That's what I'm doing currently. Gestating ideas, for an innovative new business and also for my writing (and as an extension to both - my weblog). So apologies for the lack of blogging, but I expect to deliver a nourishing meal-sized Read/Write Web entry by end of next week. Feel free to snack on my Links feed in the meantime.
For now I'll leave you with this positive, forward-looking quote:
Something's got a hold on me and I don't know what
It's the beginning of a new age...
I promised not to focus on web design, as it's not my niche. But I remain a keen amateur designer, as all Web junkies are, so I want to jot down some notes on Jason Kottke's re-design. I haven't read through the 995 comments that people have left on his site, nor have I seen any of the design community's thoughts (I've barely had time to read my RSS feeds this week). So my opinion is currently unsullied by popular opinion...which is something I hope to achieve most times anyway ;-)
The first thing that struck me was how spare and non-colourful Jason's re-design is. The distinctive yellow-green Kottke 'brand' that used to cover the screen like wallpaper, has now been condensed into a very thin yellow-green banner right at the top of the screen. The new design is very white-space heavy, reminiscent of the designs of Dave Winer, Mark Pilgrim, Robert Scoble and others. Now to me, this is not a bad thing. I like that 'minimalist' type of design, more so than the colourful Simple Bits-like designs that most of the web design community have. A personal preference.
Back to the Thin Yellow-Green Banner. Jason has named this a "tag". He explains:
Like the red tag on Levi's jeans or even the red stripe on Prada shoes. It's small, out of the way, but when you see it on something, you know exactly what you're holding in your hands.
My guess is we'll see a lot of these tags suddenly sprout up across the blogosphere over the next few weeks. But that'll be a sign of what a great little innovation this is, because I really like the idea of having my own Levi's-like tag. It also has Kottke's main links in it, so it's functional as well as fashionable. It would perhaps be one way around my current dilemma of not being able to design a logo for Read/Write Web. I've been doodling away in my notebooks, trying to think of a compact and utterly original logo to stick in the top-left corner of my site. But inspiration is hard to come by for me when it comes to graphical things... Also my header currently is very, well, green and doesn't have much utility - other than housing my search box. But the search could easily be shifted elsewhere. I've also been thinking of sticking a photo in the header as background - aka Scripting News, but my favourite example of this is jill/text. Hmm, it's good to have options.
Overall, I like Kottke's re-design. It's clean and functional, and that yellow-green tag is a deceptively simple but highly distinctive touch. And yes the font looks gorgeous in a Mac (I have both a PC and Mac on my work desk at this point in time, lucky me!).
I'll finish by mentioning my own humble efforts at incrementally improving my weblog design. Over the past week I've tampered with the CSS in the left and right columns and changed the font (to a serif - Georgia). Now the left and right columns match each other in style and so are more balanced. Thanks to my friend Code is Mandatory for giving me the feedback I needed to hear in order to make those changes. The other change I've done is swap to MT comments. For now they're pop-up, not inline. I'll probably change to inline later, when I get around to styling it. And by then, hopefully I'll have thought of a way to re-design my header.
I've always wanted to namecheck that great Velvet Underground song. I wore my teeth in my hands...So I could mess the hair of the night. Anyway, Sébastien Paquet has posted a suggestion to improve the Topic Exchange - which reminded me of my own efforts to ignite the topics community over a month ago. Here's Seb's post:
I believe I have finally seen the light as to how the Internet Topic Exchange (ITE) could be made simpler to use and more viral at once, taking one cue from my colleague Stephen's recent ridiculously easy shibboleth strategy for putting together conference aggregators and another from Joshua Shachter's now-defunct reversible.org
1. Right now submitting a post to a channel requires people to either fill in a form on the channel page of their choice or send a TrackBack ping to the channel. Both are simple, but still harder than they should. How about adding a third option: simply link to the channel in your post. To make it easier, the top of each channel page could even provide some standard boilerplate chunk of the requisite HTML.
2. In order for this to work the ITE needs to watch the participating weblogs. It already watches for weblog updates, so just let people register their blog or feed once and let the ITE pick out the posts that link to it as they appear thereafter.
Note that this new option automagically generates visibility for the channels on participating blogs with every post submitted; this is one of the key elements that were missing for effective word-of-mouth propagation of awareness of the Exchange. I'm kicking myself for having taken so long to find a simpler way.
Of course, along with ease of use comes more spam. I've been thinking about this too - more later.
Here's what I posted in Seb's comments (tided up a bit):
This is pretty much what I was getting at a month or so ago, only I wanted Topic Exchange and K-Collector to play together more. Ref: Proposed Solution for ENT Topic-Sharing Community and the follow-ups here and here. And this is what I ended up with - K-Collector picks up my posts via my ENT-enabled RSS feed. And my weblog automatically pings Topic Exchange every time I post, via my use of MT categories (which match up with Topic Exchange names).
You propose people include the TE link in their post, which is similar to what I do - only I include the link on a reference tacked onto the end of the post (so it doesn't actually form part of the post itself). This way works for me, because it means I don't have to manually enter the link - MT does it automagically for me. The downside of my method is that I use pre-defined categories, which does limit the topic selection somewhat. But I balanced this by knowing that my topics/categories match now with *both* Topic Exchange and K-Collector, which was what I wanted.
Anywho, good luck with your proposal. If it helps more people adopt TE then it's a good thing.
