Terrible Idea (.net)

Today’s terrible idea is justified text.  It has its time and place, but in modes of text communication with more than a few lines of text, justified text will lead to “rivers” of white space running down the page.  This is noticeable to some, but subconsciously distracting to all.  Thus, in addition to the other minor changes I made today, such as moving the sidebar contents to their own discrete pages and shortening the main page to only four recent posts, I am moving to proper, left aligned text.  More on typography — specifically web typography — at a later date.

The New York Times has an article up about the stress and strain involved in professional blogging.  I’ve talked a bit about people who make their livings through new media such as web comics, and the same interest carries over to making a living from blogging.  Apparently, there is a seamy underbelly to this world of new opportunities — people have died.  The Gray Lady doesn’t actually reach that sensationalist conclusion, but it’s left tantalizingly, inferably close.

This will probably hit the blogosphere (a term that is only slightly more easy to use than hate — though I do both) like a ton of bricks.  I got it from How Appealing, one of the fountain sources of all legal news in the U.S., so it’s probably working its way through the other fountain sources of other areas of interest even as we speak I type.  Soon, it will be disseminated across the internet, and great quantities of virtual ink will be spilled.  Is this as big a problem as it appears?  Is it really a high-tech sweatshop to work a professional blog?  Will Matt Buchanan be sucked into the internet like Tron?  This is worrisome stuff.

Oh yes, I can see it now, the virtual ink will run like rivers through the tubes of the internet.  I hope nobody has an anyeurism.

I set up a Google Alert yesterday, to test it and see what it’s all about.  Basically, you give it a search term, and any time there’s a news article relating to that term, it saves it, and once a day it mails links to all the saved articles to you.

Today, I was giving my spam box in Gmail a quick run through, when I noticed my Google Alerts mail for that day.  My first thought was, “what, Google isn’t smart enough to recognize mail from its own servers?”  Then, another thought follow’d hard upon:  Preferential treatment to your own products is bad, especially in the area of spam detection, where server origins can be faked by spammers pretty easily.  Giving preferential treatment to your own product is what got Microsoft in trouble in their anti-trust case.

So, bravo for Google.  Though it would probably be a good idea to format their news alert emails in such a way not to look so similar to spam…

Today’s terrible idea is from immediate personal experience.  I installed the Wordpress plugins “Typogrify” and “Textile2” in an effort to beautify this humble site.  I’ve become interested in typography in general and web typography in particular recently, and improving the look of my own site seemed to be the logical starting point.

Unfortunately, something went wrong, and preceding every double space (of the type used after the end of a sentence), was a weird character.  It didn’t kill the site, but it’s embarassing, and it looks terrible.  I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but I removed the offending modules.  So, the terrible idea for today is installing modules whose code you don’t know on a live website.

In order to fully rectify the problem, it turns out I have to write a post (this post) in order to flush the main page’s cache and get rid of the weird characters.  It seemed appropriate to make the post that would fix the problem a post about how I shoudln’t have had the problem in the first place.