Archive for the ‘This Site’ Category
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
Content on the web has become overtly monotonous in format. Top X Lists, X Reasons Why Y is Z, and so on. On rare occasion you come across something useful amongst the plethora of these lists but more often than not you finish reading and realized you’ve learned nothing.
We know why these articles receive Diggs, Stumbles, or what-have-you. The content is typically easy to digest almost mindlessly, the headlines are proven phrases which spark interest – marketing lingo for the news world. They bring in traffic, traffic leads to advertising, advertising leads to monetary returns. Or perhaps people really love watching the little numbers go up in their stats regardless of whether they’re producing something of value.
These posts are easy to write, simply gathering information or regurgitating the thoughts of others, and my aversion to writing pieces such as these is – at least in my mind – a large reason why things have been so silent here.
Rant over.
I believe it’s been just nearly three months since I’ve written here, eclipsing a previous dry spout back in November. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, or that I’m too busy or that I’m burnt out on writing articles. Hardly.
Well, maybe a little. Things are definitely busy.
This is essentially a post to break the streak of silence, because after going so long without writing one feels indebted to show up with some miraculous, enlightening piece. This isn’t one of them, but it is writing.
I’m planning on posting shorter blurbs here in the posts section, saving the occasional article for the articles section as I should have been doing the last three months. So it may be a slight change of pace from what I’ve published here in the past, but I’d really love to share more inspirational things, or articles that left me pondering things at night, and therefore posting more frequently. Sacrificing length and depth on the common post for an increase in frequency. So expect some new content, even if it only arrives in bits and pieces, shortly.
Posted in Personal, This Site | 13 Comments »
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
This redesign was sparked by quite a few things. But what truly set it off was coming across a post on Greg Storey’s Airbag. To summarize, he writes about a moment of nostalgia of the pre-web 2.0 era; back when the visual differences between sites were vast and everyone worked to be unique in some way or another.
I absolutely loved reading the post (even though it is from 2006) and decided to push Astheria.com to be a little different from other blogs. Fortunately, this sat pretty well with me since I wanted to pull the articles out of the mess of lesser posts anyway. This makes things a little different on its own but I hope it will drastically improve the findability of what most people are going to care about. There are no longer sections for metadata or categories, and the archives are a bit radical. It’s still a blog, it still has a relatively conservative layout, but it’s a step in the right direction I think.
I have some interesting thoughts regarding the use of human computation and blogs that I didn’t have time to address in depth, and that’s something I’ll be working on behind the scenes for a while. Look for it in the future.
A Work in Progress
For now, I’m still working on tweaking and fixing for different browsers, but I’d love some feedback. It’s going to take a good bit of polish to bring this to the level of the previous design.
Posted in Design, Personal, This Site | 36 Comments »
Monday, March 31st, 2008
Design changes that is.
The problem for me is with the way things are set up now. I feel compelled to only write articles, and any time that I write something shorter and less important, it pushes the ones that are more important further down the page. So I need to do some reformatting to keep those important articles at the top, while allowing myself the freedom to post more often by not feeling the need to write a full article. The good news is, changing this means I’ll be posting more frequently.
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Posted in Personal, This Site | 10 Comments »
Monday, February 11th, 2008
The original plan was to be biweekly because of the chaos and anarchy of having a guest author each week. But, the hell with that; I’ll be posting a review weekly. Timelines be damned.
On another note the site has done very well during it’s first week, and there’s already a new review up. Thank you to anyone who has commented, emailed, linked or whatever. It’s been fun.
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Posted in Design, Personal, This Site | 3 Comments »
Monday, January 21st, 2008
I was surprised to get an email a couple days ago saying that my site had been part of an article in this month’s .Net Magazine (Practical Web Design here in the States). Unfortunately, the issues are delayed about a month here so Elliot was kind enough to take a quick picture with his iPhone. It’s a bit blurry, but does the job. Damn the delay!
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Posted in This Site | 15 Comments »
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
I’m tempted to post the same generic crap that most others do in a situation such as this: “I’ve been busy.” But in truth that would be a bit of an understatement so instead I’ll list what’s waiting in the wings and a few things that bug me in the web world as of late. Chew what you will.
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Posted in Design, Personal, This Site | 5 Comments »
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
What a day. As some of you may have noticed, Astheria.com went offline sometime about two days ago. Figuring it was normal downtime I fired off an email to the host to make sure and checked to see if it was back up on occasion. Problem was, I found the email returned to me with an unable to send message – the DNS servers were down too.
I’ve always been a tad ignorant of the perils of online hosting and the security that your data will always be there. After deciding I wasn’t going to put myself on their timeline I switched the domain’s nameservers over to my Media Temple account (something that should’ve been done long ago) and started putting the pieces back together.
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Posted in Personal, This Site, old | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007
So after two weeks I’m in a bit of shock and awe as to everything that has transpired here. From the traffic to the feedback I’m thankful people have been vocal about their thoughts. So here’s how things have shaken up:
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Posted in This Site, old | 4 Comments »
Friday, August 10th, 2007
I know few people read these things so I will keep it brief, and if I do begin to bore you please do take the time to drop your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for visiting!
The basic concept for this design is something I tend to express in frustration every time I come across a website and am forced to bump the text size up or wait for all of the imagery to load up so that I can enjoy the content. The web is all about content and the goals of users is (in the majority of cases) to view that content or submit some form of content. Anything that complicates that process is just… unnecessary. I feel I’ve accomplished my goal of putting the content front and center.
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Posted in Design, This Site, old | 21 Comments »