I hit an odd rhythm this evening. After a delightful morning sleeping in and then puttering around the house – which is looking just great these days thanks to some furniture rearranging effected by my good housemate Chris – and an afternoon of friendly hanging out*, I found myself a little wiped out in the early evening. Partly it was being over-heated from my hike back up over the hill from Cole Valley, partly it’s probably the low number of calories I’m consuming (running an approximately 500 calorie per day deficit most days as I lose weight on the hacker’s diet), and partly it was just the option to flop out a little bit after a fairly intense week of work.
I decided that I was under no social obligation to attend the Annie Lin/Goh Nakamura show, as much as I enjoyed their last one. Having given myself permission to stay home, I puttered a bit on the computer (upgrading software and downloading NetNewsWire to give it a try) and thought about making dinner though the small snack I’d had at Reverie hadn’t fully worn off.
Some time mid-evening – I wasn’t paying attention to the clock – I decided to lie down for a nap. That felt so good that after an hour or so I decided to just go to sleep for the night….
…and woke up again at 11pm feeling great. I was refreshed and clear-minded, ready to get up and do things. So, I did. Dinner at midnight, watched some Simpsons, and a pleasant time reading the archives of Douglas Bowman’s Stopdesign log. I always find his writing worth my time, but have been sporadic in reading the site. Since I was in a web design-y mood, want to dig deeper into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and will be giving a presentation later this year on “Building a Business Case for Web Standards”, reading his log from day 1 forward was the ideal place to spend my time. I’ve still only up to about a year and a half ago, but I expect it will go a little faster as I get into the range where I’m more likely to have read the posts while they were fresh.
One thing is definitely clear after spending over two hours on a single site: good design makes reading more enjoyable. Even something so simple as a link to the previous and next entries at the very bottom of the page makes a huge difference.
So, two changes on MetaGrrrl.com tonight:
1) a global search & replace to change all instances of unencoded ampersands to the proper & format for better accessibility and page validation;
2) the previous/next navigation links are now repeated at the bottom of the my individual entry archive pages.
Thanks, Doug.
*An afternoon in which I met Joel in person after an online friendship leading up to his 1000 mile bicycle ride down the coast from Seattle and, thanks to a suprise encounter on the street with Min Jung, we got to visit with a cool crowd of photobloggers at the lovely Reverie cafe in Cole Valley.
MetaGrrrl 