“elzr.com”

As far as blog-intros go, Rondam Ramblings’s is one of my favorites—both because I happen to agree with much of it (and thus, of course, think highly of such a sound writer) and because it honors the blog’s name from digressive paragraph 1. Here four clips:

The black background of this website was dropped because I realized recently that some relatively old displays can be configured, by tweaking brightness and contrast, to better display black text on a white background (and it makes sense to do so, most text comes like that) but doing so would turn black elzr.com into garbled chicken scratches.

That was utterly unacceptable.

Two people had complained of such problems before but it was only until I experienced how bad and frustrating it was that I realized it really had to change.

I loved black^EE: it was distinctive, easier on the eyes, allowed for exploration of an entirely different color scheme, and it looked absolutely gorgeous (luscious) on my Dell Ultrasharp.

But I must think of who’s reading my website.

As you may have noticed, I’m unhealthily and impolitely obsessed with quotes. They easily make for my most popular category and were it not for my negligent restraint every single post of this blog could have its very own quote. Though I doubt anyone actually reads them :(, I love crafting them, specially when I go over the top and quote paragraphs upon paragraphs: I trim that detail, highlight that phrase, color that other, and in general try to make the fragment clear and inviting. Today I’m pleased to announce you that the genre has finally coalesced into what I think I’ll call quote collages. (And in a feat of retcon, there are already 7 quote collages on the blog.)

The first and best example of it was today’s Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese post. A quote collage consists of a big, juicy text extract, color-highlighted and clipped to the point of near-paraphrasing. A Flickr photo is prepended for visual spice.

Do you like them? Do you find the colors useful or annoying? Do you simply skim away and roll your eyes at the sight of (yet) another text monolith?

And while we’re on it, two points (..) inside a quote indicates text was omitted. It’s an elegant OED convention that degrades gracefully (if you don’t know what it means most of the time it’s harmless).

Today, just after finishing a slight redesign of my blog (inspired by caterina’s) and comparing it with other redesigns of other websites I’ve made along the past 2 years, I became aware of a small pattern to my madness: don’t enclose unless you must.

I’m not sure why—tenderfootness I guess—but my first website designs have always been unnecessarily enclosed, too many fences, too many cages. Only after much pruning and shuffling do I realize that much of it is extraneous, just clutter.

Most of the time you don’t need that box around that text, you almost certainly don’t need that big box to enclose your entire website, and you probably don’t need so many borders. Try erasing them and watch your website become more “flowing”, more open.

(For an example of what not to do, check my local newspaper’s hideous, caged redesign.)

I’ve been pretty uncomfortable these days with this blog.

I understand that and yet I want a change of cage. It may be foolish, but so what? It may not. I want something more à la Gelernter’s information beams. I want my blog to be a stream-of-consciousness. The textstream to the right of this blog has been one of my favorite and most active sections lately but I’m sure most simply miss it. It feels odd there, buried at the side, violating some deep semantic principle, overcrowding the already overcrowded sidebar.

I much prefer Kottke’s elegant solution to it: remaindered links. I envision a page with only two vertical sections: the right a weird, tagged aggregator of posts, text scraps, links, and photos, the left the commentstream.

These days, even pigeons have blogs. They provide them with electronic recording equipment and their output is automatically fed into a blog.  —Wait! Pause for a minute to wonder how profoundly weird that is. Done? Go!—  In a way I’m like that, sometimes I’m but a text pigeon, reporting what I find amid the words. And I’m proud of that.

Y es que quiero que mi pensamiento deje estelas. Poe’s Murder in the Rue Morgue comes to mind:

To publish before the heat death of the universe:

1. I Fell In Love With Yoga
2. Me, Myself, and Exercise
3. Why Reading Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies Got Me Out of a Math Degree (And How Paul Graham Held My Hand Later On)
4. How to Use Firefox as a Text-Reader.
5. How I Finally Got Criticism with Interface Culture & Understanding Comics
6. In Defense of Prejudices
7. Paean to Contraceptives
8. On Premarital Sex
9. How to Use Winamp with Flair
10. Prefiero Lo Fresa
11. The Perry Bible Fellowship: The weirdest comics you’ll ever, ever read
12. No amamos a nuestros amantes por su belleza
13. Secrets of Language Learning
14. A List of Fruits
15. A Wikipedia Feature Proposal
16. Analogies
17. Music Search and the Future of Google
18. How to Learn Esperanto
19. Azureus’ 3d View: a Beautiful, Dense, Self-Explanatory Example of Information Design
20. On Youth (and Foolish Ambition)
21. A Personal Theory of Love
22. Urban Sensibility. Media Enjoyment.
23. I Used to Fly
24. The Synaptic Mesh That Is My Mind Seems To Have Reached a Link Tipping Point. The Same Goes For The Web.
25. Reasons to Love Web Design
26. Mejor, la Verdad
27. Una Introduccion a Fernando Delgadillo
28. Como Todas las Mañanas
29. Sobre el Peje y Cosas Peores
30. Memetic Alert!
31. Those Pfizer Ads Are Pure eemadges!
32. I Want To Be Selfish
33. City Driving
34. Art Definition
35. Una Introduccion a Akwid
36. Doug Engelbart’s Stages of Mankind
37. Borges, The Information Fetishist
38. Ghosts, A Novel
39. A Summary of Summaries
40. Conceptual Blending
41. A Dictionary of Language Extensions
42. 18 Pages of True Math (Or Why Minus Times Minus Yields Positive)
43. Discographies and Sturgeon’s Law
44. Internet & Electricity
45. Ten Reasons to Drop Out
46. Systems (My Kind)

I’m proud to announce that, right now, this blog is the #2 result if you search for “very arousing” in MSN Search—beating such famed contenders as ”The most beautiful tits I’ve ever seen…”, ”Medical Fetish Pictures”, and ”Scent of an uncircumcised penis”. This only goes to show how far behind is Microsoft when it comes to search, but whatever, I’m proud.

Here’s a screenshot, for posterity.

Claro que es posible, pero, al menos para mi, es mas dificil. Tu afirmas tacitamente que lo que importa es el talento, no el idioma, y eso es muy cierto. Estoy seguro de que toda la jerga gringa que nos invade—jerga tecnologica, cientifica, social, y artistica—podria haberse desarrollado perfectamente en Español, en Japones, en Hebreo, o, quizas, en toki pona. Pero se desarrollo en Ingles! Y es precisamente  por que el idioma no es lo que importa, sino sus hablantes y la suma de sus talentos y creatividad linguistica¹, que el Ingles es actualmente la lengua. A principios de nuestro siglo no hay esfera mas importante, mas efervescente, ni mas creativa que la angloesfera^WP (que para mi abarca todos los hablantes del Ingles, sin importar si lo aprendieron, quizas a regañadientes, como segunda lengua). No es malinchismo, es la verdad.

Precisamente, un buen ejemplo en Español de a que me refiero con jerga es “malinchismo”. Es una palabra curiosa, llena de significado y matices para cualquier mexicano (quizas tambien para cualquier latinoamericano), pero es muy dificil de traducir a otros idiomas por ser un fenomeno cultural (tristemente) muy nuestro. La tecnologia, la ciencia, y el arte son hoy en dia, en enorme medida, fenomenos de la angloesfera (como lo fueron en su tiempo del Aleman, del Frances, del Latin, del Griego, del Sumerio, del…).

O aqui va otro ejemplo, mas alentador: como dices “trova” en ingles? No puedes. Te ves forzado a escribir trova entre comillas y explicar atropelladamente que es la trova dentro de la hispanoesfera (o simplemente confiar que tu escucha este familiarizado con ella).

Por supuesto, este tipo de palabras y conceptos no son propiedad exclusiva de la esfera que las creo. Eventualmente, otras esferas las asimilan y llegan a su vez a derivar nuevas palabras y conceptos—rocanrol es ya una palabra hispana, y mas aun rocanrolero (como dices “rocanrolero yo soy” en ingles?). La pega aqui es ese “eventualmente”. (In the long run we’re all dead, remember?)

Es por eso que me faltan palabras en Español para hablar sobre lo que yo quiero hablar—mi idioma no las sabe todavia. Me faltan palabras y me faltan interlocutores—la gente con la que quiero hablar, abrumaduramente habla ingles (muchas veces como segundo idioma, claro, pero aun asi). Le he dado pues varias vueltas al asunto y, en este momento, la conversacion que me interesa, en la que quiero participar directamente, es la de la angloesfera². Que cada quien elija, libremente, la suya.

Last time a friend asked me what a blog was, I blabbered and gesticulated madly for a long while, only to cap it off, desperate, with the safe “they’re online diaries”. As it often happens, I ended up saying exactly the opposite of what I believe. I don’t think blogs are mere online diaries. Those are a sub-genre, to be sure, but blogs are much more, and it is misleading, stifling, and plain false, to have that as their only metaphor (isn’t it overstretching to call this very blog post you’re now reading a journal entry?).

So that no one finds himself forced to betray his better knowledge again, I’ve tried to find a metaphor that outcharms the prevailing one—one that’s true and yet as simple and catchy. I think I’ve found it: Blogs are open letters.

Blogs are open letters. Compilations of written communications addressed to whoever may want to read them¹. The title of a blog post, the letter, is in fact its address, crafted to route the epistle to its many recipients (though of course Google, the post master, uses far more clever ways to deliver it). A good dose of current happenings goes in these letters, of course, but there’s much, much else: recommendations, reviews, analysis, reflections, advice, criticism, self-promotion, narrative, essays, rants, howtos, explanations, interpretations, confessions, j’accuses, press releases, calumnies, lies, exaggerations, gossip, sobs—anything that would go on a letter.

So now you know. Blogs are open letters. Spread the word (or challenge it in the comments).