sysmango.com

This is going to be a discussion that might bump up against the limits of acceptable meta as far as blogging is concerned. I am not all that interested in being yet another blog about blogging or site design. This is mostly because my world really doesn't have much to do with blogging or site design beyond having a blog and having designed the site. And Meta Is Murder.
This post is about forums. Specifically, this post is about web forums and the communities that I've found around them over the last several years.
If you love forums, or even just like forums, even if just a little bit, may I suggest not reading this? Just because I don't like them doesn't mean you should do something that will probably just make you angry.
I will try to keep the meta to a minimum. The forum bashing, that I'll make no promises about.

Hopefully this is the last post on the way that the website now looks. But this is not really about the redesign of the website than it is about how I tried to do the redesign. I tried to run the redesign using Google Wave.

If you don't know what Wave is, I don't think that you are really missing anything. Wave is a "preview" at a much earlier stage than Gmail was when it was first released (in preview/beta/whatever). With Gmail, everyone already knew what e-mail was. While some of us think we know what Wave is, I don't know that anyone actually realizes everything that Wave is eventually going to be when it grows up (if ever). [I spoke about my initial feelings on Google wave in an earlier post.]

The redesign started as some notes scrawled in a notebook, including some pretty poorly done drawings.

I'm racing to get this in before I have to start working for the day. Today I released an updated theme for SysMango.com. Looking at the theme, I can say that it's not done, not 100% done. It is good enough to put it up and see how it deals with the real version of this website. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. I know there are probably issues that I haven't seen yet, because I'm using Firefox and Google Chrome. I'm fairly certain that Internet Explorer will look awful. Sorry about that. Can't really make myself care about browsers that seem to refuse to follow standards. There are still changes to come, but this was the big change.

OR How I discovered how incredibly uninteresting I really am.

When I first started with Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, I really didn't expect anythign meaningful to come of it. I could see the possibilities that hte technologies presented, but I could also see the issues that bubbled beneath the surface.

My experimentation with MySpace didn't last all that long. In the time since I abbandonded the MySpace account (Sept 2007) to now, my attention has been paid to other services. Almost the same day, I created a Twitter account. About a month later I created an account on Facebook, about the day Facebook opened up the service to anyone and everyone.

Three years seems like a really long time to be using these services. And at times, each and every one of them loses whatever appeal they may have had.

July 09 to earlier this week. That's how long I've been thinking about upgrading the theme to this site, and doing nothing about it. Not one bit, not at all. This isn't to say that the theme I am using, a slight modification of the contributed 960 Robots theme, but it's not mine. And it's not really me. But I did think the header pulling in random stuff from Twitter was at least interesting. Over the weekend, I did start thinking again about what it was I wanted to do with this site. I was looking for something different in the theme than a lot of the contributed themes provide. This probably has something to do with the bit where a contributed theme, no matter how good or well designed (and a lot of them are great and really well designed these days) I'm just going to think about doing something different, somethign that works for just me, even if it means that I am, ultimately, going to be the only one that reads whatever it is I post here. So I might as well be happy with it, and experiment with the design until it makes me happy.