10 thoughts on “the view from 30,000 pixels”

  1. I love the map for Dean Nation – all those tidy orange dandelions look cool.

    On Flickr, your Haibane descriptions says “City of Brass” in the description. Looks like you cut & pasted and forgot to change that. I only mention this because it confused me for a minute. 🙂

    I’m not sure what the obsession is with DIV tags – purists seem to prefer them, but I can’t figure out why. TABLE tags are like building with legos – the parts lock together and don’t move around once you place them. DIV tags are like building with loose wooden blocks. You can still stack them together, but they tend to move around and knock each other out of place as you add more.

  3. ah, thanks Shamus – fixed. I wish I could zoom in on the maps, there is definitely structure in there that is obscured. I really like the way you deconstructed your own map – at first glance at my various ones I can’t really tell what the heck each cluster corresponds to. I did expect Dean Nation to be the simplest given that its template was recently redone to be as bare-bones as possible, but the dandelions are a mystery to me. Are those individual posts? Why so many orange dots – do I use that many blockquote and pagebreak tags?

    I used to be the Table Master myself, but the flexibility of CSS-based design is just too alluring. if you use DIVs correctly you can completely change the aetshteics and even teh basic layout of your site by just editing one or two lines of CSS. its amazingly powerful. I can recommend A List Apart from more on the subtleties of site design using CSS, its motsly above my level but I go there for inspiration on my own small tweaking.

  4. I’ve been assumeing the numerous orange dots must be paragraph tags generated by wordpress. I’m pretty sure leaving a blank line between paragraphs will create a paragraph break. So a post with many paragraphs will form a dandelion. Things like italics and bold within the paragraph will then turn into little grey danglers hanging off the dandelion. Since the Dean Nation dandelions are so nice and neat, I guess he never uses those decorative tags, and probably doesn’t have a lot of in-line links sprinkled throughout the post.

    My posts are filled with such tags, so my structures always look very frayed and disorganized. Funny how writing style is reflected visually in these things. I love it.

  5. I actually run Dean Nation off of blogspot, so no WordPress involved… I don’t think it inserts any para tags. And I do usually have a number of links in each post, most of my posts there are riffs off of articles in the regular media or responses to other blogs (though substantially less so nowadays than before during the heady Dean for President campaign days).

  6. (though substantially less so nowadays than before during the heady Dean for President campaign days).

    Oh! Howard Dean. I was getting Dean’s World and Dean Nation mixed up. Interesting.

    You DO have quite a lot of blogs! No wonder you don’t have time for video games.

  7. heh, yeah even I get confuised at times 🙂 I should make a list of all the blogs I’ve started (and abandoned) over the years. I have a pretty decent main list at this placeholder: cityofbrass.info

    But really the blogging stuff is just during lunch breaks or in the morning or once in a while at work needing a brief respite. The reason I dont play games is 4 years old and very jealous of anything that takes time away from her while in the same location 🙂

  8. is it just me, or is the google graph really suggestive of the google logo somehow?

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