Linear navigation can be dull. Furthermore, it requires the person browsing to think like the person who organized the navigation–from distinctions between organizational models down to the structure of the hierarchy. (What, for example, on my own site, is the difference between a “category” and a “tag”? And why is “Humor” under “Poetry” but not …
After a brief experiment with Twitter, I concluded that the trend toward quantity over quality being perpetuated by social network status updates wasn’t for me. In fact, it seemed downright unpoetic. Then, thanks to Jeanine’s site, I discovered Goodreads. Finally, a niche network with a purpose I could get behind: discussing books. The only other …
Our Air New Zealand Boeing 747 came with an in-flight entertainment system, including movies-on-demand and arcade games. A few rounds into Tetris, I managed to crash the system, complete with the classic Windows “application has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down” message. I switched to chess, and beat the system on its …
I was shocked to discover today that French PHP programmer Bertrand Gugger passed away last week due to a heart attack. Bertrand was co-lead on the Net_Monitor project with me, and contributed many valuable additions to the project, including all the SMS messaging support and end-to-end testing of European SMS messaging providers. Bertrand was a …
(Or, A History Of My Web Presence, With Nods To Robert Pinsky And The 14th Century Samurai Creed) When frames were in vogue, my address bar remained constant. When full-page graphics were in, you could see my big head for miles. I never used a black background, I made trendiness my enemy. When blogs were …
“Every word was once a poem” –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” In this so-called information age, we live among language more than ever before. For example, one of the latest fads drawing hype to itself faster than a black hole sucks light is Twitter: a web-based social networking site predicated on “tweets”–brief text messages uploaded …
