Version 13
I shelved Long Pauses in 2010, soon after my daughter was born, because, frankly, the web had become boring.
To be continued . . .
In the nine years since I first read Denise Levertov’s poem “Making Peace” and pulled the words “long pauses . . .” from it, I’ve bought and sold two houses, changed jobs three times, and… To be continued . . .
Long Pauses Version 11
The variety of communications tools would be overwhelming but for the fact that my friends and I are engaged in what is essentially a single, extended conversation. It’s all come to feel perfectly natural.
The Day Job (Part 2)
Redesigning the UT Knoxville front page was the first step in an on-going overhaul of the university’s web presence. Step two went into effect today, when I officially released the design template for all colleges, departments, and units. Conceptually, this design was actually the greater challenge — much to my surprise.
Why It’s Been So Quiet Around Here
My office at work is fairly small. Windowless. Tidy. Lit by three underpowered lamps. Spartan. The back wall is dominated by a large dry-erase board that, for the past four months, has been covered in brown scribbles, which is a kind way to describe my handwriting. Sometime back in the fall I wrote myself a long to-do list on the board, and in the weeks since I have slowly but steadily crossed off each item. A brown stroke through each brown scribble. On Wednesday morning, just before 7 am, I erased the board.
Version 9.0
I had two main goals this time out. First, I wanted to return to the conventional blog format. As I said in my announcement of the last redesign, the widescreen format was an experiment — a usability study, really. And what I discovered was . . . it wasn’t as usable. Second, and more importantly, I wanted to stretch my CSS skills a bit.
Now in Widescreen
Welcome to Long Pauses (version 8.0). Consider this redesign a usability study.
Selling My Soul to Blogger
People who blog are, by their nature, archivists, and posts like this serve to capture a significant (relatively speaking, of course) moment of development. I found several such pages while digging through the archives and enjoyed revisiting them.
CSS Zen Garden
With my last reworking of Long Pauses, I attempted to rebuild its architecture from the ground up using CSS. Cross-platform and cross-browser problems stopped me dead, though. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, I’d open a page in Netscape or Safari and watch it all blow up.
Evolution
If you’re interested in adding multiple style sheets to your site, do what I did: read Paul Sowden’s excellent tutorial, then rip off his script.
Heavy Industries
Y0ung-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents is just about the coolest damn Website I’ve found in months. Finally, someone is doing something original with Flash — and by “original” I mean a backward glance to early-Godard all jumbled together with politics and sex and Blue Note jazz.
Speaking of Blogs
I spent Thursday afternoon with UT law professor, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit), and thirty or so other faculty and staff in a discussion of blogging and its potential impact on academic life.
New and Improved?
After a year of stubborn resistance, I finally knocked the HTML chip off of my shoulder and joined the Blogger world. Management of the blog itself — and of the archive, in particular — was becoming too great a burden and was detracting from my actual writing and posting.
Simple Design
But I’d like to think that it’s also because content is king, and the sharing of content is the only reason that the Internet continues to excite me.
New and Improved
With more than one hundred html documents, nearly three hundred images, and thousands upon thousands of words, Long Pauses was getting a bit unwieldy.