thread count (1/1132)

the "twitter thread" as a genre fascinates me. I have so many curious questions about it. when was the first cohesive thread of posts created on twitter? who wrote it and about what?

threaded tweets are a reaction to the restrictions of the platform. it's like adapting the limited microblogging form to serve a longer form of writing. combining a handful of tiny posts into something bigger-- like building a tower out of toy blocks.

twitter added an official thread-making feature to its platform not that long ago. but threads (in the computer/internet sense) have been a thing for way longer than that. although etymonline doesn't mention this newer usage--perhaps it's too new-- in its word history of "thread," Merriam Webster does, interestingly. I guess regular dictionaries have a stronger incentive to keep up with the times than etymological dictionaries do.

I learned the internet meaning of thread on online bulletin boards, where a thread is an asynchronous conversation contained under a heading within a specific discussion forum. multiple people can post to a forum thread. everyone's replies are timestamped, linkable, quotable, reply-to-able, and it's all very organized.

a twitter thread is different. sure, the usual "any string of posts-and-replies" does technically constitute a twitter thread... but that's not really what anyone is talking about when they use "twitter thread" as a specific noun. any old string of posts and replies on twitter is more likely to be referred to as a conversation or an exchange. the connotation of "a thread" (often with an introductiony colon, like "a thread:") on twitter involves a string of posts written by a single author, on some focused topic, typically (but not always) within a short span of time. there can be replies, but they feel separate from the twitter thread itself.

so if we want to delineate the twitter thread genre, what are its requirements and hallmarks? and what are its conventions? every genre has conventions-- sometimes very strong ones. memos and emails should have subject lines, letters can have letterhead, and academic articles have references lists at the end. twitter threads have their own rules, too.

we expect a twitter thread to include at least three tweets linked together by topic, structure, and the platform's formatting. there are usually twice that many, if not more. sometimes there is a narrative feel to the thread, and other times it's more list-like. often the thread is announced and introduced as such in the first post, whether or not the ensuing thread is planned out or more off-the-cuff. at the end, especially if the thread has been shared repeatedly and garnered a lot of attention, the author may add a concluding postscript with a link to somewhere readers can donate or otherwise compensate the author's writing work in some way.

but the really interesting and evolving convention I want to talk about is the numbering. there are different ways to number the individual tweets in your twitter thread. in my experience, the numbers most often come at the end of each post, as in the following variations:

[content of tweet...] 1/12

[content of tweet...] (1/12)

(when the total number of tweets is known at the outset)

[content of tweet...] 1/

[content of tweet...] 1/x
[content of tweet...] (1)

(when the total number of eventual tweets is not known-- this mode seems more common)

I've been collecting twitter thread examples (a whole sixteen of them!) for a while now in anticipation of exploring these numbering conventions a bit more. the end-of-the-tweet positioning is the most common numbering style I've seen, overall. but it's not the only one. on rare occasion, the numbers may come first. plenty of threads don't including numbering at all.

so I have sixteen tabs-worth of twitter threads open next to this blogpost draft right now (I'll link them all at the bottom, pseudo-reference-list-style), and while such a random sample of course can't be truly representative of all the twitter threads that have been created in recent months, they at least give me the beginnings of some general insights into twitter thread numbering conventions.

my main finding? the convention of numbering the tweets in a thread on twitter is dying.

at the very least, it's become a marker of formality, more than a useful signal to readers about the order or length of the composition. numbers seem to be less important to a thread's legibility now that the twitter platform supports and displays threaded tweets so smoothly for most people.

I'm surprised by this, for some reason.

but of these sixteen example threads, only 4 include fully numbered tweets (3 at the end as shown above, and 1 at the beginning). another 10 forego numbering altogether, and 2 include numbering for content within the thread, but not as a marker for each separate tweet.

so there you have it. some really, really informally-gathered data about a quirky little internet genre.

it's interesting, right? it is to me. twitter is a culturally powerful and maddeningly ephemeral discursive space. how conventions emerge and spread and morph a little over time is fascinating in any genre or medium. looking at how it seems to be working on twitter helps me think of twitter as not so special. sure, it's different, but it's mostly made of humans just the same way email chains and academic journals are.

and speaking of platforms and their power...author Robin Sloan makes a good argument here (and a cleverly presented one at that) about how social media could work vs. how it currently works.
 

as promised, the twitter threads I referenced in this random exploration of mine, listed here in chronological order. I'll add a note that linking them here like this takes them out of context. they may or may not make as much sense from outside the constant/endless/fast-paced nature of twitter as experienced by those who spend too much time scrolling around within it.

research-based lessons on ending police violence

thoughts on how women get written out of history

how to save the USPS

linguistics and news headlines

on white silence

on the enduring nature of white supremacy

being anti-racist and avoiding burnout at the same time

pixel art and crossstitch

on voting differently vs. persuading others to vote differently

linguistics and the general horribleness of college sports

teaching students how to format memos

real grammar is very messy

reflections on how colleges are marketed

on white fragility (the book and adjacent mild uproar)

how to fight back against crazy new legislation concerning international students

commentary on material vs. symbolic crises

weekly again

my current journal has completely blank pages. which means I use it as a sketchbook every now and then. sketches are useful both for rejuvinating dying pens and for clearing my head.

many of you have probably seen this new internet corner I've begun carving out for my professional ivory-tower self. there isn't much there yet. so far only an excerpt from this old post and a placeholder 'about' page. and some links.

what else should I put there?

book swapping

libraries are glorious.

as much as I love to read, I'm not so into owning books. books take up space in your suitcase and they can get really heavy, and if I own a book I'm almost certain never to actually read it. having a due date is pretty motivating, I guess. so I frequent the library as often as possible. how lucky I am that our society has developed these institutions that collect books and films and recordings and let almost anyone show up to borrow them almost whenever they want? I think very lucky.

libraries function as giant, never-ending book swaps. you never know who else will read the book you've just returned, or who added all this pink underlining to the novel you've just carried home with you. I don't own too many books (maybe ten?), but thousands of them have camped out temporarily on my shelves and nightstands and desks.

so I've noticed a rather cool thing recently. I know I spent a significant amount of words complaining about brainpickings the other month, but the little linkage mill still exists and does post semi-thought-provoking stuff sometimes. the thing I noticed concerns the way they link to the books they review. heaven help me if I ever, in writing about any published work, make its title into an amazon link. most sites make a habit of this kind of thing. it's my penniless loyalty to libraries that has always made such e-commercialism so annoying, I guess. but it is traditional, and I'm sure book-buying folks find it helpful and convenient and etc.

anyway--brainpickings, though as guilty as everyone else of this amazon plugging, has added parenthetical links to World Cat, so just in case you are not the book-buying type, you can find whatever book they're rhapsodizing about in your nearest library.

see?

{ example screen-grabbed from a post about Richard Dawkin's essay collection }

the title itself is the customary amazon link, and in parenthesis Ms. Popova is kind enough to provide the amazon.co.uk version and a link to this book's listings in World Cat.

have you heard about World Cat? we used it a bit last year in Bibliography & Research Methods. sometimes it's a little icky to navigate, but the idea of the site is absolutely awesome. search for any book, and World Cat will tell you which libraries near you have copies. there is usually a way to access the catalogue through your university library too, and you can get inter-library loans set up without much trouble.

this is cool. and I definitely think libraries should share some of the attention most people just give to booksellers. open access to and free exchange of information is a beautiful concept. global book swapping, you might say.


while we were in Europe this year, I finished reading Field Tested Books--a collection of anecdotes about books read in particular places. I read bits of it on the train from Budapest to Sighişoara. I read bits of it in our Bratislava hostel. it accompanied me from Slovakia to Vienna and back to Budapest again, where I scribbled a few annotations in it and left it in this pub (this pub, by the way, despite being disguised as an Irish pub, served us a marvelous Hungarian Goulash for lunch one day). they had a few shelves in their corner window, just above the radiator. I didn't find any books I wanted to take from their book swap, so I merely abandoned mine there. I am not in the habit of holding on to books I've already read, after all. I wonder if anyone else has picked it up?

sort of love. sort of forever.

maybe you've noticed the tweaking of the blog design. I'm still working on it though. any suggestions for me? that right-hand column may not fit properly on all screens, I'm thinking. we'll see what we can do with it.

by freak coincidence, radiolab put up their newly redesigned website today also. it has a goat.

what's so cool about goats? I just think they're adorable. just look at this. and they can eat practically anything. I totally identify with that sort of behavior.

however, the fact that a website has a goat doesn't mean it automatically qualifies as an awesomely-put-together website. I'm not quite sure how I like this renovated radiolab.org, actually. but as long as they keep making wonderful radio, I might be persuaded not to care about their code.

speaking of radiolab, their latest and newest podcast is all about words. words making things better. or a lack of words making things better? I don't know if I would know how to handle experiencing the world without language, but Jill Taylor says it's pretty amazing.

now that I'm blogging about this, I seem to remember my mum talking about that woman's book. so many books I haven't read...

on sunday my former roommate's sister was mentioning a book called Stiff, by some woman who writes about crazy topics. for example: dead bodies. or what life is really like in zero gravity. the next morning Mary Roach was on the radio, talking about her new book and all the fun things she got to do as research for it.

and then another friend mentioned he had been reading Born to Run. a book with a title like that just doesn't strike me as one I'd ever be very interested in. but then I heard its author on the radio telling these intriguing stories about barefoot children in Africa. really, I should be long past categorizing any book as one I wouldn't be interested in. I have read many, many odd books. some of them for undeniably odd reasons.

anyway... wish me luck with the following upcoming events: a haircut, a yoga class, a bit of stargazing, and writing the next twenty pages of my little alien girl novel. all things I anticipate loving quite a lot.

and please, can I have one of these shirts?

j is for...

I know not many of my readers here are in the business of web development, but it's a pot I keep finding myself in. and this is cool. believe me.

as much as I try I cannot get over how glorious and wonderful this
jquery stuff is. I can't really remember what I used it for last time, but this time it's proving even more essential. our current web project has been completely different from any of my previous attempts. I'm glad I've got genius brother around to do the insanely tricky parts.

it's been pretty fun, polishing up my tarnished design skills and wedging them into a totally new setup. I get to feed CSS to a monster named Django, and so far... I still have all my fingers and toes. the design is actually working. the interface is going to be flawless. you can't imagine how exciting that is.

last week I discovered a little site that I now don't think I could ever live without, as a webdesigner: jquery tools. such slick and simple little plugins. they make me so happy. it all makes this long, precarious and messy road seem much, much brighter.

free range

a while back I finally broke down and ordered me some of those astonishingly popular little notebooks. a set of the grey winter-colored ones. they came promptly, straight from Chicago, in a very nice cardboard envelope. at first, I was a bit disappointed that all of them had pages of graph-paper grid. I'm a blank-paper notebook girl, whenever possible. it's so much easier that way. (then again, you miss out on that great rebellious sort of feeling when there are no lines at all to disregard...)

this here is an old sketchbook. I pulled it out and started using it, randomly, to hash out ideas for a web project genius brother and I are working on. it worked. sort of. until on my flight home the other night I found myself too lazy to tug the fat spiral-bound thing out of my bag. so I used one of these little notebooks instead:

and it was just about perfect. much more accessible. not so much space that I felt I had to scribble meaninglessly in every corner--just enough for the ideas I was chasing back and forth and up and down.

and the grid works too. my disappointment has fled. so, henceforth my little grey fieldnotes shall be my webdesign sketchbook. and maybe other kinds of designs too. I'm thinking I'll make one of the other two into a typography sketchbook and... well, the third might just collect scraps of paper, tags from clothes, and cool paper clips. for now.

roundabout

my favourite things to look at on the internet are about pages. they aren't always called that, of course. sometimes it's something like 'who are we? well, let us tell you...' or 'what's all this then?' or 'mission statement' or something random. and sometimes it's not even a page but a little box or a pop-up, like coudal does at the top of their site, with a link to a longer explanation if you really, really want. I love them all (some, understandably, more than others). they answer all my prying, curious questions. some of course answer those questions directly (like this one, and this one, or this one), and some are a bit obscure (like this one). it doesn't really matter though, because whatever the about page says on it, it is addressed very plainly to me and my curiosity. well, and everyone else and their curiosity too.

these pages are the first thing I look for when I come across a new website. I eat them up. with all the insane stuff there is on the interenet these days, I feel like I just have to know a little tiny bit about why it's there. where it came from, who's behind it, how they got there, and just what they think they're doing.

about pages should be updated every once in a while, I think. things change, right? and more importantly, I get bored. when I visit your website for the thirtieth time, it might be silly of me to look at the about page again; I should know very well what you're about by that point. but weren't you listening? these things are my favourite. I'm weirdly drawn to them and their lovely secrets. okay, not secrets, answers. stories. biographical snippets. whatever you call them. on my thirtieth visit to your website, I very well may have new questions. different questions. and you may have different answers. maybe not, but just in case, you know? it seems those about pages can get written in the last-minute fumbling just before your website breathes its first breath, and then what? four or five years slip away and by that time are you even the same person? the same company? do you have the same readers? the same clients or friends or whoever?

and even if you are, and you do--don't you get bored?

maybe you're not like I am. this is the same instinct that gives me the urge to rearrange all the furniture in the house and put completely new pictures on the walls every two weeks. but even if you're not like I am, you don't want your visitors to get bored, do you?

I am aware that other than the ugly little default profile of me over there, this blog of mine has no real or proper about page. I shall have to fix this.

whatever you say

a few things I have recently figured out:

• just as genius brother says, jquery is indeed pretty awesome
• php is not nearly as hard as it looks
• wordpress does not seem to be as cool as it looks.
  
• with google, all things are possible.

I cannot and may not ever be able to call myself a programmer. at this point, even webdesigner is a tortuous stretch of description. there are so many ways this new website could be better than it is.

here are my thanks to Bekah for the chance to pick through all this once-forgotten and unknown mess of knowledge among the piles of junk in the dark corners of my brain and in the not-so-dark corners of the world wide web. may I humbly present to you the completed Sugarbee Cookies website.
programming is such a mysterious thing. tiny little bits, very basic concepts and such, are collecting like lint in my pockets--but it's so vastly more complicated and powerful than lint, this stuff. you can do anything you want. anything. just say it in the right words and magically... things happen. you can say this = that and pull things out of everywhere and put it somewhere else entirely.

for helping me endure this round of beating the code into submission, I am indebted to the following tutorials: this one, by Mr. Vaswani and this one, by Mr. Dhandhania (if those are indeed their real names.)

ahead of me is a long road, shadowed and precarious and crowded and messy. I can still turn back. but what if the road is just as long and precarious in the other direction?

roadtrips never last

today is the day that nephew #1 turns two years old. so we're going down to slather him with gifts and attention. and while we're there, we shall have the privilege of admiring his father on stage in Footloose, Guys and Dolls, and The Secret Garden at this little theatrical establishment in West Yellowstone. we shall see whether or not the performances go any distance at all towards assuaging the grief I have been suffering over the hideousness of the Playmill's website.

(for more information regarding my obviously infallible judgement, read this. and then just look at it. maybe while I'm down there I can talk them into letting me redesign the poor thing.)

-------------------------------------------------------------
{ photo borrowed from some kind person on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fabcom/ / CC BY-NC 2.0 }

browse

today I came across this little note today, tacked onto the side of a column on Locus Magazine:

Note: Design issues with this blog in Internet Explorer will be addressed shortly. It displays as intended in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari.

it was a surprise, because usually you see something like this, the complete opposite:

Page is Best viewed in IE6 or IE7. Some elements may not work in other browsers.

as seen at the bottom of the website for this little theatre in West Yellowstone.

it amuses me to see Locus's slightly uncommon preference for everything but Internet Explorer in contrast to the Playmill's blatant ignorance of everything but Internet Explorer. how fitting, the pleasant, encouraging manner of the first as opposed to the inconsiderate sloppiness of the second.

I am on principle, even as a mere amateur web designer, required to prefer browsers with lovely names like Firefox and Opera over the default-sounding, default-looking monster that is microsoft's Internet Explorer. but that is not the only reason I have for appreciating the designer at Locus Magazine a great deal more than whoever is in charge over at the Playmill. I have many memories of headaches endured while trying to make a certain slice of code function properly in as many browsers as possible. the note at the bottom of the Playmill's website reveals that whoever designed it must have come up against the same headaches and given up. or perhaps they simply avoided the possibility altogether and didn't even bother attempting cross-browser compliance. it's disappointing on so many levels. on the other hand, Locus gives me the assurance that they know just what those cursed web-headaches are like and they are patiently hacking away to make it right. that's the kind of thing I want to hear.

green apples

i taught my last web design class this morning. summer is upon us, chewing on people's brains.

everyone needs reminding, from time to time, that the rest of the world doesn't think quite the same way that you do. teaching isn't the only way for such reminding to take place, but it is one way in which your ability to cope with the frustration of all those other minds and how they learn is pretty crucial. they way i learned web design is not the way anyone else learned it, or should learn it. the world changes from minute to minute and so do the people in it.

i still don't know much about the way other people think, but i've learned a bit of patience. i've also had to forgive myself. there are a lot of important things i didn't teach as well as i could have. there are things that i didn't teach at all. there are things did teach that i didn't feel really sunk in.

i never did talk the school district into recognizing the virtues of mozilla firefox. i didn't get into image editing at all. my students never fully understood the point of external stylesheets. will they remember the four little principles of design that i taught them?

but what can i do? an hour a week every monday... that's not so much. they will have to go out and keep learning on their own, without me. they'll have to find their own friends to build websites for and their own relatives' servers to host things on.

i learned a lot of vocabulary. before, i never had to know what the right terms were for html attributes and css syntax, but i wanted to teach it all, so i had to hammer things like selector { property: value; } into my head. and i had to explain it fifteen different times fifteen different ways, for the kids who missed last week or came in late, or just don't remember what css stands for anyway.

you can't rush things. you can lecture your students for an hour on why the font tag is evil and useless, but you can't force them to see what web standards are all about even over the course of a four month class. they'll see it when they want to see it. when they need to. i'm just a tool. a doorway.

no, not even a doorway. a small key in the rusted lock on a gate in the middle of a falling-down picket fence, bordering a long stretch of wild garden.

undeserving brats

I accompanied my mother to the school yesterday. The school which needs me for its little webdesign class. The strung-out description of said class was posted up on the whiteboard in the office with a chart beneath it, and three scribbled names were listed as willing students. There is a minimum of five. There are ten days before the start of the new semester.

Without falling into more description than is necessary, let me say this small educational center, housed as it is in a handful of portable buildings off to the side of the main junior high, is a quaint in that full-of-fingerpainted-butcher-paper way, but also full of an almost invisible sort of dingy hopelessness. I know 'hopelessness' sounds overly poetic, more concerned with drama than the real business of what a school is. I can't help it.

What strikes me so directly, so disturbingly, is the subtle sort of struggle I see between what these students ought to have and what they don't even know they lack. I might be imagining it, it's so subtle. Education is important. Learning is the greatest path anyone can follow (perhaps the only true path to anywhere). Teaching is an overly sentimentalized profession. (most things involving children are, i suppose.) The children are the future, etcetera.

They are indeed. And yet there is such sense of abandonment in this little collection of classrooms. The dirt and grime of twenty years is settled on the eight computers of the lab where I will teach. The shelves in the library are few.

And yet they learn just the same. They are bright students. They'll be fine. Indeed, if they had brand new computers, all the newest and best software they could imagine, and miles of book-crammed shelves, they'd learn just the same. If they had all that, it would make almost no difference at all. Ignorance is such bliss: such grand scope for improvement.

Perhaps it only bothers me because I am expected to teach webdesign using a who-knows-how-old liscence of Microsoft FrontPage, as outdated a piece of software you'd fine anyplace on earth. Discontinued last year. Abounding in hideously substandard mark-up. Painfully obsolete. With this I am expected to prepare these children for the future? With this I am to open their minds to the wonders of HTML?

I wish there was something I could do.

a tribe of misfits

this little blogspot is nearing its second birthday. perhaps on saturday, the day itself, i will eat some cake in honor of its glowing pointlessness.

over a year ago i wrote this in response to the ever-evolving state of web-standardization and development practices:

"Maybe I call myself a designer. Maybe I'm getting better at the technology side of it. The web is definitely a part of my little life. So what?
I'm not committed to taking the web anywhere. I'm not nearly advanced enough to be a part of that kind of development. I think the most I can hope for is that I'll someday be competent enough to contribute beauty and meaning to the world via this insanely everchanging medium. At base I am just an english major. just a writer given a tiny bit of dangerous knowledge. I don't know where that will take me."

since then i've really quit capitalizing things. i've learned that 'designer' is a word with a multitude of meanings. i've gone swimming with print media. photography. my own website has gone on a little vacation and it's been months since i've touched anyone else's. but now... now i have been given a chance to make a difference in the future of this. to shape the minds of a bunch of kids who (you never know) may grow up and be famous designers in their own way.

i shouldn't perhaps take this so seriously. a bunch of kids? famous designers? when they have so much distraction and selfishness and conflict to still to fight themselves through?

what if they hate me? (fear, anger, doubt)

patience, self. they don't all know what you know. how can they? they are not you.

at any rate i suppose i will pass on what geekism i've picked up on my way. if i'm lucky they'll all act interested or something. dad says teaching is just a higher level of learning stuff. it won't be easy.

but i'm all about learning stuff.

the longest day ever and it's only half ten

I had to work this morning. yay.

and then I had class. that went well.

then I checked my email and the Vice President for Research wants to meet with me. TODAY!

this is the most shocking and exciting news I could possibly have received this morning.

I'll have to skip class to make the interview but I'm fine with that.

What am I going to wear?

What will I tell my professor? When will I make up the quiz we're supposed to have??

In other news...
Leslie the managing editor for Isotope sent this email around to all the English department faculty:

Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing announces its newly redesigned and relocated website: http://isotope.usu.edu/. Isotope's wonderful intern, Amelia Chesley, spent the summer revamping the site. See the new website to learn more about Isotope, to subscribe or order back issues, to find submission and contest guidelines, and to read samples from the current issue as well as the archives. Find out for yourself why newpages.com reviewer Laura van den Berg says, "Even if you don't have a special interest in nature and science writing, Isotope still makes for an excellent read."

And then Kelli, professor of Engl. 5400, announced it in class and I was so proud. yay for me.

Isotope

I'm working on one major thing for my internship at Isotope and one minor thing that's not really for it but is connected to it. Or might be, if it is finished and good enough.

The first thing--the major thing--is my overhaul of their website. I've linked to the old one above. My current in-progress redesign is here: prepare to be amazed. I'm having a great time working on it. As it slowly nears completion I'm getting more and more excited to put it up for real on its own domain and webspace. Then it will be official. And hopefully perfect.

The second thing is an essay. Isotope is a Journal of Literary Science and Nature Writing. I thought, since I'd never done any science or nature writing really, that I might try it. I'm writing about destruction, pain, and carelessness and whether it really matters. What I have so far is very disconnected and short. But we'll see where it goes.

Somebody bombed the London Underground this morning. This saddens me. Just over a year ago I was there and I loved that city. I miss it. I hope it and everyone in it are alright.

In other news, Starcustard is a whole year old now. Congratulations to Chris and me for almost almost finishing chapter four on time for the party.

latest adventures

i have photoshop of my very own on my computer at home! this is exciting news.

as is my new and improved version of the Isotope website. (see my links section for the old version)
the new version will look something like this: prepare to be amazed!

I like it a lot. it's so stylish and clean and lovely. I just hope it works how i want it to. i've had some major problems with the .gifs of the heading... blah.

anyway.
this is my exciting design-related news.

in other news: my novel-in-progress is over 16000 words now. my secondary novel-in-progress is almost 19000 words, but i don't like it as much. hm.

laziness

so.... on friday i resolved to be diligent and get a lot of work done over the weekend.

no work happened.

i did meet with jerilynn and finish our project for 3400, but that is the only time I even halfway thought about doing work. instead, i went out and played volleyball (possibly my least favourite sport) and got a sunburn. it was fun.

there is a lot of stuff I meant to do and didn't. I'm okay with that. I still have time. I can do it.

right now i'm redesigning Blank Publishing. I've decided that I need photoshop. It's the only way to get really nice designs and make them work. Dreamweaver is cool too, but without photoshop I can't imagine doing anything cool.

So... hey, dad, how much begging would it take for you to buy me photoshop? Pleeeease?

anyway. I've got lots more content to organize for my portfolio, but that's about all. as far as the design goes it's pretty set. The funny thing is... I'm already having ideas about redesigning it. But I'm making myself leave it alone at least until I turn it in. After that it'll be all mine to do with as I please. How exciting.

I don't know if I've found my place yet, but I'm feeling more confident every day. That's life I guess. You learn enough to get you through what you're going through, and then you always have to keep learning more. It never ends. And really, who would want it to?

I decided the other day that ignorance is bliss not because it keeps you safe from the horrible truths of the world, but because it allows you room to discover them. even the horrible ones are beautiful (just ask keats.)

okay, enough philosophy.

things to remember:
add 'back to top' link anchors for your long pages
make sure all your external links open have _blank targets. it just makes more sense.
write contextual paragraphs
no more playing volleyball or watching movies or skipping class until your projects are finished!

lots of stuff to do

I'm so busy!

It's good though. The pressure isn't killing me yet. I have lots to keep me occupied, and I'm learning stuff everyday. This experience is really huge and confusing and wonderful--knowing you're in up to your neck and that you'll have to work your hardest to come out on top of things.

Summer is going to be so nice after all this work. I won't have school, but I will have my internship and my catering job and it'll be nice. Hopefully a bit slower paced, but I still hope to learn stuff. I'm excited.

So... progress with my portfolio is going ...kind of. I'm trying to balance my webdesign work between Blank Publishing and my portfolio, but it's hard. I'd usually much rather work on the portfolio because it's real. But I need to get both of them finished, and since I plan to include the one within the other, it'd be good if both were pretty much perfect.

insanely busy

I was so concerned about getting my portfolio ready for the alpha testing today that I didn't have any time to blog. So this is late--

Dreamweaver can be really frustrating sometimes. I like it, and it really helps me with my design and doing things far more quickly than if i had to remember code and type stuff out, but sometimes I just wish it would behave. There are cool bits I had to leave out of this draft of my portfolio because I couldn't figure out how to make them work-- *mental note: ask rylish about library elements and css and junk

I made a lot of progress, despite Dreamweaver hating me. The template finally worked, and I was able to apply it to oodles of pages without trouble. i just hope updating it is just as simple...

I added lots of content and have lots more to add... *mental note 2 : ask rylish about file formats and junk.

I didn't end up messing with flash at all, like I thought I might want to do. However, i'm not ruling out the possibility of adding it later... I still have my artwork/illustrations to think about. mental note 3 : ask rylish about that too...maybe...

This morning in Web Design we're learning buttons and pop up menus. Very interesting. The complexity of this stuff makes me a little nervous... but maybe I'll try it on my Blank Publishing site.

problems of all sorts

so, i'm trying to sort out my final design for my portfolio. i thought it'd be relatively simple. After spending two and a half hours playing around with Photoshop I had a nice design all laid out. How hard could it be to transfer that into html?

Pretty hard. At least far more complicated than I ever ever imagined. I wasn't even sure where to start until I talked to my old friend miss genius webdesigner [her latest work here] and she started talking about slicing your Photoshop image and sectioning it up into tables... This was confusing. It took a good two hours of explanation and mistakes before I got a halfway decent-looking layout up in Dreamweaver. Here is the first draft:

crummy first draft { edit 18November2009 : removed old, broken link }

Anyway, with a little more help I fixed the horrible alignment of those graphics, but I haven't uploaded the fixed version yet.

My next step will be finding out where the tail of the 'y' is trying to run away to and then putting in the rollover images I want to use for the navigation. I hope it goes more smoothly... although probably when it's not ten p.m. and my contact lenses aren't driving me crazy, I'll be able to make more progress with less stress. And of course there is class on Thursday when I'll hopefully be able to make use of rylish and his expertise, not to mention that of my classmates.

This sure is a learning experience. Just when I get fooled into thinking it won't be that hard, I get stuck and have no clue where to go next. I'll get better though... I want it badly enough.

As for chapter 14 and 15 in the Non-Designer's Web Book, I read them. I shall have to remind myself to type up the quizzes sometime tomorrow.....