"Keep your blogs light"

Destry · 2018-01-25 23:23:26

Perhaps controversial for some here, heh, but I can relate with what he’s laying down.

bici · 2018-01-26 05:14:16

Destry wrote #308880:

Perhaps controversial for some here, heh, but I can relate with what he’s laying down.

Much to think about. But BLACK background with white lettering is soooo bad and not “light” ;-)

I think there is a movement of a simpler Blog. V.2 or reboot a foot… focused on only writing

P.S. I think back to textism.com ‘s early days as a better example of “light”, albeit not a flat html site.

Destry · 2018-01-26 07:46:00

bici wrote #308881:

BLACK background with white lettering is soooo bad

I used to think so too, and with his small font size, it is. But I’ve come to see, perhaps as an aging old dude with failing eyes, that light on dark designs are quite nice when the sun sets and lights dim. But, again, typeface decisions are critical.

I pleasantly discovered recently that when Night Shift on iOS kicks in, it makes a nice sepia/old-time-y look on black/white themes (like Masto), which is a nice improvement. It warms it up a bit to coffee and butter tones. Would make nice theme colors, actually.

I think there is a movement of a simpler Blog. V.2 or reboot a foot… focused on only writing

Yeah, I hope so. Fcuk JavaScript and Google shit-injections. Over in Mastodonia, where I’ve been mixing a bit, I’ve noticed a lot of people hopping into neocities.org just for the squirt of it. (I don’t claim to know what their shit-injections are like, but this guy was boasting a site only 19Kb. lol)

In the same vein, I also think Txp — gawd bless it — is more than I need for my own writing. A full-on flat-file approach is probably in my future. Now seems like the right time too, with my big audit of online self and the passing of the progenitor. Sometimes planets line up unexpectedly and we recognize them after the fact. Txp is always there if I need it.

Speaking of Mastodon, Purism, which makes the next laptop and phone I’m going to buy (reward goal for all the self-auditing) just hired Eugon, Masto’s developer, as the web designer for the Librem 5 project (not the UX designer, which was somebody else). Or maybe for Purism as a whole, I’m not sure. Anyway, I thought that was interesting because he’s been cranking on Masto from community donations and provisional sys-admin-ing only, so this will augment his funds for more growth on that side. A boon for the decentralization movement that’s also growing.

philwareham · 2018-01-26 09:57:12

Maybe this guy should learn about image optimisation before he worries about the miniscule speed difference between database-driven and flat-file served websites. Just saying. ;)

Destry · 2018-01-26 10:14:21

Yep. Image opti is critical. Though I think part of his argument was using less imagery than the ever more, more, more, which social media seems to have encouraged.

If you study the academic books on communication — science, for example — images are used to a minimum. Graphs and charts, etc, themselves are features of information design, and as such, minimalism. Only the absolute essentials are used to convey anything in complement with text. This is how it should be for the web too.

Right now the web is just a big garbage disposal (or outhouse) that gets fuller and fuller, requiring ever more fossil energy to keep afloat. It just doesn’t add up.

Destry · 2018-01-26 10:45:50

philwareham wrote #308887:

Maybe this guy should learn about image optimisation… Just saying. ;)

I started looking at his site and got confused by your reading there. There’s no image in his article, only the logo, I guess. But I just ran a pingdom on it too and get different results…

Page size: 10.0Kb
Load time: 134ms
Requests: 2
Faster than: 100% of sites tested

I though maybe you meant home page, but that clocks even faster:

Page size: 3.1kB
Load time: 123ms

Maybe pingdom isn’t so reliable?

philwareham · 2018-01-26 10:47:35

Minimalism is a design skill, for sure. However the internet is a visual medium not a static science journal, so people are generally going to use all the tools they are given. Who can blame them? Not everyone has the writing prose of Dean Allen et al.

For example, I could easily remove the animated sunflowers from the Textpattern homepage and save 250kb of page weight—it’s totally superfluous—but I think the page would be less interesting for it.

Just be aware of the impact of everything you add (or take away) is what I’m saying. Anyway, I’m a graphic designer so probably not the right person for a level debate on visual superfluousness!

philwareham · 2018-01-26 10:48:19

Destry wrote #308895:

I started looking at his site and got confused by your reading there. There’s no image in his article…

It was another page of the blog, with images in.

Destry · 2018-01-26 10:55:46

philwareham wrote #308896:

Just be aware of the impact of everything you add (or take away) is what I’m saying.

Agreed. I’m not arguing that everything has to be text, or as Dean put it once, “plain as an Amish coat” (or maybe that was Zeldman?). But look most anywhere on the web and it’s extremes the other way. And I’m not even that uptight about visuals, per say, but about the needless code injections from surveillance capitalism, [edit: or the ridiculous frameworks, and whatever else]. Get rid of that stuff and you’re half the way home, or more.

Anyway, I’m a graphic designer so probably not the right person for a level debate on visual superfluousness!

Nope. You’re pigeon-holed for sure. ;)

Last edited by Destry (2018-01-26 11:00:45)

philwareham · 2018-01-26 10:58:19

Destry wrote #308898:

And I’m not even that uptight about visuals, per say, but about the needless code injections from surveillance capitalism. Get rid of that stuff and you’re half the way home, or more.

You’ll be glad that I’m days away from removing Google AdSense from the Textpattern website then. Just need it to reach the payment level that covers the cost of the .io domain name for a further year.

etc · 2018-01-26 11:03:13

philwareham wrote #308899:

You’ll be glad that I’m days away from removing Google AdSense from the Textpattern website then. Just need it to reach the payment level that covers the cost of the .io domain name for a further year.

Sorry for not contributing, adblockers have always fascinated me.

jakob · 2018-01-26 11:04:36

All definitely good ideas, but that’s a pretty extreme case and only instructive to a point. In the real world, where you don’t have control over everything and everyone, there are a lot more compromises. There are still lots of options and decisions you can make to be as lean as possible, but IMO weighing up the relative benefit (effort <-> effect <-> feasibility <-> cost) of these aspects is the more interesting discussion.

Regarding visual or textual communication, I really think it depends on how and what you communicate. I absolutely agree with you that visual and textual should complement and work together but both are valid channels and I think it would be wrong to elevate one above the other. The writer and art critic John Berger did various experiments on how the two interact and operate at different levels. I’m a fan of long-form reading – I translate in my day job so I read (mostly) meaningful text every day – but I must say I also love how ‘modern (visual) media’ has made the world more spontaneous and participative. For me, the question is more often than not whether image use is part of the message or just gratuitous or vacuous ‘illustrative’ filler material.

@phil: I didn’t understand your post. I couldn’t see any image at all on that page, certainly no evidence of a page weight of 19 MB. What am I not seeing?

One more thing: with makss’ xmlimport module (currently used for the initial welcome article), there may come a time “in the not too distant future” where flat-file articles could be imported into Textpattern.

EDIT: in the meantime, you’ve already said all that ;-)

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#1 2018-01-25 23:23:26