OK, yes. The site has done gone ugly. Not that it was necessarily beautiful before, but it’s even uglier now. Really, it’s not you — it’s me.

I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week at An Event Apart in Boston, a conference for web developers. Several luminaries in the web design and development field — people whose blogs I’ve been reading for years — presented talks, and the conference did exactly what it was supposed to do, what I’d hoped it would do: it got me re-energized about web development. I realized that I really do enjoy building websites, even if I’ve been more than a bit bored with the specifics of what I’ve been doing lately.

I hope to have more to say on this topic soon, but for now know that my site’s uglification is part of a project. One of the concepts I took away from the speakers at the conference was rooted in the Japanese term kaizen, or “progressive and continual enhancement.” That means…well, okay it means sort of the exact opposite of what I’m doing, but bear with me for a minute. Kaizen means I don’t have to pull down an entire design and start from scratch: I can make small, subtle changes over time. I’ve already begun doing this to Moviegeekz and Mother Mirth, Terry’s site.

For this site, though, of all my sites…I need to have my own design here rather than use a stock theme, which is what I was doing. So I scrapped that theme and I’m starting with nothing. I currently have no style or design on this site. And over time, I’m going to make progressive changes and build it up into something which hopefully won’t suck. I’m designing in the public eye, to some degree: I’ll put up here whatever I have whenever I’m done working on any particular bit. It won’t always look good — it sure doesn’t right now — but hopefully when I’m done it’ll be something I can be proud of. And I plan to document some of what I’m doing.

I have no idea how long this’ll take to do, especially since it’s not really my main focus. I won’t be offended if you read what I write here in an RSS reader for awhile. But I hope that the project will be interesting and that you’ll check in from time to time to see how it’s going.

• Congratulations to my buddy Jeff Newberry on the birth of his new son, Ben. Ben entered this world on April 9 and immediately rolled off an impassioned version of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s cover of “Little Wing” on the miniature Stratocaster Jeff paid dearly to have the doctors insert into his wife’s womb. I hear tell she was not happy about that procedure, and less happy to have to birth the guitar as well as her son, but obviously all worked out well in the end. Congrats, Jeff and Heather, and welcome to the world, Ben!
• Superhappy 38th to Tim “Timmy B.” Bishop, who carries in his head the entirety of the info what can be found at allmusic.com and then some. Only 731 more days until we get into whatever debauchery you decide is appropriate for your 40th, homes. You’d best get to plannin’.
• Want some help reading your way through the interwebs more quickly? Check out Spreeder, a handy little tool which scrolls chunks of text by your eyes at whatever size and speed feels comfortable to you. They’ve also got a handy bookmarklet so you can select a hunk of text, click the link and go straight to reading said hunk at speeds heretofore undreamed of by man. Or at, like, 500 words per minute, anyway.
• Next time I need a lawyer, I know exactly who I’m hiring to represent me: Lawyerbear.  Let’s just see the judge try to haul me off for contempt of court next time!  Ha!  Not with Lawyerbear on my side!
• I’m not sure I have much to add to the Kathy Sierra conversation that hasn’t been said to death already, but there’s one big question that’s been bugging me: why her? What about Kathy’s site — one which existed only to help its readers, to inspire them and help them create products that would work better for their users — could inspire the hatred and death threats that ended up directed toward her? She doesn’t seem to be a particularly controversial figure and didn’t put forth the kinds of vitriolic political screeds which engender flame wars, even modest ones — especially not when compared with so many other prominent bloggers toward whom these hateful people could have targeted their bile. I haven’t read enough on the topic yet, and I’ll admit that I don’t know all sides of the story (though the pro-death-threat side would have to work awfully hard to convince me of their rightness), so please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here. But from what I know of the situation, the answer seems to be: these people essentially destroyed a meaningful chunk of Kathy Sierra’s life because she’s a woman, and because they could. That sickens me. (I’m feeling a larger First Amendment post brewing. Stay tuned.)
• On a directly related note: The Blogger’s Code of Conduct? Yeah, good luck with that.  Getting more than a couple of bloggers to agree on anything is like counting grains of sand in the Sahara — practically impossible and ultimately futile.
• Also, this seems like a great time to link to one of the most insightful and profound Penny Arcade strips ever.

Last night at about 10:30, I told an exhausted and bedward-bound Terry I’d be coming to join her in bed very soon. I hadn’t realized when I said it that I was lying: by “very soon,” I apparently meant “shortly after 1 a.m.” I stayed up more than two hours longer than I’d intended because I was fervently feeding my newest addiction: I think I’ve become a Wikipediholic. [1]

I can’t seem to stop editing articles, or looking at my watchlist of recent updates to the articles I’ve touched, or searching for poorly written or poorly organized articles to improve. I’ll fix tense, I’ll fix spelling, I’ll remove speculation, I’ll clarify, I’ll reformat. I’ve even joined my first WikiProject: it’s about comic books, which I’m sure comes as no surprise to anyone reading these words.

I’ve been using the Wikipedia as a research resource for a couple of years, but I’d done very little article editing until recently; I wasn’t sure I could consider myself enough of an authority on any subjects to feel justified in contributing. My personality is such that I always tend to doubt myself, to wonder if what I think I know is true [2] — and I certainly don’t want to put incorrect information on the site, both because I don’t want to disseminate falsehoods and because I don’t want someone to correct me later and think me a raging dumbass.

But I decided I could safely contribute my vast stores of knowledge when I realized that there exist a great many people who clearly don’t share my belief that one should know what one is talking about before one contributes to the Wikipedia. And then I realized that the words thrown up by those people usually need some serious editing.

This practice of editing articles ties directly into one of the things I’ve always felt was one of my strengths: I’m frequenly better at improving something that’s been done poorly than starting something from scratch. As good a writer as I feel like I am, in some ways I’m an even better editor, and that’s a skill so much of the Wikipedia dearly needs. (I’m not as good an editor as my wife, of course… but then, very few are.) There’s also the fact that I’m nearly OCD with my fussing over things like formatting and structure [3], and so many of the users who add text to the Wikipedia don’t seem to care about those aspects of the articles at all.

It’s proving to be something of a learning experience and an adjustment for me, this whole egalitarian concept of the Wikipedia being a truly collaborative project, one where my words count for no more than anyone else’s. While I have no problem editing the hell out of someone else’s work (for I am, but of course, far smarter than they, no matter who the “they” in question may be), I don’t like being edited myself — even when the edits results in stronger work. It’s an ego thing. As much as I’d dearly love to, I can’t lock an article and say “Now that I have touched these words, no one else need do so ever again.” I change things, people change some things back or make others more to their liking, and I have to learn to be okay with that process.

I know I’ll be fine with it, of course; subjugating my ego for the greater good has never been all that much of a problem for me, no matter how much it might rankle at first. This is the thing, though, the thing that makes swallowing my pride a little easier: I feel like I’m contributing something — and I don’t just mean contributing to the Wikipedia itself, but contributing to the greater cultural conversation, even if that something so far isn’t all that big. In some small way, I’m helping to Get Information Out There. Anything I write here on Do or Do Not gets read by, at most, seventy or so people right now; anything I add to the Wikipedia (even if it’s not directly attributed to me) has the potental to be read by millions. That’s a pretty damn good feeling.

[1] Silly me, I thought I’d coined that word, but of course I didn’t — it seems there’s a great many of us Wikipediholics out there.

[3] I’m so bad about worrying over formatting that I’m not allowed to write using Microsoft Word anymore because I’ll spend more time tweaking the fonts and styles than I will actually, y’know, writing.

Against my better judgment, I now have my MySpace profile relatively complete. (Yes, thank you, I’ve noticed that I’m not a 15-year-old girl.)

My reasons for setting up the profile are couplefold:

1. Most of my friends from Florida are on MySpace, and that seems to be one of the main ways they keep in touch. For example, my insanely talented (and now Cali-ized rather than Florided) friend Steve (he of the Deadly Fists of Kung Fu video I posted here a few weeks back) has an acccount there, and I might actually keep in contact with him a little bit better if I know where I can consistently find him.
2. There seems to be some small opportunity to network effectively using the stupid site — there are several comic book writers I like who have accounts there and allow anyone to friend them. I seriously doubt anything will actually come from having, say, Warren Ellis on my MySpace friends list, but hey — it can’t be any less than the absolutely nothing that will likely happen otherwise.

MySpace is, of course, an Internet entreprenuer’s wet dream: the guys who built it launched the site in the summer of ‘03 and sold it two years later to News Corp for $580 frickin’ million. The people who programmed the site originally couldn’t possibly have known that their little community application was going to become one of the biggest phenomena on the web and one of the centerpieces of modern teenager culture, but that’s exactly what it is. At the time I’m writing this, MySpace is the fourth-most-visited English-language site in the world according to Alexa.

As a professional web applications developer, however, using MySpace feels like digging tiny barb-covered Mountain Dew-dipped daggers underneath the fingernails of my soul. It really and truly is a wretchedly put-together site. The usability and navigation are abysmal, and we can’t even get started on the entire “ugly design” ethos that MySpace empitomizes lest my frontal lobe catch fire. I can’t look at the site without thinking of all the things I’d have done differently if I’d built it. [1] But as part of my plan to Get My Name Out There And Network, I decided that I needed to swallow the bile rising in the back of my throat and start using MySpace, at least a little.

So any of you reading this who are willing to admit you have a MySpace page, let me know or just add me as a friend on your profile. I’ll tell Warren Ellis you said hi.

[1] Of course, who knows — the things I’d've done differently might’ve made for a better application but a less-popular site. It seems that MySpace’s rough-around-the-edges-ness is one of the reasons it’s so popular. My designer mind can’t quite wrap itself around that one, though.

The next stage in Google’s ongoing effort to become a full desktop-OS-in-a-browser: Google Spreadsheets. Supposedly you can upload your existing XLS docs (and CSV, of course, and probably other formats as well) and it will keep your formulas and formatting intact. And, because this is Google, you can share your spreadsheets with others and let your buddies edit your them — while you’re still working on them.

Is there any doubt at this point that Google’s intention is to launch it’s own web-based operating system? Between this app and their forthcoming word processing program, plus GMail and Google Calendar, they’ve gone a long way toward making Microsoft Office potentially obsolete. No wonder Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer throws chairs when his developers leave to work at Google.

Proof that yeah, just about everybody’s got a blog now.

Seen the new Yahoo! Maps? Much more Google Maps-like, but with some nice twists: I like the real-time traffic updates and the navigation box in the top right showing a larger-scale view of the area you’re looking at. Even more impressive is the ability to click on a particular step of directions from one place to another and see that segment highlighted on the map — very handy. It doesn’t have the satellite views that Google Maps does, but what it does do it does pretty damn well.

Okay, the idea’s decent enough: What will sports and the sports viewing experience be like ten years from now? That I’m cool with–how we viewers watch sports has changed quite a bit in the last ten years and is sure to change even more in the next ten.

But man, whoever put that project together needs to have their keys to the Internet taken away. Most of the featured “predictions” (quotes necessitated because I can’t imagine most of them were made with any seriousness, especially given that we’re only talking ten years in the future) were laughable and the Flash-based presentation itself was horrible, like the folks at ESPN found an intern in the production department, gave them a copy of the Flash software and some URLs to tutorial sites, slapped ‘em on the ass and told ‘em to let ‘er rip.[1] Awful, awful stuff.

The best part of the presentation was the predictions by Frank Gibeau of EA Sports, who seemed to have the most practical, most considered, most likely–and, honestly, the coolest–ideas for where the sports experience is going. Makes sense to me that the best ideas would be coming from the guy working in the video game industry, since they probably spend more time thinking about exactly how viewers take in sports than anyone else.

The graphic designer in me was all over part one of Typographica’s Best Fonts of 2005. These are all gorgeous typefaces (I especially liked Proxima Nova, Arrival and Vista Sans) that I wish were available for free, but of course they aren’t–these are professional-grade fonts and, as such, ain’t cheap. But they do make me want to go find some new fonts to use in those occasional design projects I undertake.

All of this reminds me that I’ve been meaning to mention how glad I was to find that I’m not the only typography geek I know. Upon reading that Microsoft was releasing a new batch of fonts that would be shipping with Windows Vista, a friend of mine installed his beta copy of Vista (he’s got an MSDN [1] subscription and so has a really, really early version of the software) just to get those fonts. That’s right, he installed an entire operating system (a bloated, beta Microsoft operating system, no less) so that he could get six new fonts–mainly, I think, just to get the new fixed-width font so he could use it in code editors.

Of course, I asked him to slip me the fonts, too. Consolas is so, so purty for editing code…

It’s also worth noting, if you’re into this kind of thing, that Windows Vista and the next version of Microsoft Office will also have a new font for its user interface, the first change since Microsoft began using Tahoma back in Office 97.

Official Friend of Do or Do Not Mister Snitch is accepting nominations for the Best Blog Posts of 2005. I’m not soliciting votes or anything here, believe me–just wanting to help get this contest out there. (Though if you wanted to vote for some of my more eloquent or more hilarious posts, by all means, feel free.)

Here’s what Snitch is looking for:

1) Something truly witty or milk-out-your-nose funny is always welcome. Everyone tries comedy, few do it well. 2) That unique piece of information or research that everyone’s looking for, but only one blog has. 3) An issue that everyone is discussing, but only one post nails. 4) An unusual subject that few attempt, and fewer do well. 5) An interesting use of language, such as an entire post in the form of a pallindrome, or an Ogden Nash ditty. 6) Something of great service or interest to the blogosphere. Perhaps a link to blogging tools or resources that everyone should know about. 7) A great comment thread. 8) Lightning in a bottle. A post that captures a moment. Something you’d stick in a time capsule. 9) Originality, inspiration, insight, foresight. If it’s touched by greatness, we want to know about it. 10) Anything compelling. When you’re drawn to something, and you know others will be, you don’t have to analyze it.

You can leave comments at that post or email him at mistersnitch [at] hotmail [dot] com if you so desire. So get on it!