An imaginary place in a reactionary time

damnit, EVERYTHING either times out MT or gives an error. i just accidently uploaded this post 7 times.

one thing i gotta say is it looks better then greymatter out of the box...once you get teh files into a directory that it can see...you get what you pay for, and man do you get a lot of power with this cms.

hype. don't. believe.

Ffej: I really like the new layout; it's clean and easy to navigate. Content is the rule.

Anyway, I picked up a "refreshed" iMac from the Apple Store yesterday. As you may already know, the new iMacs have a 1GHz G4, I bought the previous version, which is a 800MHz G4. It has a SuperDrive (nice!) and a big, fat 17" flat screen for watching DVDs.

I read that 21 people are dead in Chicago from a trampling at a club located at 24th and Michigan Ave.

All's well out here.

After my post, the pop window where one inputs their post, gave me this:

An error occurred:

Rebuild failed: Writing to '/home/parody/www/ffej.org/styles-site.css' failed: Opening local file '/home/parody/www/ffej.org/styles-site.css' failed: Permission denied

yup, like i said in the main post, it'll give you an error.

the layout is movable type's out of the box apearence. i'm frankly not in love with seriphed fonts and double line height, or the monospacing on the title tags. too old timey for me. so imagine the current layout with arial, 1.25 line height, and without the annoying divider line at the top...

the solution is to move the blog to a seperate directory, say ffej.org/blog, and make the directory world writable. i'm loath to this for two reasons: if i put up a ffej.org/index.html that said "click here for the weblog" i'd loose 11 out of my thriteen readers, and i don't wanto (and don't know how) to do redirection. i also have modified the site backend layout enough to accomodate the CMS. greymatter didn't need all this putzing around. i also have to update the CMS to last weeks new version...i'll give it a week before i make my decision to keep it.

congrates on the new imac, use it in the best of health always! it's amazing how different they look in person from the pictures on teh web and in the ads. they have a wonderfull presence in a room. the 17" will make for great dvd, hell the 12" i have makes for great DVD, compared to a crt. but 17"! yummy!

I like the new layout, though it takes some getting used to.

Serifs help with readability -- but just try telling a designer that. Proportionate type also helps with reading but, again, designers seem to prefer monotype.

P.S.: The new format is more functional with Opera. I no longer have to hit "refresh" to post. You should be seeing fewer duplicate posts from me.

Yikes. In the brief interval between my last posts, the page now has a dark background, and the window for posting is now side-by-side, instead of pop-up. Even better.

heheheheehehehhehehehe

sorry couldn't leave well enough alone.

this is another out of the box layout, it won't stay this way.

thank you all for your comments. the final design/layout will take your opinions into account. right now i gotta get it all working, and secure (there's a security advisory for the version i just downloaded.) then i'll play around a bit, and then it'll get serious.

there is a reason for using seriphs for readibility on paper, it's the same reason arabic and some indian languages are written in one continuous line. unfortunently, the nature of digital displays make most fonts break up, unless your running XP on a fast enough machine to endure the performance hit you get from turning on "clear fonts" (or whatever they call it, or your running OS X, which antialias' everything by default--and with amazing beuaty (Danny, you are running os x on the 17" iMac aren't you ;-) ) monospacing can work against what a designer intends: most people have trouble remembering monospaced titles or articles.

i use arial simply because i like it. it's just a nice compromise between certain modern fonts i like and certain older age of printing press fonts. i use 1.25 and 1.5 line height because my eyes unfocus on 2 and i get headaches from most fonts at single height.

i've just discovered that i don't like the menu on the right. the page was much more readible with it on the left. i'll fix that later.

I like the line spacing and the more narrow margins--as is--because the page is easier to read. The dark background with lightened type and yellow links are good to these eyes, too.

I'm liking the new site so far, Ffej.

cool, thank you. howabout moving the menu back to the left? any problems with that? and just wait till you see what i do with the old links page. and the old about/statement of purpose.