This article follows a similar train of thought as my last post, Qualifying “Web Karma”: It shouldn’t be a game. I’ve always had a fascination with communities and I’ve noticed, as perhaps many others have, that communities often gain momentum over time to a point where they are expanding at an almost unholy rate. You can clearly see this kind of growth in Digg, Reddit, and even (to a limited extent, currently) Hacker News, if you’ve watched them over time.
Qualifying “Web Karma”: It shouldn’t be a game.
karma, n. the cosmic principle according to which each person is rewarded or punished in one incarnation according to that person’s deeds in the previous incarnation.1
Though not always called “karma” (Everything2 has a multi-faceted system involving “reps” and “C!s,” and Slashdot calls it a “score”), the concepts all serve the same purpose: karma has come to be a way of quantifying the contributions of a person to a particular website.
Accidentally On Purpose: Living Spaces and Layout
This topic is something I’ve had on my “to write” list for a while, and it is mostly just some conjecture about living spaces and how they are arranged. While this isn’t directly related to web design or programming, it is very applicable, as interior design still requires many similar considerations (albeit via a more physical media).
“Duly Noted”: Taking notes and being productive
How many notes do you have on your desk right now? Ten? Twenty? Hundreds? Like many people, you probably keep them on scraps of paper, or sticky notes stuck to your LCD, or in a pile on one side of your desk. That works just fine for some, sure, but organizing your notes can be a real task, especially when you have many topics on a single sheet of paper, or those sticky notes become…well, not so sticky. I’ve come up with my own method of keeping my notes and being able to feel productive that I thought I would share, as it has been absolutely fantastic.
I’m My Own Worst Nightmare (or Why Being Your Own Client Sucks.)
If you’re a designer (or anyone in a similar business), what I’m about to tell you is likely not news, but based on my recent hellish experience, I thought it would still be pertinent to go over this.
The “this” I am speaking of is, of course, why being your own client sucks. It’s a horrible, detestable, deplorable task that is an unfortunate fact of life. Perhaps I am just an awful perfectionist, or just have masochistic design tendencies, but the path I rode to get to my current design was a long, painful, ten month ride.
At first, the project I gave to myself seemed easy: just redesign my site, as I was tired of my old design and it needed some definite freshening up. Seems simple enough, right? Just come up with a new design, code it, and get it online – no big deal.
…But oh how wrong I was. Frankly, I should have known better, as I’ve gone through this trouble of designing for myself before, but sadly I forgot and “history repeats itself because no one was listening the first time.” (—Anonymous)
So without the slightest second thought about the difficulty of the task in front of me, I began on the first design: