Less Is More

Firstly, many thanks to Steve for the cool graphic on the left. The guy’s a Photoshop wizard, and some of the stuff he comes up with is pretty mindblowing. I think he’s got a full cool quotidient.

Secondly, I realised I wanted to use Movable Type instead of Wordpress for this blog. Why?

1. Multiple blogs - I really like the idea of being able to have blogs for different sections of my life - think thoughts vs personal life, with maybe one for linkage (a la Airbag ). Wordpress doesn’t let me do this straight out of the box, although I don’t know if there are any customisations out there.

Actually, that’s the only reason I can think of, although it’s pretty compelling given what I want. However , here’s a list of reasons why I’ll probably stick with Wordpress:

1. Ease of setup. With WP, I configured one PHP file, created an SQL database, and it was all done. Easiest. Setup. Ever. I had a read of the installation instructions for MT. I don’t know what Perl is (well, I have a vague idea), let alone how to use it.
2. Standards - WP makes a point of emphasising how it’s standards-compliant - everything validates first time. I see no such claims on MT’s site, which is worrying given that I’ve really jumped on the standards bandwagon. Well, not so much jumped as snuck onto and then hung onto grimly for dear life, but I like standards, and I love being able to be snobby and geekish at the same time. Plus, I actually find tableless layouts with CSS easier than nested tables. Go figure.

If I were cynical, I might suspect that the difficulty in installing MT was in order to make more people purchase a version and have it installed, rather than get the free version and have to do it themselves. Or perhaps it’s primarily aimed at a geekier market - however, the discussion of a plugin that converts text to XHTML thus allowing “non-technical writers to produce valid XHTML” sinks that argument.

I suppose the question is - do I want to spend $70/£40 on blogging software when I have a free version?

John Peel died today in Peru . The guy was a legend among radio listeners in the UK - he’d been with Radio 1 (the national radio station from the BBC) since the beginning, and was responsable for launching the careers of dozens of influential artists, and probably hundreds more who didn’t make it as big. His gravelly tones could be found promoting bleeding-edge bands in the evening, even more so than his younger counterparts.
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I’ve pretty much completely stripped down the whole look and feel of the blog now - I started a completely new stylesheet, and quickly sorted out basic positional issues. Hence the white, awful look at the moment. But never fear, as an image is forming in my mind of the eventual look and feel of the site. The trigger? The picture you see in this post. Yellow and blue. The colour scheme just seemed so striking , and maybe even a tad unique (although I realise that both Dan Cederholm (whose book I’m ordering on Amazon right about now) and Andrei Herasimchuk also use yellow/orange to good effect).

I think it’s important to have a good image of what you want your site to look like - after all, whilst it’s nice to play around with the look of some things (say, link styling) as you go, it’s a pain to keep going back to the CSS and changing the property for the umpteenth time, and even more so the layout. But maybe that’s just me. As I see it, there’s an element of creating a brand - a personal brand, but a brand nonetheless - with any site you use personally. I guess it’s an imprint of your personality - or maybe I’m getting carried away. Nevertheless, Damien Newman’s article in the first Design In-Flight hit a chord, and outlines it well: