2007.02.21
Posted in This Site at 7:15 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I’ve always more or less followed a set of unwritten rules about the articles I post to this weblog. Until now, I’ve never really taken a step back and examined those rules and their impact on the site. Nor have I singled out the exceptions to these rules for further dissection. It is now time to do both of those things.
As best as I can determine, here are the rules which I have been abiding by:
Rule 1: All content must be written by me, Jeremiah Wittevrongel.
Rule 2: I cannot post anything I would not freely acknowledge as my own.
Rule 3: I cannot post anything which is either illegal or would violate my own morals and ethics.
Rule 4: I cannot knowingly misrepresent myself.
Rule 5: I must adhere to W3 standards in the construction of this weblog.
These self-imposed rules all stem from a desire to take advantage of the Primacy and Recency effects. This weblog is the first result returned by Google whenever someone searches for “Jeremiah Wittevrongel”. It’s their first impression of my digital self. In addition, because the content on this weblog is presented in reverse chronological order, the first thing someone sees is going to be the most recent post on the weblog. Every post is thus doubled in importance from a psychological standpoint. Thus every post needs to accurately reflect myself while also seeking to leave a generally good first impression. All five rules target this goal. This is not a pseudonymous weblog; I publicly present all of the content as my own, and so I need to have some guidelines in place. Even something as simple as following W3 standards is important, since the technically-minded among my readers will take notice.
These rules do have an interesting effect, though. Certain topics are completely or mostly taboo on this weblog. A quick glance at the politics category indicates that this is so – I seldom choose to voice any sort of political opinion here. There are also several aspects to my life which receive absolutely no comment here, and I believe my reasons for this decision are sound.
This form of self-censorship raises an interesting question: by self-censoring, am I violating Rule 4? Is omission tantamount to misrepresentation? Or is this merely a by-product of the inevitable editing process? I’m leaning toward the latter, but perhaps not everyone agrees. There are a number many myspace profiles out there that reveal a lot more about their owners than this weblog does about me. In my opinion, some of them go too far in terms of personal information.
Perhaps it all boils down to this: since this is my weblog, I can set rules that I’m comfortable with. In and of themselves, the rules are representative of who I am. Within the framework they provide, I can feel comfortable about my content, and feel good about posting it. That’s what really matters.
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2006.12.28
Posted in In the News, Technology, The Web, This Site at 6:37 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Suppose you’re out to buy a new car. You’re kinda partial to Japanese cars, and you’ve done a bit of research, and you’ve narrowed it down to two options:
- A Honda Civic
- A Toyota Corolla
Both cars fit your criteria. You just have to pick one. Here’s the $1,000,000 question: which of the following would pull more weight with you?
- A paid television advertisement for the Honda Civic, which highlights the excellence of its engineering and how fun it is to drive.
- A trusted friend’s informal, unsolicited review of her Toyota Corolla, which she absolutely adores and can’t stop gushing about.
If you picked B, you’re a winner. Or rather, Toyota is the winner, since you’re busy driving your brand new Corolla.
Here’s the catch. Everybody knows this. Even slow, lumbering multinational corporations have figured this out by now. And so the marketing departments now have some new pages in their playbooks.
Recently, there have been a couple of news items that illustrate the emerging trend of using weblogs as marketing tools:
- Sony has admitted that the website http://alliwantforxmasisapsp.com/ (seemingly now offline) was a fraud, created by a marketing firm that Sony hired.
- More recently, Microsoft gave brand new laptops loaded with Windows Vista to prominent bloggers as gifts. This action has caused at least one blogger to reconsider the ethics of accepting gifts from vendors.
Going back to the original question, there are two key phrases in option B that are the focal points of the new marketing plays: trusted friend and unsolicited review. By creating alliwantforxmasisapsp.com, Sony was looking to trade on the unsolicited review bit. Rather than having a slick, professional, corporate marketing website that just oozed Sony, they tried to create the illusion of an average Joe who was in love with the portable gaming device. On the internet, people sometimes pay more attention to weblogs that appear to be impartial than they do to the manufacturer’s own site. They’re looking for the real dirt, not the corporate line.
Microsoft was trying for a double-whammy – trusted friends giving unsolicited reviews. There are many bloggers who are rather influential with the tech set, and by giving them free review laptops with no obligations whatsoever, Microsoft was hoping that the bloggers would nonetheless feel obligated to write some sort of positive review of Windows Vista. These influential bloggers could easily have a significant impact on the general internet buzz surrounding the launch of Vista.
This whole mess has caused me a moment’s reflection about things I’ve blogged about. Just the other day I was raving about Solio. In my case, I didn’t buy a Solio, but it was a Christmas gift. Furthermore, and I’m sure nobody at Better Energy Systems Ltd. has even noticed that my weblog even exists, let alone has a positive review of their product. I don’t feel any ethical qualms since I’m fairly sure that the person who gave me the gift had no idea I would even want to write about it on my weblog. And as a personal thing, that’s the way I intend to keep things – all of the stuff I write is my own opinion. It hasn’t been bought via bribes yet.
Though I’m not sure I agree with the position Joel Spolsky has taken on the issue. Even without him disclosing the fact that by reading his weblog I’m indirectly contributing to the “Joel gets a Hot Tub fund”, I already knew that. I don’t trust him any less (or any more) for disclosing that, and I still take everything he writes with a grain of salt (as I do with information source).
I suspect that if people generally had better critical reading skills, this whole new frontier of weblog marketing would be less of an issue; the issue would still exist, though, since many weblogs are being written more or less anonymously, and it can be tough to even discover who the source is, let alone evaluate their trustworthiness or authoritativeness. Surrogates like Google Pagerank are helpful as a guide for assigning trustworthiness, but as with everything, the hard work is still up to us humans. And luckily for the marketing companies, that probably won’t change anytime soon.
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2006.11.24
Posted in The Web, This Site at 12:07 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Now that IE 7 has been out for a little while, I decided it was finally time to fix a bug that this site had. Notably, the left-hand sidebar was missing in Internet Explorer 7.
The issue has mostly been fixed, although there is a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the screen that I have yet to get rid of.
I have to wonder whatever possessed Microsoft to break backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 while simultaneously failing to adhere to more of the CSS standards. I could understand the IE6 compatibility breakage if my stylesheet (which is happily rendered by many other browsers) worked in IE 7, but it doesn’t.
I can only imagine the screams of thousands of web developers who have to update their stylesheets with yet more crud to make sure that they render correctly in IE7 as well as IE6 and then all the other more standards-compliant browsers out there. How frustrating. Why can’t Microsoft get this right? Everyone else (Apple, the Mozilla folks, Konqueror, Opera, and others) seem to have far fewer problems with handling stylesheets. Microsoft’s full of very bright people, so why can’t they spend some time to get this right?
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2006.09.13
Posted in House and Home, This Site at 5:59 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
If you’re wondering why I’ve been unusually quiet for the past couple of weeks, it’s because my internet connection at home has been down. It’s back now. I’ve got a couple of posts queued up in TextEdit, and I’ll be posting them momentarily.
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2006.05.13
Posted in The Web, This Site at 3:24 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I’ve had several people comment on the fact that they quite like the design of my weblog, so I thought I’d write a bit about how the design came together.
First off, I wanted to make sure that the site validated as XHTML 1.0 at least, and that CSS was used to style the site where possible. I also wanted a weblog engine that was flexible, easy to maintain, and well-supported. WordPress was an obvious fit for me, because it allowed for very flexible templates, was capable of generating XHTML, and wouldn’t get in my way. As a bonus, it’s free (as in freedom) software.
OK, so now I’ve got the blog engine, but the default theme wasn’t really me. I found a theme I kind of liked (Ocadia by Becca Wei), but it still wasn’t me. For one, I wanted a 3-column layout, and I found the design a little to constraining to tweak to my liking.
So, I went off in seach of the holy grail. Literally. I took the basic 3-column layout presented in that article, and fit it into a really simple (read: ugly) WordPress theme. At first, I tried to sort of merge it in with the Ocadia theme, but this didn’t work so well, so I started a new theme from scratch, using other WordPress themes as a sort of reference. This approach worked much better for me, and I also understood how the theme worked from the inside out, so making tweaks and changes over time has been pretty easy to do.
I decided that I wanted to use a photograph as the basis of the theme, but I wanted to avoid having a blue theme. My last blog had a blue-heavy theme, and I was tired of it, so I was looking for something fresh. I very nearly used a photograph of Pelican Point as the basis for the visual design. I had problems getting a masthead I liked, though, and I was having a really hard time finding colors that worked in a palette of greens and yellows. I’m not a graphic designer, and this just wasn’t working for me.
Frustrated with this project, I went for a walk, and as I was coming home, I noticed a sign that I’ve seen hundreds of times before, and it provided the inspiration I needed. It was one of the signs for Cohos Evamy.
What’s really odd is that the sign looks nothing like any part of my blog. What struck me about the sign is the way it delinated an image and used negative space for impact. This gave me the idea to have a photo in the upper left corner of the page, but leave most of the masthead blank, and use strong lines to separate the masthead from the rest of the content.
Ultimately, the photograph I wound up using in the top-left corner was a photograph of some paper mache peppers I have hanging on a closet door. It’s one of the first photographs I ever took with my Canon EOS 20D. For some reason, the ability to use really rich reds, yellows, and purples in my design really resonated with me.
Armed with the photo and my copy of Photoshop Elements, I set off creating the rest of the images I needed for my theme, and gradually worked them in over time. I also borrowed some style ideas from a number of places. I honestly can’t remember them all. For the most part, I cut and pasted, and scaled chunks of the original photograph to get the basic color elements, then started working them all together. The little push-pin and comment images took a while – I drew them essentially from scratch. All of this took a number of hours in Elements, but I was quite pleased with the result.
And so the first version of my new blog theme emerged over the course of a week or so. The CSS stuff took a while to get all settled – there’s quite a number of styles in there that I really had to fiddle with to get them “just so”.
Through this entire process, I kept the following things in mind:
- Use a simple palette. I only really use 6 basic colors in the entire weblog theme (plus subtle variants): black, white, grey, red, purple, and yellow.
- Use repetition to reinforce the design’s structure. The nature of the blog makes this very easy to do, and it’s quite effective in making the design both appealing and effective.
- Use negative space for big impact in a few places, but don’t waste a lot of screen real-estate with giant margins around things.
These three principles helped to guide me when I was creating the initial version of the blog layout, and kept me with a general sense of what I wanted to accomplish.
After the basic version was done, I was quite happy with the result, but I wanted to make the blog feel a bit more personal. So, I added in the Random Photo thing on the left, which also served to add a bit more visual interest to an otherwise very textual layout. A few months later, I added in the Recent iTunes section, which I think is a kind of fun and interesting window into my personal life – you can see what I’m listening to as I’m listening to it. Design-wise, that little purple musical note was essential in keeping that content easy to read, since it serves as a very small separator.
Really, it was a matter of drawing inspiration from a few sources, then doing a whole bunch of grunt work in text editors, web browsers, and photoshop to bring it all together. I didn’t have a goal in mind that I really drove towards, but worked things out as I went along, letting the design itself drive the process. I’m a little surprised at where I ended up, but really, it was just the natural conclusion to the path I set out down originally. I also learned some new XHTML and CSS kung-fu in the process, which will certainly come in handy in the future.
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2006.03.17
Posted in Music, The Web, This Site at 6:59 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Well, I’ve finally caved and signed up with last.fm.
There were several motivations for doing this. First, I was tired of iTunes’ utter failure to track the music I play at work. Probably 80% of the music I listen to is in remote iTunes libraries, and the iTunes instance hosting the library does not count these “plays” in its stats. This is really uncool, since part of my eventual goal is to discover what I actually listen to (as oppoosed to what I only believe I listen to). With last.fm, I can track my music usage from all of my iTunes instances, even for tracks that actually reside in remote iTunes instances. Yay!
Second, the (ahem) geeky part of me thought it would be fun (even if it’s cliché) to display the songs I’m listening to on my weblog as I’m playing them. Thanks to a handy little WordPress plugin, doing this with last.fm is easy. And you can see the result at the left of this page.
If it says something boring like “not listening”, it means my life has been music-deprived for the past few hours. Perhaps I’m dead, or merely asleep. Or maybe I’m out having fun instead of sitting at home writing lame weblog posts on a Friday night.
In any case, we’ll have to see how this whole last.fm thing goes after it’s monitored my true listening habits for a week or two.
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2006.02.05
Posted in House and Home, The Web, This Site at 2:15 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
Well, this site has a new theme, as you can see. There was nothing wrong with the other theme, but it wasn’t mine. It just didn’t fit me quite right.
So, I built a theme of my own. I’ve been pulling ideas from lots of places, and the final inspiration was one of the earliest photos I shot with my Canon EOS 20D. Those paper maché bell peppers are hanging on a door in the hall in my apartment. They were a housewarming gift from my mother a few moves ago, and I’ve always liked them.
Bear with me as I finish up the theme. There’s still more work to do, but it’s functional enough that I thought I would post it as is for now.
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2006.01.30
Posted in House and Home, This Site at 11:06 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much money I spend on telephone and internet service for myself. My combined internet and phone bill hovers at about $145 / month, and that’s not including any long distance. You’re probably shocked, but consider the following:
- I have every possible feature on my home phone line. And yes, I do use all of them. You’d be surprised.
- I have a business-grade DSL account, which gives me static IP addresses and the official blessing that yes, I am allowed to host servers if I want to.
So that’s where my $145 / month goes. I blame it all on the static IP addresses. My current provider is the cheapest place to get that sort of account, and it runs $75/month on its own.
Well, actually I’ve been doing more than thinking about it. Last week, I moved my domain (wittevrongel.ca) to a hosting provider. This week, (actually, starting tonight) I’ve got a much cheaper internet account, and it’s faster to boot. Hopefully next week, my home phone number will make the jump to the digital age and move to a VOIP provider. Yes, I’m keeping my current home phone number. Telemarketers, rejoice – you’ll still be able to harass me.
Here’s a cost rundown of the new setup, for the curious:
- Hosting for my domain: $6.45 USD / month. About $7.75 CAD / month, give or take.
- 7 Mbit internet + VOIP: $40 / month (yes, for both)
- Additional geeky phone features (like call forwarding): $6 / month
That’s it. Under $60 / month to get what amounts to more than I have now for $145 / month. And long distance is a lot cheaper, too.
There’s also another bonus: at the end of all of this, I will have ditched a certain telecom provider from my life entirely. They won’t be missed.
Though now I have another problem: I have a lot of hardware I’m not going to need any longer. Probably a good thing – less crap to move to the new place it’s finished being built. I still have to get rid of it, though. Several friends have expressed interest in some of the hardware (I don’t know why, exactly, but I work with a bunch of geeks, so I’m not terribly surprised). Let the purging begin!
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2006.01.23
Posted in Food, This Site at 11:26 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
A while back, I kept a simple little food journal in a cool little black book. I’ve stopped using this journal, as it started to get unwieldy. There were odd little snippets, and cross referencing things and updating the index was a chore. Since I now have a wiki, I thought I would maybe try moving the content of my notebook there.
The wiki seems more ideal since it provides a natural way to cross reference things, it’s easy to reorganize should I need to, and I can access my random food notes from places other than home should I want to replicate an experiment while I’m cooking away from home.
So, here goes nothing. I have no idea how this little experiment is going to work, and I doubt my random notes will have much meaning to anyone besides myself and possibly my friend Jason, but I guess time will tell.
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2006.01.21
Posted in This Site at 11:48 pm by Jeremiah Wittevrongel
I’ve decided that a personal wiki might be a good compliment to my blog.
So, I’ve created one. Yes, my very own personal wiki. I chose MediaWiki for a number of reasons, but mostly because it doesn’t use CamelCase, and because you can secure it so only registered users can edit, and so users can’t register themselves. Only I can edit my wiki, so I don’t have to worry about wikispam or anything like that.
It’s pretty much an experiment at this point, so we’ll see how it goes.
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