t think too hard before I hit “add to cart.”

It’s worth noting that I think this is the first time that I’ve bought something I saw advertised online. I saw an ad on Austinist advertising local design studio Sparrowhead’s ten dollar t-shirt sale, and I thought it was time to pick up a new “cool” t-shirt, so I followed the ad to the site. It does seem like online advertising has improved in the past eighteen months or so. Certainly Google’s AdWords has matured to the point where it delivers ads appropriate to the content it accompanies, but I also think that bloggers and advertisers have figured out how and what to advertise on blogs. Hopefully, online advertising won’t get too good, or I’ll break my budget whenever I go online.

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