Why Dont You Blog?

Infinite thanks to the people who’ve taken the trouble to comment on the downward spiral that is this blog’s theme. It has been a great help.

And an apology is for the fact that the redesign is interfering with there actally being any readable content.

On a “while the cat’s away” basis I’ve done some theme hacks that will bring down the wrath of TW for being deprecated and/or non-compliant (negative margins, for instance. I’ve havent cracked and used tables yet.)

I think that it works in ie6 at 100% and doesnt degrade too badly when you shrink the window.

Havent even broached ff yet so it may get rebuilt in the next few minutes and I am pretty fearful of what will happen on mobiles.

Short, administrative, comment for now. We have added some new plugins (for example the “sphere” one you can see at the bottom of most posts) and will be trialling a new theme over the next few days. Please let us know what you think – your feedback is always welcome.

I have tried to hold off commenting on this month’s issue of .Net magazine. In recent months, the magazine has been showing signs of greatness and some of the recent articles have been inspirational and educational.

Not this time.

Generally speaking, the May 2007 issue (number 162) is completely dull. The cover articles range from potentially interesting “The Power Of Type” to ones you know will be dull, namely “Can the Web save the world?” Forgive me, I never realised I’d bought the Economist by mistake….

The saving the world article is about the OLPC project. This is a project to get children in the third world laptops. I am going to steer clear of any potentially dangerous topics, but I can’t help but think that giving them food, water, shelter and the like would be a lot better. Giving them laptops (and I assume net access) is not going to feed them. I hope they are English speakers as well…

For a while I thought there was some webdesign links to the OLPC, but as the site appears to be unavailable, I can’t confirm. Suffice it to say, it struck me as three pages of filler content.

The filler content thing seems prevalent this month. Reading the magazine I got the definite impression that, although a magazine had to be published, they had nothing to say. Every one of the articles is excessively wordy, and the use of pages of graphics has reached new highs. The “advice” section is pretty poor, for example the graphics teach you how to design a type face. This basically consists of write the text you want, scan it in and use it… Seriously (4 pages though). In the “Expert Advice” there is a box out titled Understanding ID and Classes. I defy any one who doesn’t already understand them to understand them after reading this…

All in all, this is certainly not an issue of the magazine which you read and then run to the computer, fire up Dreamweaver (or Bluefish) and get coding. Even the reviews section is sparse. If I wasn’t a subscriber, I wouldn’t have bought this in the shop.

As you may have noticed over the last few weeks, we have been trying out new themes for the blog (the joys of WordPress).

It looks like this is the one we are going to settle on, and it will remain in use for the next few days. Can you take a moment to let us know what you think please? Good and bad comments are welcome here.

If you haven’t already seen the news on the CompuSkills Web design blog, there is a new “parent” site for Why Dont You under construction.

This site is expected to be ready by July this year, and will be the home to a variety of articles on some of the topics we blog about here. We are aiming to include quite a bit on philosophy and logic, and possibly expose some of the more common fallacies people fall prey to.

You can see the design of the site as it it evolves on the CompuSkills design testbed – if there is anything you would like to see, or something you would like to know about let us know.

Thanks to a link on the “past thinking” blog I found out about some very interesting software produced to create 3D models. So far it looks VERY cool – I have not had time to check it out properly but I will do so soon.

One of the most interesting things about this is, is the ability it has to link into Google Earth maps – potentially great fun.

You can find out more about this at http://www.sketchup.com/.