• Short posts: Despite my best efforts to resist it, there’s a draw to the instant gratification that services like Twitter and Tumblr provide. Sometimes I do want to say something short and trivial, without having to figure out how to tag or categorize or even title the post. I feel a little more guilty clogging up my WordPress database with stuff like this, for fear that these types of posts will far outnumber the longer ones. A workable solution might be to create a separate category for these types of posts, and hiding them from the normal “flow” that appears on the front page, in the “Previous” and “Next” links on single post pages, and in search/date/tag/category archives. This solution seems a little sloppy and ad hoc, however; no matter how much I try to hide it, the fact remains that these will be posts, strictly speaking in WordPress parlance. Even if I’m able to integrate this solution into the current design, if I create enough of these trivial posts, I’ll have to consider how to present them with every redesign in the future. I suppose that only means that these obstacles aren’t theoretical — their solutions just require more work than I’d like.
• Socialization: Although my “arbitrary comments” idea was short-lived (and has been pending a resurrection for a while now), I think I was onto something with it. One of the draws of Facebook is that everything is right there — its news feed can be a source of constant entertainment; every photo, every comment, every status update, no matter how trivial, is in there. This is how people spend all day on there. In theory, this activity doesn’t require a central hub like Facebook. Thanks to RSS/Atom, anybody can, with enough work, make their privately-hosted site just as social. The problem is that this isn’t currently easily implemented; sure, there’s FriendFeed, which can provide you with a widget to embed in your WordPress theme, but this relies unnecessarily on a centralized service. XFN was supposed to have solved this problem a long time ago, but little to no progress is being made with this technology. The Meet Your Commenters plugin for WordPress actually offers a glimpse of how things can so easily take advantage of XFN; it lists all the known homes of everyone who’s commented on your blog with a URL, via the rel=”me” attribute. From there it wouldn’t be difficult to scrape every one of each user’s available RSS/Atom feeds, from Blogger to Flickr to Twitter and everything in between — not to mention all their friends and their friends’ feeds. I should be able to effortlessly add a Facebook-esque news feed to my front page, but in order to do this at present, I’d need to hack around with Google Reader, Yahoo! Pipes, and/or Magpie RSS. It just shouldn’t be that hard. Yes, anybody can add any number of feeds from this blog into their Google Reader, but I’m not so sure they do. Even if they did, it wouldn’t provide the same user experience that Facebook does; they’d have to log in to Google Reader to see what I’m up to, and log in to Facebook to see what everyone else they know is up to. On top of that, even offering a link to my feeds feels presumptuous, while hosting my content at Twitter, which asks people to “follow me,” doesn’t. In the latter case, it’s Twitter who’s suggesting that my content might be interesting. Not me. They do the dirty work of promoting me. In short, there’s no easy way to be “friends” with a self-hosted WordPress blog, with all the implications that being “friends” means on social networks. This should not be the case. This subject really deserves its own post.
• Media: The JW FLV Player is really versatile and indispensable, and I use it a lot. Still, I’d much prefer to just upload raw AVI files and have WordPress convert them to FLV and generate thumbnails and embed code. There’s a solution for WordPress MU installs called WordPress Video Solution Framework, but (a) I don’t have MU, and (b) it requires a lot of server-side configuration that I’m not sure I can even implement with my shoddy GoDaddy account. Other plugins exist, but a lot of them rely on WordPress’ shortcode, which I’m just not comfortable with in terms of forwards-compatibility. What if development on a given shortcode plugin halts, or I move to some platform other than WordPress? Suddenly I have dozens of posts that once contained video, but that now just have [flv url:/stuff/asdf.flv] in them or whatever. Why do these plugins think we’re so afraid of code? Just generate the valid code and put it into the post window for me. I promise it won’t confuse me.

I’d also like to get the CSS cleaned up a lot so that the design can be more modular, in a way. Change color schemes quickly and easily, for instance. Maybe it could even support widgets.

1. Get my shit together.

More to come.

5:30am in Boston

The tuxes-/fireworks-/Zombies (the band, not the internet cliché)-themed New Year’s party we’ve been planning and anticipating is most likely not going to entirely succeed. There will probably be some guests, and some booze, but the tuxes and the fireworks are looking less likely every day.

The weather in Boston and Chicago is dreadful. Friday afternoon I opted to break the bank on an Amtrak ticket to New York instead of taking a bus. It took three and a half hours. It was like magic. A bus that departed New York at 1:00 on Sunday afternoon, on the other hand, arrived in Boston at 7:30. We crawled behind two snow plows for what felt like two hours of that trip. Fortunately I had been tipped off to Bolt Bus, whose buses have two rows of seats removed, giving every row an extra four or so inches of leg room, which sounds trivial but is in fact not trivial at all.

Logan Airport was madness at 6am on Monday. I boarded my plane fifteen minutes before takeoff. JetBlue is not all it’s cracked up to be. There really isn’t any noticeable additional legroom. The snack selection isn’t as exciting as you might expect. And the TVs embedded in the headrests of every seat is an awful idea. Even if yours is off, your eyes are irresistibly drawn to every other screen in front of you, all of which are on. This of course requires that all the shades be pulled down to reduce glare. It’s a depressing sight that’s ripe for a photo in Adbusters.

If nothing else, staying with my folks in Chicago over the holidays slows things down for me and offers me some faint clarity and perspective that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I’m looking forward to next year. I do feel a little smarter. I think I even have a better idea of what I want, and maybe even the motivation to do something about it.

Anyway. It’s nice to know that there’s a whole weekend between this trip and beginning work again.

Then there’s Nimbus Sans, which is indistinguishable from Helvetica; DejaVu Sans, which as far as I can tell is a descendant of Frutiger (and, hence, a cousin of [Apple's] Myriad and [Microsoft's] Segoe UI), and makes a nice all-around system font; and Libertine, which makes for a great general-purpose body serif. Once you set these as the fonts in GNOME and in Firefox, everything looks scores better — better than Ubuntu’s default look, certainly, and arguably better than Windows.

I went into a newly expanded Newbury Comics, which had flooded over into their basement and even had to borrow some room from the public library. At first I was looking for Trans Am albums, before I got distracted with noting pretty covers on books in the library. One in particular had this great ’60s illustration of a seated man in grey and gold. I wish I could remember the author’s name. I did write it down.

The whole time my mom was chasing me around being pissed off at me about something. I was insisting on some minor philosophical point, and she took it as personally insulting that I continued to believe whatever the thing was.

As dusk settled in, I stepped out onto the street and had to skateboard home, down Newbury Street and back to my old place in Kenmore. I have a lot of skateboarding dreams.

As much complaining as I do about my home suburb, I sure look at it backwards. The neighborhood in which my parents now live used to depress me — you get the sense that nobody under the age of 60 lives here — yet it might be one of the few remaining authentic neighborhoods this city has. Decades-old oaks and elms shield ’50s ranch-style houses. This is where the Boomers spent their childhood, playing baseball in the streets of this newly-developed suburb before riding their bikes to Cock Robin.

In reality I should be grateful that a place like this still exists. It’s the kind of place The Clientele or I Like might write about.

And as long as I’m in a generous mood, here’s a Flickr set of some of the more photogenic parts of our suburbs.