Reborn
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
It's official - my blog is now no longer the ugliest thing I have ever made in my life. Oh man,
it was hideous and in dire need of a checkup. It was so ugly that a friend once thought I used a generic template that came with Blogger - they didn't realize I'd designed the monstrosity myself. Fair enough - it was either the first or second CSS site I'd ever made and it didn't reflect how much I'd learned in the year and half since. Even the Blogger templates had advanced and become extremely prettified in that span.
A few things had to be pruned: the link to email was first, I've had more spam than I care for. I'm fine with my penis size and real estate investments, thank you. The links to "super cool friends that blog" had to go, since there's only one
fucking super cool friend that blogs and the rest are either static sites or people I don't know. I'll have to think over that bit in general, how and where to format the outbound links section. And the direct link to my IM address is out too, it kept the new design from validating as XHTML 1.0 Strict.
A word about that, yes. A preemptive strike, if you will, to those that don't care about validation. You are either:
- Not A Web Designer: you could care less whether this blog was made with jam or cheese, you come just for the words. I salute you.
- A Web Designer: you don't know or care about validating your work. You fucking suck and your shit is retarded rookie bullshit.
Yup, I said it. Validation is a hot issue now (
yes, again) and riding another little wave of debate throughout the blogosphere. I'm not on the fence about it at all. I don't care if I get flamed for saying the small-minded conflate that issue with using CSS-based layouts. Oh, so you're finally ditching Netscape 4-era markup and now you think that's good enough? No. Gotta validate. At least
fucking try, will you? A lot of "designers" treat validation as an unrelated extra that doesn't matter as long as they just don't use tables. It's the same geniuses that confuse those two issues with yet another,
Coding Semantically, as if they're making their site any more accessible or semantic when vomiting div and span tags all over the markup instead of old school td or font, when they could be good citizens and use header and paragraph tags for the same effects while giving something digestible to Google, screen readers, cell phones, printers, etc.
Again, if you don't make a living doing this stuff and subsequently don't care if I make these words appear on your screen by giving chocolates to little midgets in your monitor, this rant wasn't aimed at you. Oh yes, I cherish your patronage.
Upcoming: getting the archives working; giving each post it's own page and making permanent links to them, very Google and commenting-friendly; adding Blogger's new commenting feature; maybe a writeup on the design process and notes on the new visual look; sidebar links of books I'm reading or movie reviews.