Month: October 2003

“Tim Bray is having trouble with print stylesheets”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/10/02/Print

alas, I can’t find any contact info on his site, so I’ll just make some notes here for the time being and maybe look for that later. (I’m one to talk, right?)

1) it seems to me that almost all browsers have issues with background images/colors and printing. in IE, there’s a checkbox in options which is checked off by default that controls whether backgrounds are printed. it’s generally safer just to go with a dark color and give up on a background image. (those of us who occasionally use b&w laser printers will thank you.)

2) setting multiple alternate stylesheets is a weird, weird business. I wish I could remember exactly how that came out in the css-discuss list, but it’d be a pain in the ass to hunt for now. I’d go back to media=”print” and just bite the bullet and override all the bits you don’t want from the screen stylesheet. in the long run, it comes out much less funky. so to speak. (especially since in my copy of mozilla, the page loaded completely unstyled!)

3) I’m vaguely confused by some of the styles in the print stylesheet…once you’ve declared something as display: none; there’s really no need to add any other styles for that element (or whatever).

then again, IANASW(I am not a stylesheet wizard). or maybe I am…it’s hard to tell, some days.

darn easy to set up. pain in the ass to add all the blogs on my blogrolling list, but I don’t know if there’s anything else that could be done for that. I don’t especially care for the “detail” view (I don’t know exactly what it’s called). What I really want in the new items view is just to see the titles, not the entries. I really prefer to read the entries in their “native” environment. it irritates me enough that I might actually have to dig into the code to find how it does that bit…and then change it.

after a little more looking around…. it would be cool if you could import the blogroll as opml. but it’s a little late for that for me now.

so getting rid of the detail turned out to be really, really easy. it’s cool knowing the language your tool is written in.

not auto-subscribable thru feed on feeds (strikethroughs could be added manually):

* webgraphics
* memex
* kottke
* windley
* signal v. noise
* rebecca blood
* flummel
* big white guy
* there is no cat
* gus
* evhead
* talking points memo
* anita
* stavros
* is that legal?
* greater democracy
* accessify
* lisa strange
* orcinus
* fontlover
* kat
* both of joe clark’s active blogs
* anitra pavka
* red/photolog
* design desk
* erica (currently)
* made for all
* coggeshall
* modulo 26
* interaction designer’s coffee break

some I can probably add by hand, but some I’ll have to put on a separate “check manually” list.

I decided to try out the basic display, and so help me, I think I like it. in case you missed it, I’ve been reconfiguring this blog so it matches the look of the rest of my site. I’ve got that pretty much under control now. 🙂

but I’m thinking, vaguely, about a design upgrade. the “linking goodness” list is just way too long. (yes, I’m considering removing my blogroll to a separate page again, just like in my very first site. ah, nostalgia. only now it’ll all be scripted, no manual labor needed.) and all the meta-stuff for the movable type blogs is a little unwieldy, esp. if I want the main focus to be the words & links.

plus, I get bored. y’know?

I’m wondering how my journal-style blogging will be affected by the switch in software, especially since I’ve used mt for something like 9 months primarily for blogging of the link-comment variety.

I’m finding myself wanting a larger font, for one thing (god I’m getting old) and a window that stretches across more of the screen, for another. I want the post button closer to the entry box, too. (I actually know how to do that one already.) I’m wondering how or if I should be using the extended entry box or the excerpt box and how to build my archives beyond the duplication of what blogger gave me. what about categories?! Then there’s the whole RSS (etc) question…but then we’re getting beyond what it does to the writing, I think. or are we?

there’s always been something simple about the format of “emergency weblog” — I actually sort of resisted adding titles, because it was too formal. I wanted, and still want, something that’s almost an analog of my paper journal, which eschews all structure to be just words (and sometimes little sketches) on paper. blogger was just the big box with the button above it…this is…more like an application, “real” software that can be endlessly configured and fiddled with. will that take away from the rush of just writing, albeit more of a performance than my paper journal.

(aside: is my paper journal any less a performance? I was explicitly inspired by journals/diaries which had been published, most notably Anais Nin, and in my more vainglorious days, dream of my journals leaving some sort of record of my life and my writing. I think I’m still writing to be read, just with the assumption that I’ll either be dead or really famous or both by then.)

hmmmmm.

it’s been an intense afternoon. sometimes people really surprise you in wonderful ways. I don’t know how much I can or should write beyond that.

(and then greyson called, and said “sometimes good things happen to good people” and that was just about what I needed to hear at that exact minute.)

this weekend might be a bit of a bumpy ride as I get this blog resettled into MT. yep, I finally went ahead & did it. I even integrated in my old blog from before Febrary 2002! (more than 1000 entries altogther, but they imported quite smoothly. more on that later, I think.)

I’ve got the basics down (importing entries and setting the archive links), but there’s so much more to do….