on writing and wireframes

Dean Allen, he of the brilliant Textism and Daily Oliver, is working on another CMS/bloggy thing called Textpattern. Similar to MovableType, by the looks of it, but with more CMS and less blog-related bells and whistles. Looks very nice, damn does the man know how to make a pretty interface. I am already looking forward to checking this out.

Heavens Above is just cool. I can see satellite information, the sky chart for this time and place, Sun and Moon information for today, comets, all relative to my longitude and latitude. Awesome.

HTTP: The definitive guide is on Webreference; chapter three is free and up for grabs.

Mark Morford on how to write: “I did not learn to write this way. I learned to write an entirely different and relatively normal way and then took that way and seared it over the hot snakey coals various literary inspirations and poetic mutations and discursive molestations, and then took this nubile raw Way out for raw oysters and iced vodka and Ecstasy and laughter and anal sex and lavender bath salts and lots of risk and limb-walking and oh my God I have no idea what I'm doing. Many terrified grammatical nitpickers, horrified J-school traditionalists along the way, and more daily. You want a JC class to learn to write this way? Ain't gonna find it. Screw the class -- look for the teacher. Physics. Astronomy. Poetry. Art. Could be anywhere. Ask around. Find the inspirers, the electric motivators, the luminous thinkers, the hard drinkers, the mentors. ” Alas, I cannot point to the web archive for this because there isn't one for his newsletters [a-hem!] but you should sign up anyway and forgive his darling technological backwardness. It's really OK. His writing is worth it.

Visio or HTML for Wireframes: The debate rages on. I'm in the middle of heading up a Very Big redesign project at work, and I'll tell you that for me I've found the fastest way of doing this is armed with Visio and a copy of these shapes. But there are other times when HTML works equally well. All depends on the project.

posted on 2003.01.31 at 06:30 AM