Comment, spam, etc to the usual places.

In some respects this now makes the site look much like any WordPress site on the iPhone, especially since WordPress.com has this plugin installed & enabled by default, but the benefit of the design and additional functionality is well worth the trade-off of appearance.

It was all the better for the site to be one of the hand-crafted ones, where you knew that someone had to spend time creating the latest “entry” page by hand, updating the archives page. Those based on a dynamic updating platform had a curiously flat appearance to them, all “posts” the same in some respect or another… and yet there was an undeniable appeal, the simplicity of not having to upload, the ease of automatic archiving – and the brilliance of RSS, all for (practically) free.

All you had to do was learn the template.

And then people (ok, at least I) got lazy. There were better designers out there, and they were giving away templates as they played with new layouts – CSS had arrived, and there was experimentation to be had. And then it got accessible – anyone could do it, technical skills or no.

For a time, it was good. People were experimenting, the format was evolving, and there was a whole net out there to be explored.

After that time, it got staid. Everyone had a blog, a flickr account, a myspace page, and a facebook profile. And along came tumblr, tempting with its short-form updates. Youtube provided a diversion into video blogging, and the multifarious podcasting tools for those who preferred audio. And then came the prodigal son, twitter, life in bite-size chunks of 140 characters.

Now, they’re all hungry, as the newly social internet runs on the back of that ubiquitous term, user-generated content. They ask you to Add a New Post, or What Are You Doing? or the latest prompt, What is On Your Mind?, as though the answers were being sought for anything other than page-views and the corresponding ad dollars.

Whatever happened to us?

So it is thus that I’m prompted for a redesign, one I’m flagging ahead of time in order for it to sink in to myself. A re-organisation away from the blog format, one where we return to the idea of a “home page”.

I no longer blog in the longer form about day-to-day things – I never had much to say, not being a diarist, and with the advent of twitter it entirely does away with the reason to post here for shorter items. The main thing I post here are the longer opinion/rant pieces, selected links I deem more interesting and noteworthy than simply appearing on del.icio.us, and finally reviews of movies, music, books etc.

None of these really make sense in a blog form – there’s no narrative continuity, no requirement for a timeline. The default archiving method has in effect fallen to being last-come first-served – and there’s no reason for it.

My most popular posts are the one where I detail the rules of the card game Sweep, and where I share a basic Indian recipe – neither of which is immediately obvious from the page you’re greeted with when you land on this site. It’s not that I want to particularly drive visitors towards these posts, but these are the ones that have become most useful to people, and there’s no reason Google should be the only “portal” in to my site.

Thus it falls to a redesign – as I mentioned, a re-ordering of how things work. Rather than allowing time to dictate the ordering and visibility of items, I’m going for a home page that returns more to the original use of the term. I’ll still utilise the tools available to me in the background, so RSS feeds, comments and the like should remain, but at first glance, things should feel a little more… hand-crafted.

In the mean time… keep a watch on del.icio.us, maybe.

Or was it ever a ‘homepage’?

I remember back in the day (10 whole years ago!), people didn’t have ‘blogs’, they had ‘home pages’. It was different for one reason: a blog you’re expected to update, and is supposed to be for people to look in. A home page, on the other hand, didn’t need to update for months on end (but that didn’t stop you from checking back every day if it was a really good home page).

But then… but then, the online diary, the web log came along, and the mishmash ended, and everyone transitioned to the blog. The extra bits of the home page – the carefully crafted, hand built HTML of pages past all gone, replaced by the march of time-stamps and updates to show you were still alive.

The borg of blogs hastened assimilation with the combined might of the blogging software and RSS essentially redefining and replacing the need for refreshing a home page, the need to revisit sites to see if something’s changed – you don’t go to the content, the content comes to you.

Let’s be honest – any blog might be a place to visit, but it’s by no means a ‘home’ you can wander in whenever you wish. ‘House page’ also doesn’t have the same ring to it. So somewhere along the way, I think we lost the homepage, the collection of random that constituted the online existence. I lost my list of links for a blogroll, and I’ve even lost that since in an effort at simplification.

It’s something I’m working to restore. I’m going to go back to the home page, the home over the blog alone. This will necessitate moving away from having WordPress do everything for me – for me to actually crank out an angle bracket or two again. It’ll probably break the ‘permalinks’ too, but it’s got to be done. It’s no longer a home, and I didn’t set out to do that.

Now, for me to actually go do something with it.

What say you to the prospect of a forum again? (Yes yes, I know, but I’m partial to forums okay?)

I’ve always been a little skeptical of tags, as it seems a little bit of categorical overkill, so for the moment I’m holding back, tagging posts but not showing the tags until I convince myself that they’ve got a point. Maybe I’m missing the point; tags are pretty useful over on flickr, and I’ve even embraced them somewhat on del.icio.us, but for some reason the blog seems like a last-bastion.

What else has been happening? Not too much. Spent half of today working, unfortunately – Reuters decided nigh on 4000 of their identification codes for stocks had to be changed this weekend, and so more than a few IT teams around the world would have been scrambling to change. To make things worse, some codes were reused. For example, on Friday, BAY.DE meant one thing (a bank of some sort) and on Monday, i’tll mean British Airways stock on the German exchange. Reuters, truly you are messed up.

Other than that, I’ve been using my tumblelog a little like Twitter, and that’s got me thinking if this twitter nonsense has any point; again, it comes back to the “overkill” theory, not to mention the sheer inanity. A blog might be a diary, but a twitter is akin to a running commentary – and who wants that? (Clearly a whole lot of people, though I would suggest the web geeks for the most part yet. Twitter will not get you laid. At this point.

I have a month to reenew pushingthesky. Should I?

The first thing I picked up on was that my designs overall have probably been slipping :) Back then, each page, each post was carefully crafted by hand, for without script-enabled hosting, what other method is there? And the other thing was that it wasn’t just a blog, it was a whole personal site, and that’s something that going down the blogging platform path takes away from you, I think. It does make a lot of other things a helluva lot easier (no need to FTP in every update, for one).

Here’s the second design (the first being no design :D) -

I had a splash screen! It was all the rage then, as I recall… Maybe just as I recall. But I like splash screens, dammit. I can’t find my v2 splash screen, but the hit parade below should be a nice little walk through my design history (thumbnails only, mostly for my sake). You may note an anime-ish theme running through the earlier designs.

Through the Glass Darkly

I used image smileys in this one

the dream onion – my first go at poetry (!)

“the freestyle sessions” was the name of blog section

Between the Field and the Sky

Hello iframes!

Did I mention how torturous the writing is on this blog? God, I hope this stuff isn’t preserved in the web archive or somesuch.

In Colour

The iframe had a yellow scrollbar in Internet Explorer

I particularly liked that last one, despite it being all kinds of horrible on the eyes, especially so at night (when I did most of my blogging). It adhered clearly to my principles of expressive design without the need for images to be spliced around. If you can’t design something with just pure HTML/CSS, you’re not really trying =P

occasional coarse language

This one is also one of my favourites

And version 7 (also a fav) was the last of the Mohicans hand-crafted designs. I was off to India at the end of 2003, and I wanted a way to be able to update without having to deal with FTP, and I found a solution. I’d long wanted to play with dynamic web languages (mostly PHP), and WordPress fit the bill (free, fairly hackable, PHP/MySQL). It also let me put a forum up and pretend that my site was some sort of hub for my bunch of friends =) Ah, the innocence of youth.

WordPress was very much in its infancy then, at version 0.72, though it was already growing and showing promise. There was no independent theme structure in those days, so the easiest way I found to plug it into my existing blog was to simply i-frame in the core loop, some straightforward CSS in place to make it all square. It worked seamlessly! =)

More designs followed yet – at the time, I’d been in lockstep with a few others, changing designs every season, and I had to keep the designs flowing. Version 8 can only be described as lazy, with no excuses (“old skool/the official lie”). Version 9, “Codename Eternity” (Winter 04), was an attempt at something vaguely Sci-fi themed.

(The unfortunate part of the early wordpress infrastructure is that themes weren’t seperable from the implementation, and this means that while I have the designs on file, it’d take a bunch of needless effort to try to revive it =P)

Version 10, “Occam’s Razor” (Spring 04), broke the seasonal mould – it continued past spring, mainly because I liked it so much. Initially supposed to be far more concept-based, a revolving door of images along a theme that was easily skinnable. This only happened once, for Christmas – suffice to say, the lack of a digital camera wasn’t helpful.

This came very close to running into the new year.

Version 11, codenamed “I/O” was a non-starter. Between working and hosting issues, my design never progressed beyond some prototype images and I ended up ditching it for Michael Heilmann’s funky new theme, K2, a sterling example of how a theme should be constructed but also an example of how a project can run away on you (development is still on going).

Version 12 was far more pragmatic a redesign, adding a third column of my own design to give a wide-body blog that was moving towards a kottke-esque link blog.

I was halfway through a new design (which would crop up again later, mutated) when Jeremy (friendlygrocer man) told me he was going to change things up, and dropped the hint that if I would care to move on…

Everything was going to be excerpts!

Thus the first rumbling of my own domain started around this point, and thus was the dke project retired for pushing the sky.

This first one went through three revisions itself – pushing the sky on the left? horizontal? on the right? – before I found the genius idea of putting it between the content and the sidebar. And then I looked at it and thought, “wow, that’s so…. white….” and I really couldn’t figure out where to put the colours into it. Interesting design exercise, though.

For some reason, I called the design above “ubermorgen” (“very morning” in German). I have no idea why.

This one was a lot more straightforward naming – “b+w”, and was one of those ideas that sounds really quite good in my head, but just doesn’t translate to paper (or screen, as it were). Again, my issue here became that if I introduced any colour, it would throw things off. I liked the little stripes I had going there though, as well as the translucent sidebar. Maybe in another life.

This, I think, was just about the shortest-lived design I had, as evidenced by the lack of any lorem ipsum in the content. I called it “Vert”, as the whole thing just seemed to want to scroll (maybe I should’ve called it “scroll”?). Again, an idea that worked really well in my head, but just didn’t quite pan out when I played around with it. It was all well and good to have the Really Big Textâ„¢ on the home page, but when you got to the content, it was a distraction, big and bold – so the title would have to translate to a smaller, horizontal one, and then you lost the branding impact.

And finally…

 

Out of the ashes of “Vert” was “Stripe” born. I played with the design a little, giving the giant header a black background like you see on the side of this design. And then, to make the colours mesh, I had to play around a little… and then the blue stripe emerged out of somewhere, and suddenly we were cruising, or at least on a path I liked. I dropped the orange in the title in favour of simplifying to a 3 colour primary palette, letting the brand define itself. Et voila, pushing the sky, version 4.