Welcome to the 29th different version of Meadow Hill. Starting as a Geocities page back in 1997 (remember that place?), I can finally say that I’ve wasted just about enough time designing this site. I put together some new and old ideas to make this the most feature–complete/minimalist design in the top–level domain era.

It’s a balance. Trying to get it as simple as possible, but not that simple. Plus, I had to obey my inner urges to never use anything other than Helvetica, ever. For a few days I was using Tahoma and Georgia, but font addiction is a hard thing to break.

Oh, and so is whatever I keep catching. I’ve been sick for most of January, with the most fun coming when I ate something that gave me food poisoning.

Great fun. But I digress.

The point of [continuously] redesigning this site is simply because I love redesigning sites. People search for muses in many places, and mine is getting template tags to work. Don’t ask me to explain how that works.

In this inaugural post of 2009, I’d love to explain how things will work around here (at least until I get tired of it and change everything all over again).

Loquaciousness

After my tirade on pretentious writers and their one–word obsession, it seems that all I can think about are posts requiring singularly–posited titles. This is a bad thing for me, you see, as I move into the new year with a new attitude and mission. To be as thorough as possible.

In that regard, I chose to use more words, and to explain them when they’re one of my William F. Buckley–like $2 words. Being delphic isn’t what I strive for, but it’s what I tend to achieve. It’s words like that (and ideas as well) that make it difficult for me tojust say things. I am verbose.

This can get me into trouble — but it can keep me out of it, as well. When people have no idea what you’re saying, you can say anything. Politicians do this all the time. So do academics, sadly. But I don’t want to be a politician (or an academic).

Would that I could just be direct. I tend to give credence to both sides of an issue, even though I’m rarely undecided. It’s that fear of being partizan that makes me think twice about what I say or do. This is something I want to change with this new year.

What this means for, in 2009, that I’m going to focus on writing. This means that I’ll probably be editing things (yeah, really) thoroughly. People familiar with me will be either amazed, dismayed, or confused by that. Think of it as a late Christmas gift.

This will have a deleterious effect on post frequency. You just simply can’t think of ways to work word like ‘deleterious’ into a sentence when you post 30 items a day. Well, maybe you can, but not me.

Helvetica and a baseline grid

Golly, can I ever get away from this? It’s not like I’m married to the idea, I just keep coming back to that font, and that concept. I like easy readability — from the typography, at least.

The point of a baseline grid (also known as a ‘vertical rhythm’) is to make it easier on the eyes to read. The reader expects the next line to be there, reducing eye strain. I’ll leave it to my writing to produce strain in my readers.

...waits for beet...

An additional bonus from this design is that I’ve totally sold out to the 960 Grid System. Poking around my code will show the tell–tale signs, right there in the <head>. For quick prototyping, I just love that 960.gs and the like came out.

It took me about 30 minutes to get what you would see in a typical page produced. That was with no prior study of what [you were supposed] to do. Now I’m going to be beholden to this thing, since I don’t want to lose my lovely grids!

Elsewhere

In 2006 I came up with a brilliant idea. Instead of posting all those awesome links in instant message windows (like I have since 1995), why not post them in one place? Sort of a…sidebar, if you will. Links in the sidebar.

That led me to figure out WordPress, social bookmarking sites, and ultimately led me to alienate everybody that I used to chat with. It is fun (in some categorically–motivated sort of way), but I’m not really sure how it adds value to each page–viewhere. So I’m changing it — slightly.

You can still see it on this site (look around the page for a hint). But it’s not as big a deal as when I first conceived it. All you diehard fans will find it anyways, so I don’t fear for the loss there.

Post extracts

The most fun I’ve had adding the bling to this site is what I call the post extracts. Think of it as those two guys up in the side of the theater, telling Kermit how lousy the show was that night. Only I’m the two old mean hecklers. And Kermit, for that matter.

A little extra fun for the people who happen by the site.

There’s more stuff, actually, in the pipeline. The wonder that is Textpattern really means that you’re really grasping at ways to makeall the stuff work. There’s such a powerful, yet really simple, set of tools that demands to be used. So much that I haven’t been well enough this year to get to them all.

status: published
lastmod: '2009-01-17T01:05:32.000Z'
excerpt: 'In this inaugural post of 2009, I’d love to explain how things will work around here (at least until I get tired of it and change everything all over again).'
author: meadowhill login
cms: textpattern
custom:
  section: articles
  custom_1: meadow+hill john+stansbury writing textpattern
  custom_2: 'The Sidebar Extract: comments on myself'
  custom_3: 'A feature of Textpattern is the ability to use custom fields to add additional data anywhere. The text here gives me the space to write something about the post itself. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about the post content, either.'
  custom_4: This area is like meta–data for the words. Just a couple of paragraphs on the post itself. I’ve finally done it — figured out how to heckle myself.