‘general’ archive

By now, plenty of people have tried out Buzz. Here are a few things I’ve noticed that I think make it stand out among other social networking sites:

• Choose who sees what. Plain and simple select box, up front, every time you write a new post. And those users can easily see a list of folks who are also privy to the conversation.
• It tells you about new followers when you log in. Notice what it does not do: it does not clutter up your inbox with “Jim Beam is now following you” emails. Granted, it does clutter up your inbox with plenty of other stuff, but that is easily fixed. (Quick addition to that lifehacker article: also check the “Mark as read” box on the filter; you can rely on the Buzz interface to indicate unread messages.)
• Search! This is the upside to all Buzzes landing in your Gmail: you can always find an archived message. Need to find that link you saw in your Twitter feed three months ago about Super Bowl predictions? Good luck!

Oh, and need I mention the single click it will take me to add this blog post to my Buzz stream?

I know I said a while back that I was working on a redesign for this place. It’s true; I am. Just one problem: At about the same time, I received a Wii for my birthday. I hate to say it, but that thing is like crack.

So yes, the design is in progress! And it’s blue! (Which may not be a big deal to you, but I kind of secretly swore to myself when I registered elucidblue.com that I would never actually use blue in the site design. I just couldn’t resist, though, once I drew this idea up. Hope you’ll agree when the time comes.) The current theme annoys me more and more. Even worse, the HTML isn’t really semantically correct anymore, since I did a quick hack to break out of the particular structuring of the site I had been using. So I am eager for the change.

I’ve got the mock-up pretty much done in Photoshop, and will commence with construction soon. Of course, this week at work, I’m building the redesign of our system’s site, so it does feel a little silly to come home and do the exact same thing I did at work. What can I say, though, I love it.

That’s right, a special note to you. Don’t bother clicking the link, because, as you may have already seen, nothing of any significance will show up on my blog. Here’s what’s up:

I’m re-doing my blog and expanding it to a website. I’ll write a more detailed post once the site is live, but after much prayer and deliberation, I’ve realized my passion is in web design, and I am going to be pursuing a career in it. So I’m working on populating a portfolio and building a venue to host it, at elucidblue.com.

My personal blog will then be moved to elucidblue.com/blog (and will NOT be directly accessible from my web webpage). This means a few things, all good for you:

(more…)

Here she is. My new theme, which I’m calling Elucid.

This took a surprisingly small amount of time to do, though I’m still tweaking all the little things. For the most part it all seems to work, so I’m going to keep it online while I finish what I can. The “design” and “photography” pages above will come eventually. Let me know what you think!

(Note: I haven’t tested this is too many browsers yet, so let me know if things don’t render well for you. And of course I scripted a warning for IE folks: something that should just be plastered on every single page on the internet.)

Looks like I still have a couple bugs to work out of the theme. For some reason, my spam blocker isn’t cooperating with it very well, so if you comment, don’t mind the message saying my spam blocker stopped it. I’m checking in every now and then to recover blocked messages. Hopefully I’ll have time to work it out soon.