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Fog of Eternity | Website design and discussion

Fog of Eternity examines aspects of website design, social networking, the accessibility agenda and the wider web and tech related world.

CSS Deserving Of A ShowcaseAugust 20

Despite the increased focus on accessibility and simplicity in web design, it’s surprising how often designers resort all to quickly to the likes of table based design, Javascript, or Flash when creating websites. CSS and HTML are acknowledged as the most important building blocks of accessible web design, but they’re also seen as lacking in flexibility. But the idea that a site based purely on CSS and HTML has to be simplistic or unattractive is wrong. Sure, there’s things that you can’t do, and Flash’s increased (but imperfect) accessibility allows for wider flexibility in design, but all things being equal it’s still better to use CSS and HTML where they can provide the required function.

CSS - Pretty and accessible

I’ve spoken about the benefits of CSS design regularly in the past, but to recap - CSS gives you great flexibility in design and page appearance, keeps that appearance entirely seperate from the actual content of the page, and therefore provides excellent accessibility and makes redesigning a site far easier.

As browsers develop, support for deeper CSS functionality has grown extensively. The extensive glitches in support with Internet Explorer 6 can largely be overcome with stylesheets specific to that browser, and Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera all provide pretty comprehensive CSS functionality. Universal consistency is still some way awa

The Moral Quandries Of A BloggerJune 22

In the last few days I’ve had occasion to think about the moral aspects of blogging and social media. I was faced with two moral dilemmas. One regarded a visitor to my site, the other about the content I put on Fog of Eternity myself. They led to questions about privacy, independence, trust and fair-use.

Taken as a hypothetical or general question, in each situation the conclusion I reached would have been different. Each demonstrated the important of context and specifics.

How to lose your right to browsing privacy

I’m a strong believer in the right to browse largely anonymously. Web Analytics will give any webmaster a degree of personal information about their visitors - whether that be IP, domain, service provider - but this information shouldn’t really be used. It certainly shouldn’t be used to track individuals.

…but there are exceptions. I often look at my analytics information to see what Google searches are bringing traffic to my site. I’d noticed since my post a while ago ‘Only Cute Girls Make Me Stumble‘ that I’d started picking up odd bits and pieces of search for “cute girls”. Not entirely surprising given the amount of people who use the web to look at pictures of cute girls, even if they’d be sadly disappointed on reaching that article.

None of which was of major concern until a couple of days ago. Mistaken

Look At Me, I’m Alternative…Just Like You!June 20

Blogging is a way for us to have our voice heard. It’s how we broadcast our thoughts to the world at large. We develop an audience. We widen the conversation. It allows for a greater variety of discussion. We give our unique viewpoints on…um…what everyone else is talking about.

Social networking exacerbates the problem. It creates a sameness in the conversation, because everyone is looking at the same subject. In early May everyone was talking about how great Twitter was. In late May everyone was talking about how annoying Twitter’s downtimes were. This month it’s Friendfeed and the fragmentation of conversation.

Did you hear the one about … oh … you did already …

Different viewpoints are all well and good. But how many different viewpoints are you going to get among hundreds of blogs all addressing the same topics? People see that something is “the buzz” because they read it on Scobleizer. Then they talk about it on their own blog and link back to the original articles.

They probably develop more immediate traffic this way - it’s the fashionable thing after all. It’s easier to continue a trend than begin one. But how much value is being added to the wide

Don’t Like It, LOVE It. Don’t Dislike It, HATE It.June 19

Tuesday saw the famed ‘Download Day’ as Firefox 3 was released. They racked up 8.3 million downloads despite server problems and rumours of a security loophole. Great press coverage, a success all round. And a big chunk of the success was taken up with a “yah, boo, sucks to Internet Explorer” approach.

Which seems to be the same across the technology world. We can’t merely like something and dislike something. We have to love things and despise things. A couple of months ago we loved Twitter. Now it’s had a little bit of downtime we hate Twitter, but we love Friendfeed. Macs hate PCs, and like to patronise them. People aren’t just loyal to brands they are LOYAL to brands, to the extent of reacting aggressively and rudely to their competitors.

The only other medium that I can think of that provokes such strong feelings is music. You don’t see people looking down on others because of the cereal they eat. We don’t laugh at morons who drink Snapple instead of Mountain Dew. Yet for some reason - and we’re talking about mere tools here - we can’t extol the virtues of a computer, a browser, a social media service without denigrating another one in return.

But it doesn’

The Stress Of Keeping The Plates SpinningJune 18

A blogger starts writing because of a desire to make money or through enjoyment and interest in the subject. But most of us share a limitation, we’re not independently wealthy. Unless we get great success and thousands upon thousands of visitors on a regular basis, we’re never going to make a living by blogging.

For me, like many others, blogging is a professionally focused hobby. I might develop long term benefit through work opportunities, but I’m not monetising the blog. I work in a salaried role as well, and so Fog of Eternity is just one of a number of hobbies vying for my “free time”.

I talked a little while ago about time management, but I thought I’d give a general idea of the kind of plate spinning that goes on. Even for those with good time management skills (and I don’t claim to be one) it’s a struggle. For us “part timers” blogging is a extensive commitment to an already busy life. Here’s an example from the last week for me.

We need to pay the bills

I work full time for a non-IT company doing web design and development. It’s a reasonably large company, but the web and online team is two people. I think we’re pretty innovative in our approaches relative to the rest of our industry. But a two person team can find themselves under a lot of time pressure.

The last week saw my time taken up by three main tasks, an