A WordPress Request
There’s this button that says “Save and Continue Editing”, which enables you to save your stuff to the database as you write. But what about another button called “Publish and Continue Editing”, for those of us who can never spot mistakes until they’re actually published on the site itself? The current system seems to assume that one is capable of proofreading prior to publication, and that the logical followup to the act of publishing is the act of writing the next post, for the purpose of which a new blank composition form is provided.
Stranded in Prahran
So my muffler falls off on the way down Burke Road on my way to a gig on the Mornington Peninsula yesterday. Fortunately, I’m on my way to pick up a colleague in Glen Iris, so I’m able to leave my car at his place and catch a lift with him. After the gig, I decide to catch a train back to Brunswick rather than drive, on the basis that combustion is better when it’s fully internal.
Which is how I find myself in an internet cafe on Chapel Street while I wait for Midas to call, getting gouged simultaneously by two different businesses. Is it just me, or does this part of town lack character? There just don’t seem to be many businesses here that you wouldn’t find on any generic shopping strip anywhere in the world. Then again, perhaps it’s just blind prejudice on my part, attached as I am to the side of town where the cafes only have room for four tables and at least one of them must be occupied at all times by someone with a noisy mental illness.
I’ve been thinking a bit about diversity lately. I was at an orchestra concert the other night, where there wasn’t any. With barely an exception, the audience were white and over 50. There’s nothing wrong with being white and over 50, by the way. I just think it’s an interesting commentary on the status of “serious music” that its audience has changed so little over the time when the country itself has changed so much.
I was in Adelaide the other day. I wonder whether its self-appointed position as a Yartz capital might be lent some credibility by the fact that its demographic bulges echo those of the orchestra audience I was talking about.
A furtive glance at the meter — using this thing is like being in a traffic-bound taxi: the cost escalates out of all proportion to the productive output. I wonder whether the rise of the thumb-drive will have meant that internet cafes will have to start letting people use them. When I was travelling about four years ago, your normal virus-shy bandwith profiteers would balk at the idea of a floppy disk (sometimes to the extent of putting physical locks on the drives). I wonder how they’ve been able to get their heads around the idea of removable storage big enough to carry actual code? I could dig out my oversized card-reader-with-archaic-memory-format-inserted to test whether the Shuttle small form factor PCs that they’re using here would cope with the idea of USB mass storage. They seem to run a fairly plain vanilla WindowsXP rather than some locked down variety of internet kioskness, so I might be in with a chance. Oh, and they use a compact little laptop-like keyboard with the Page Up key located in convenient proximity to the Enter key, the better for making one hit it by mistake and cascade erroneous text on the page to be laboriously deleted as the meter ticks over. Nice one.
Well, enough bollocks, nearly half an hour killed, time to pay off this extortion and move on to the next. Did I mention that I’m trying to live on 1400 calories a day, which may explain any irritability of tone you might have detected.
Browsing Como Banderas
I’m a bit of a sucker for natty little bits of software that do things that seem handy at first glance but get less useful and more annoying as time goes by. I’m getting quite addicted to the Firefox “Mouse Gestures”:http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/ plugin, though. I seem to get a little thrill every time I close a window by slashing a “Z” across it with the right mouse button. Maybe it’s just me.
Hating Big Brother
Speaking for the dark one a moment, I’m just going to point out that there is a problem for the BB defenders who respond to the anti-T&A-fest brigade by saying “If you don’t like it, switch it off.” Does it need to be pointed out that commercial television spectrum (both analogue and digital) is limited to four providers? The providers who have been granted these oligopoly rights _do_, in fact, have a duty to the community, and members of the community _do_ have a right to complain if they perceive that those rights are being abused.
Personally, there are only a couple of things that bother me about Big Brother. Firstly, the dodgy competitions which exploit the overdeveloped SMS reflex of their target demographic and gloss over the fact that each one of these messages costs three times as much as a normal text. Their “hammer down auctions“, for instance, where viewers pay 55c to SMS a bid and the prize is sold to the lowest unique bidder. Of course, this is one bizarre auction, where you have to pay a bidder’s premium as well as a buyer’s premium. In fact, it’s a lottery in disguise — it’s quite certain that the value of all those SMS bids would exceed the value of the prize. If viewers were asked to buy a ticket, instead of being asked to submit a bid, then perhaps they’d be inclined to see it for what it is.
And don’t get me started on the fucking ringtones.
The second thing I have an issue with is the misogyny. And that’s really nothing to do with Channel 10 — they’re not making those guys behave like dickheads. I don’t know how representative the housemates are of wider Australian society, but I certainly don’t think there’s anything particularly unusual about the group that they’ve put in there. So yeah, I dislike those sort of dinosaur attitudes to women, not because I think the women suffer from them that much these days, but because men do. I don’t think that flopping your dick out while you give someone a massage is going to scar her in some way, but I do think it makes you (and, by extension, all men) seem like someone who’s not ready to respect women. Those of us who do quite genuinely respect and treat women as equals go through hell trying to convince women of that fact, and that’s a drag for which we can thank the kind of man represented by all but one (perhaps two) of the male BB housemates.
Thinking About Text
I don’t know why, but I’ve been thinking about text creation (perhaps because I haven’t been creating any for such a long time). Ever since I began using (or not) blogs, I’ve been seduced by the idea of separating design and content. I’ve realised that one of the things I really like about writing in a blog is that the actual process of doing it tends to involve nothing but writing text. What’s more (and perhaps more importantly) it doesn’t involve Microsoft Word. There’s an almost typewriter-like simplicity to cranking out paragraphs in a textarea, unencumbered by gratuitous spell checking, animated paper clips or those feral bulletted lists that seem to evolve into free spirits. At least until the time you hit the “Publish” button, blogging tends to be simple and effective. Even the formatting that you _may_ choose to worry about tends to be done using tools like Textile, which almost emulate the style of formatting which we used to use in pre-HTML emails, when wys definitely wasn’t wyg. You type your little asterisks and you keep typing. Nothing resizes or reformats or hyphenates or aligns itself while you’re doing it. There’s not all that much to think about except the beautiful, directionless rambling quality of the sentences you’re producing. One can almost hear the “ding” at the end of each line (and yes, Firefox hackers, that was a hint).
Thing is, I’ve been thinking that all text should be created this way. Whether I’m hammering out a quote to one of my clients or an essay or a promotional spiel or an acceptance speech, I should be able to just sit down in front of some suitably blank window and start typing without worrying about templates or file names or font sizes or style definitions. I should be able to save it in this blog-like skeletal form, waiting for a design to be layered on it like an epidermis. I should be able to type without knowing or caring whether the final destination of my writing is going to be a website, a printed page, an email or a PowerPoint slide. And when the time comes, I should be able to quickly and simply use the same text to create any or all of the above in the typesetter-quality formatting of my choice, without ever having to spot the difference between an en-dash and an em — dash.
It seems a bit regressive, I guess, doing your editing in a plain-text environment and then rendering into the pretty stuff. Admittedly, it was frustrating at times when, in WordPerfect 5.1, you had to choose whether the screen was going to use it’s one alternative colour (actually, it was the same colour, just a different intensity) to indicate bold _or_ italics, but not both, so your eventual character formatting was largely in the hands of the Print Preview Gods. But as someone who has always had a Notepad shortcut sitting on the QuickLaunch toolbar, and who uses it about a hundred times a day, and as someone who has spent a fair bit of time typing into the textareas on various blogging tools (which are like Notepad plus drag and drop minus the ability to save without relying on a remote webserver assembled from cheap parts by the lowest bidder), I’m very hip to the idea of using one tool to get the stuff written and another tool to stuff around with it.
I was under the impression that this sort of thing was happening anyway. We hear all this stuff about XML (without anybody being able to explain adequately what it actually is) and the semantic web and all that, all these documents supposedly embedded with the information needed to meld them into exotic forms and extract meaning without actually reading them. I would have thought that we might be at the point where someone who didn’t mind putting up with an ugly user interface and patchy documentation written in foreign languages might be able to begin to approach this textual nirvana, the point where common garden ASCII begins to crawl out from beneath the over-ornamented burden of TrueType fonts and begins to show us that content was what it was about all along. The point where desktop writing claims its proper ascendancy over desktop publishing. Based on my limited survey, though, I don’t think we’re there yet.
There are some promising developments. There are Wikis up the wazoo, and I think they’re a nice idea. Think about everything you ever write, anywhere in the world, strung together with links in an indexed and keyworded database; accessible, changeable and creatable from any kitchen appliance with a browser; ready to be displayed on the web or projected on the side of a building or spelt out on the floor by a team of SMS-automated alphabet dancers. All you did was type away, just like I’m doing now, the letters appearing on the screen in roughly the same sequence as they’re pressed on the keyboard. The wikis that I’ve looked at, though, don’t really work like this. They’re web applications - they defined themselves as web applications, and they create content for the web which seems as if it should pretty much stay on the web. Sure, you can press the print button and watch the left-hand two-thirds of the content spill out of your printer until the images run it out of toner. Some of them might even provide a print-friendly version of their content, which strips out most of the navigation and usually leaves you with only one surplus page containing a copyright message and a hit counter. But is there any kind of content application out there which you could say is genuinely content-agnostic? How many could take a blog-like slab of text (with some simple user-friendly markup a-la Textile) and convert it into a business letter, then take the same slab and output it to a PDA screen or send it as a text message or print it on a blank CD? Surely with all the effort that goes into cracking XHTML up to be something, there would be at least a few geeks on this kind of case?