maniacal rage

Another month, another design. I'm calling this one Techno Tuesday (apologies to the excellent comic strip) because of the font choice—it's AUDimat—and because I started on it last Tuesday night. This iteration plays around with some elements that I used in the Summer Blues design a while back, specifically the fixed column that contains navigation and such (only this time it's on the left).

This is the first design of my site to use sIFR. I tend to dislike sIFR, but I wanted the permalinks to be in AUDimat and that was the only simple way to do it. It should be easier by now, but at least this works for the most part. Implementation wasn't that much fun and I probably won't use it again except for a specific case like this.

This design was inspired by "A Sea of Red", a photo taken by the extremely talented Cindy and posted to Flickr. When I saw the photo last week I immediately wanted to use it as the basis of a design and went to work. Thankfully, Cindy gave me permission to use it and it has been abstracted into the background of this new design.

If you want to view the site in a more simplistic fashion, the "toggle high contrast" option from the previous two designs has been changed to a "toggle background" function in this design. You can find the link in the footer of every page—it will remove the background image. It actually looks pretty nice on plain white too.

Speaking of Half-Life², I've just refreshed the color scheme here on the site to a palette inspired by the game. In fact, it's more than just inspired—the background image is derived directly from a screenshot (manipulated, of course).

I've always been a fan of the steel and orange look of the HL series, so I figured I'd give it a shot here for a while. I might continue on this theme and pull some more color variations out of the game in the near future.

And note: This color variation still contains the "invert colors" feature, which might make it easier to read for those of you who prefer dark text on light backgrounds. You can find the invert colors option in the footer of every page. It will set a cookie as well, so you don't have to keep clicking it. Of course, clicking it again will set your colors back to normal.

The primary reason I redesigned yesterday was to get back some of the simplicity I started with after my reboot in 2005. People who know me (especially in the web development realm) know that I like to talk about simplicity a lot. It's the base of all of my thoughts on web and application design and I always strive for very simple things that work well.

"Simplicity" should not be confused with "lacking" or "incomplete."

For what they are, weblogs can become complicated very quickly. We're talking about a collection of writing (interspersed with photos, links and such from time to time), and yet I'll frequently see weblogs that have three or more columns. If you have two sidebars, you're probably complicating things.

My primary interest in running this site is to write. I've noticed the more random stuff, structure or layout metaphors I add to the site, the less I write. And usually, the writing is more fractured, unfocused and sloppy.

In 2005, I banished all the old content and started anew with an extremely simple layout. No comments, no archives, no titles, just searching and content. Over the past two years, I've slowly crept back to complication and this is an attempt to get back to that better place.

I said it back then and I'll say it again: Getting rid of post titles and comments is the best thing you can do for your content. I've been without comments for over two years and I don't ever plan on bringing them back. I turned titles on for the last design and immediately regretted it. I am so thrilled they're gone again.

If you like the background image of this new design (which, by the way, I've referred to as "rainbow brite"), then you might want to download a higher-resolution version for your desktop.

Get them while they're hot.

I've also included an iPhone wallpaper, which is also now available in the iPhone wallpapers section of the site as well.

Update: I've uploaded a new zip that contains two more sizes: 1440x900 and 2560x1600.

I've redesigned again. It's getting to the point where even if people like the new design, they get angry. Apparently, redesigning on an average of every three months for two years is a little much.

When I look back at the archive of recent designs, I remember each design lasting for a lot longer than it did. I think my problem is that all the work I spend on each design adds invisible length, so by the time I release it I feel like it has already been a month. I tire of designs quickly. And so I start again.

The irony is that I don't consider myself a designer. I say that all the time. People will approach me for design work and I will say, "Sorry, I'm not a designer. I can't do that." I think what I have to finally admit is that I am designer—but only for my own stuff.

To give you a good example of the kind of feedback I get now when I redesign, consider this conversation I just had with Sean Madden:

Sean: Goddamn you and your new design.
Me: Well, it had been more than a month.
Sean: I'm not sure whether to be angry or relieved.
Me: EXACTLY.

Which sort of sums it up. I promise, I'm not redesigning just to anger you. Well, at least not most of you.

I'm undesigning for a little while. I know... I'm insane. I just need a clean slate here and I plan to mess around with various things as I start ramping up SimpleLog 3.0 in the near future. Sorry for the visual mess—things will change around here soon again, I'm sure.

The plan, as I see it, is to redesign every few weeks until every last person I know calls me on the phone and yells at me. I'm getting close to fulfilling it. This is the third redesign in as many months. I gotta say, for not being a "designer," I sure to seem to enjoy it sometimes.

This design (which I've dubbed "bonsai") is based on a photo I took recently at the BBG. In fact, almost all of my recent designs have been based on photos. I guess that's where most of my inspiration comes from.

You'll note, if you've been a good little visitor, that this design melds a little of the textured background design from a while back with the newer layout of the previous design ("commie" as it was called). What can I say—I like to iterate.

In all honesty, I really liked the previous design (which is why the layout stayed), but I felt like it was time for a lighter design for the summer and once I took that photo of the bonsai tree I knew I had to redesign.

I just redesigned. Again. It's been, what, about 19 days? Yeah, that's long enough. It turns out the previous design was just too different for me. I loved it for the six hours I worked on it but as soon as it went live, I began to dislike it.

I started playing with this design while at SXSW after grabbing some colors from a photograph I took at the bowling event. Yeah, the photos I've yet to upload. I know.

I completely stole the idea of the navigation dimming from Meg Hourihan, although my method doesn't use an imagemap and it will still work without images/css enabled, so it's a little more bullet-proof.

It's good to be back to a more me-esque design. I feel better already.

It was time for a change around here, design-wise. Here's the next version of Maniacal Rage—I call it Pink. Granted, it's more purple, but okay, yeah, I know.

It's very different than recent designs. It's left aligned. It uses some graphics (and a big huge background image that might load slowly for you the first time). Graphics? Wow. It's been a while.

I don't know how long it will last, but occasionally I get an itching to change everything and that happened last night around 10PM, so here we are. Have I told you how much I love SimpleLog and its easy to create themes? Well, I love them a lot.

If you're using a newsreader, you might want to hit the site to see the new design. As always, I welcome your feedback (good, bad or otherwise).

I've just upgraded this site to the newest beta of SimpleLog version 1.5 to test out some of the new features in a more real-world environment. As part of that upgrade, I've changed the design to something I've been working on on and off for the past few weeks alongside developing the app itself. If you're using a news reader, you might want to visit the site to see what looks like now.

This design is a work in progress, and I'll be making tweaks as time goes on, in between work on the new version of SimpleLog.

A few things of note about this design (and version 1.5 of the app as well):

• It should be significantly faster to load, due to the massive speed-up in version 1.5.
• SimpleLog now has "static" page functionality, which I've used to create an about page.
• The text is much, much bigger. Looking at the old design before, I thought the text was sized just fine, but when I started working on this and made it larger, I realized just how small the text was before. It felt tiny. This text is much larger and I love it. I actually might make it even bigger in the long run.
• Yes, it's a dark background with light text... sorry, but I like this better than black on white. Black on white hurts my eyes. I code in dark on dark, and I prefer to read dark on dark. I'll probably create an alternate stylesheet that's inverted for those of you who want it. Probably.

Redesigning is fun. I really enjoy it. I used to do it a lot more, but it takes time and it kills everything else (I never post when I'm redesigning because I'm too busy redesigning to post). Now that it's done I look forward to wrapping up this version of SimpleLog and releasing it (oh, and writing more here too).

If you're reading this in a newsreader, you won't notice but I've just changed the color scheme. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but didn't get a chance until today.

I loved the previous scheme, but it was time for a change. Feedback is, of course, welcome and appreciated.

I've finally had a chance to switch this site over to my new weblog application, SimpleLog. We're only a few days from release to the public, and things are looking good. Feedback has been very positive and I'm excited to release this into the wild.

In the mean time, it's nice to have the new app in place here, since its administration section is leaps-and-bounds better than my previous version and it's much more fun to post now.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of this transition is that my RSS feed will show up as new for everyone. Sorry about that.

I need to build future posting into this system so that I can write stuff and have it auto-publish and ping and such at a certain time, because I go in these ridiculous bursts where I want to write ten entries at once but don't want to spam the site all at the same time. The other side of this is that if I don't post all ten, I forget about them and never get to it. Future posting would solve this.

A while back I posted a screenshot on Flickr of what this site looks like in Safari. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's really quite different going from home to work (where I'm on a PC for now). I miss the nice shadows under the text and that smooth OS X anti-aliasing.

Speaking of kind readers, I came across some flattering comments about this site from Jason Morehead at Opus this morning:

I've never met an abstract background image I didn't like, and [Garrett] Murray's choice adds just the right touch of atmosphere to the site without harming readability (and the subtle text shadowing is a nice touch—if you're using Safari, that is). The color choices are simply magnificent, and let's hear it for CSS' ability to control opacity levels. Again, it's all about atmosphere and subtlety, and me likey. Me likey a lot.

You can read the rest of his entry if you wish. Thanks, Jason!

I switched the feed for the site from Atom 1.0 back to RSS 2.0 because of a few issues people were having:

1. You have to be running the latest version of NNW for Atom 1.0 support. Seemingly, older versions just don't show the feed at all. This caused a bit of a problem since most of my feed subscribers use NNW and not all use the absolute latest version.
2. 9rules' site is only capable of parsing RSS 2.0, not Atom (yet).
3. It was easy to switch (RoR is great!) so I just went ahead and did it.

Later on I'll push Atom 1.0 support back out but for now this is safer.

Oh, and before I forget—I've gotten a few complaints about the message IE readers receive at the top of every page. I just want to apologize to any of you who get the message when you're on a public or work computer that you can't install a better browser on (there are only two of you who have complained about this), but it's a necessary evil to have the message there. IE must die.

On a related note, two people complained about some issues with this site in Opera and I just want to say, politely, that I don't care. Opera is totally and completely useless as far as I'm concerned and while I value you as a person getting to make up your mind as to what you do and such, I disagree with your choice and hope one day you see the light. I mean, a browser with ads? Ridiculous. Wait, a browser with ads that renders pages differently than the other major standards-compliant browsers? Oh, goodie! Where can I sign up and, until about a month ago, pay money for it? Yuck. Double yuck. I understand that it doesn't have ads anymore and it's free now, but that doesn't make it good. Seriously, it doesn't.

It's not that I hate browsers other than Firefox/Camino and Safari/Omniweb, it's just that I hate browsers that don't render things correctly and require tweaking and patches and crap like that.

One of the reasons I wasn't posting a lot of entries on the site before this new RoR version was that the CMS I built wasn't working. Adding a new post required using phpMyAdmin and manually creating tag associations as well as creating a Markdown version of the content as well. It was a pain. I used to have a fully-functional CMS, but it broke when we moved to PHP5 at Segpub and I never bothered to fix it. So for the last year or so, I've been entering posts via the database itself, basically. And it was cumbersome.

Another issue was always having to think of titles. I hate thinking of titles. I don't want to do it anymore. The new site doesn't have them (technically, it does, you just never see them because they're for my reference only—this entry is called "Pooping Out Bananas") and I love it. No pressure. This goes hand-in-hand with the whole one-entry-on-the-index thing I started with the last design, which nearly immediately killed the site. Having only one entry on your index page at any given time is ballsy—it requires that you actually have good content that can last for several days, something that's, well, nearly impossible in this medium. I would find myself looking at an post 20 minutes after I published it and already being pissed off at the stale feeling it gave me. It's one thing for a long piece of fiction, but when it's just some nonsense about nonsense then, well, it's annoying.

And then there's the lack of comments. I must say, I fucking love it. I don't have to worry about saying something so fantastic that you'll feel obligated to respond, and I don't have to worry when you don't. Clearly, you're here—I still get plenty of hits a day—and if you want to say something you can send me an email (there's a link in the info section) and I'll respond.

This new format feels freeing and suddenly I'm writing without worry or responsibility. Stripping away everything but the most basic of content has given me an internet boner for this site which, effectively, is the same thing as a real-world boner except that it's really shiny and keeps beeping. See, no responsibility at all.

Things are a bit messy now, after the move. I've got lots of little things to fix and tweak so for a few days things will be in disarray. Such is life. Truth be told, I'm actually sort of enjoying having no content on the site. It feels like a huge weight as been lifted from my shoulders.

The main feed is working but it's Atom 1.0, so some feed readers probably aren't showing it correctly. You should upgrade, not just for me but because Atom 1.0 is now the standard and it's good to have the latest thing, blah, blah, why am I trying to convince you? I'm not sure.

My replacement 5g iPod shipped today, as soon as I get it we'll make iPod video formats of our short films for everyone.

Hold tight, pal.

This is a new version of Maniacal Rage, built in Ruby on Rails. The old stuff is gone (well, technically, it's still available in the graveyard—look there if you want to). Things are about 95% simpler. There is no archives page. There are no monthly archives. You can find things by tag or by permalink, or by searching. Find all those options in the small information area on each page (you can get to it quickly by clicking the site's title up there).

You'll need to update your feed subscriptions, sorry. See below for new addresses (or use the auto-detected link in your browser [most have this now]).

There are no comments yet. They might come back, I don't know. For now, let's do it old school and you use the email link on the page to send me any feedback you have. I'll respond, probably.

Yeah.