The basic Blog design options available are: Template, Background, Adjust Widths, and Layout.

I tried several templates before settling on the one I employed initially, and then added a background. It’s a mix-and-match puzzle, as many templates and backgrounds don’t go well together, and the color choices are important here as well. Also, changing the background color can render text unreadable if the background and text colors are too similar.

When I experimented with adjusting widths I set the right sidebar to minimum and found that that caused text to wrap one word to a row, which rendered it fairly incomprehensible.

I tried using the Edit HTML feature to edit my template. My thought was to fetch an image from my wife’s website and use it as a background, but I couldn’t make it work.

The Blogger Template Designer Advanced Features is mainly a control panel for various color schemes – Tabs Background, Footer, Text, Links, etc. There’s also an Add CSS feature that allows you to customize the appearance of your blog. I followed the directions for changing the background image and this time it worked, but the background was incompatible with the choices I already had made so I didn’t keep it – it was gratifying to see it work though!

I added a single Gadget called "Books & Stuff".

Finally, in the New Post/Compose window, standard text document choices are available, including font; font color and size; bold, italic, underline; text bg color; import image; insert link; etc. The font selection was limited and I'm not clear how one could add to it but it must be fairly simple (importing the desired fonts and adding to HTML).

For some reason the "text background color" did not take - it was probably overridden by the Template Backgound.

The main problem I have is that the "Page" that I created, "East Coker - definitions" is now also covered by the CSS, and it includes links like "Home" that don't function.

Blog Topic #5: What is Usability?

It's amazing how many sites there are that are frustrating to the end user - even (or especially, since they are often more complex) sites owned by major corporations. It seems like every few days I'll tell my wife, "this site is really retarded." Most of the time it's a matter of a link simply not doing what it syas it's supposed to do, or a failure to function within my favorite browser (Opera).

Often it's something as sample as an inability to respond to the "Back" button, especially after failing to launch a new page when you click on a URL. Other times it's the bandwidth-hog Flash ads that have very small light-gray "skip ad" buttons. But mostly it's a poorly organized structure that makes the site difficult to navigate.

I have followed Surfline for years now, and have watched them grapple with adding features and complexity while trying to maintain navigability. I think that overall they have done a great job, primarily in that they:

• allow me to personalize my experience by saving pages I visit most and offering them in a conveniently placed menu
• allow me to customize my preferences for locations I want to monitor (surf reports with live video feeds as well as surf forecasts)
• allow me to have multiple live-video feeds from as many as four surf locations all on one screen

Poem for Class

(I initially put these works here in order to use one for the Poem/webpage assignment.)

Here is a verse I've always liked by Leonard Cohen from The Stanger Song.

And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind
you find he did not leave you very much not even laughter
Like any dealer he was watching for the card
that is so high and wild
he'll never need to deal another
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger

And then, the last stanza of my favorite poem:

Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning

Virtual Space Theory

To begin my thoughts about the theme "There is no here here," I'm referencing this site: http://virtualspacetheory.com/. Note the October, 2009 blog entry, "Not a Blog about Metaphysics".

Now, there's some great stuff on the site, and I've only skimmed its surface so far, but if my reality ultimately boils down to how I assemble input, then why make distinctions about the nature of the input? It's the Washington Monument, or a photo of it, or a video of it, or a total-immersion 3D simulation. Sure, the texture and richness of data are different, depending on the media (or the fact of "direct" experience), but in the last analysis I have an image of a particular obelisk in the internal viewing space that I call "consciousness"; what could be more "virtual" than that? How can this not be a metaphysical problem?

Why is this relevant to the curriculum? Because everything that we create in web design is directed toward the purpose of imposing, if you will, a set of images and symbols on an eventual viewer, and it seems useful to have some idea of what's happening. Aren't we in fact sharing virtualities? Where?

As I write, it occurs to me that my own logic contradicts itself: If I deny the distinction between virtual and actual, then there is, in fact, a here here, even now, on this page, where we meet as you read.

Just goofing off.