The Site Colophon
Putting aside the obvious considerations like our good friends electricity and evolution, I use WordPress to disseminate my writing to the greater Internets. I bleed my fingers on a keyboard attached to a MacBook Pro. My Mac rocks some software called Transmit and TextMate. These two programs, with the occasional help of MarsEdit, assist me in formulating and broadcasting my narcissistic echoes.
The Current Design/Theme
I created this current design to be a relatively simple and straightforward fellow. Nothing all that fancy to it.
I created this weblog on a Mac and it is best consumed in various Mac browsers, primarily the WebKit based beauties such as Safari, OmniWeb, Cruz, and the WebKit nightlies. I have done no testing with Internet Explorer and take it on faith it probably looks like dog ass when loaded with IE. I’m open to being pleasantly surprised on this matter.
The current design was not created in a vacuum. So here’s a few influences.
- danbenjamin.com. Straightforward. Simple. Two Column. Take it or Leave it. Love it.
- Kate Winslet. You’d think if she was blogging she’d have some like tricked out, kick-ass, gold card design that gave all the men boners and all the woman envy, but I’ve become convinced this would not be the case.1 I’m quite confident she’d use a weblog much like this one. Indeed you might call this site the quintessential Winsletian design.
And now for a brief word on Internet Explorer 6. I think about IE6 as much as I do the mating habits of Patagonian goats, which is to say once a year on average, plus or minus six months, but really depending on how often I get goat porn in the mail. But IE6 is dead to me. I don’t care if this site looks like a Jackson Pollack painting smeared with baby poo when consumed in IE6. This is an acceptable situation for me. Only 18% of my visitors use Internet Explorer and of those only 5% are using IE6 2.
As I see it, at this point in time, there’s no legit excuse for using IE6. Okay, maybe you’re at work and IE 6 is all you got to jam with. I sympathize. I really do. I sympathize and I think this deplorable situation is as good a reason as any to immediately quit your job. Quit your job and look for work where your boss either (01) uses Apple computers, or (02) cares enough about their employees to give them Firefox, or some suitable 21st Century browser which you can use to gawk at porn while you’re “working“.
Think of it this way; you wouldn’t choose a horse and buggy to get yourself to work. Don’t choose IE 6 to get you around the Internets.3
Site Hosting
I use the mighty fine A Small Orange to serve this humble abode to the passing traffic. ASO is a first rate hosting company based in Atlanta, Georgia. ASO’s support is world class. Their performance would make a porn star blush. I couldn’t be happier with them, and give them a hardy recommendation.4
WordPress Plugins Used
These change fairly frequently as I’m a fickle bloke and prone to bouts of chaotic experimentation. That and I’ll probably forget to change this list. That and I won’t install a plugin which automates this whole thing.
TK
The Typography of Griffin & Hoxie
I love typography. Don’t know a damn thing about it, but fonts and Font Art make me giddy. I could look at pictures of fonts used creativity all day. I mention this for no real discernible reason other than I needed some space between that h4 header up there and the h6 header below, which this accomplishes. It’s also a shoddy lesson in managing typographical space.
Body Font Stack
Heading Font Stack
- Helvetica Neue – info
- Helvetica
- Arial
Other Resources
Here’s a few of the resources woven into the fabric of this joint:
- Easy Slider on the download page.
- Komodo Media’s Social Media Icons for a few of the icons you’ll notice on my lifestream page
- Mint Stats for site statistics
Fancy Zoom for the trippy Lighbox effect with linked photos– disabled (see the changelog)
- I’ve thought a lot about this actually because it struck me as an important thing to consider in full. ↩
- These percentages were taken from November, 2008. The totals will not go up in the future unless Windows starts handing out Swedish supermodels with each purchase of Vista. ↩
- This analogy only works if you place a 1:1 proportional weight on the importance of your salary and the importance of surfing the net. I don’t know any rational person who live such a tragic life – have you used the Internet lately – but I mention this loose stitch in passing for all the really deep thinkers and nitpickers. ↩
- For the record I believe I’ve used the word porn three times already, which could signify an issue, but really betrays my love for the word. PORN. It’s a hammer of a word. ↩
