Amazing how not writing for a week tongue-ties my three typing fingers. You can take the preceding sentence as evidence of that. At least there is behind-the-scenes progress on the blog redesign front. Just you wait — BLOG@STEFANGEENS.COM will soon the best-designed blog you’ve ever seen. Jason Kottke will be shamed back to the drawing board with his transitional XHTML; 456 Berea Street will never dare slide another door again; SimpleBits will go green with envy before you switch its sylesheet, and Tomas Jogin will give up blogging outright.
If the CSS references above stump you, you’re in luck. But since I’ve had CSS, XML and other TLAs sloshing around in my skull for the last week or so, let me just quickly put my musings down while they’re still fresh.
About Jason’s redesign: He’s on target. As you can see from the current designs of this blog and MemeFirstBut please don’t look behind the curtains of my site just yet. It’s a mess back there., I agree completely that boxes = bad. It’s the classic trap of doing something because new technology allows it. Having black text swimming in whitespace just like in a book is not a failure of the imagination; it is not an inability to embrace the possibilities of a new medium; rather, it is a recognition that over the centuries, printers have honed in on the most efficient means of passing information from the page to the mind. Sure, magazines will play with labor-intensive one-off design extravanganzas for the same reason peacock feathers exist, but for workaday reading — the daily habit — I want my text clean and sparse, and not upstaged by design flourishes that look good at first blush but soon thereafter proceed from cute to haggard. The less often you update a design, the more Lutheran it should beThat’s be a good name for a design bureau, come to think of it: Lutheran..
The thing I like least about SimpleBits is that option to change the color of the banner. Other than showing that this is possible, it serves no purpose. It certainly does not enhance my user experience. Color is also used frivolously on another noted recent redesign — that of Stopdesign. Each page gets a completely different color scheme. It’s too much; and it suggests indecisionWhy not have sitewide theme changes once every season instead?. Both SimpleBits and Stopdesign are the personal pages of possibly the most proficient web designers out there right now, and so they might feel compelled to crank it up — again, the peacock feather effect — but I do wish Stopdesign’s Douglas Bowman had taken a page out of his Blogger redesign and kept it simpleOne final parting observation: I don’t like three equally spaced columns, as Stopdesign now sports on some pages. The overabundance of symmetry jars, and I’m not given a sufficiently large clue as to where I should start exploring the page..
Oh, sorry, this was meant to be a post about the state of the Swedish blogosphere. I’ll try to keep it short from here on in.
Over the past few months, the Swedish blog scene has grown, and the result is that we now find ourselves at the cusp of the third great epoch of Swedish blogging, and there are some good English-language specimens to point out.
Generalizing now: The first epoch was characterized by a predominance of technologists and early adopters, as was the case everywhere else. They mainly blogged about technology and self-referentially about blogging, but this was a good thing, because it helped mature the technology sufficiently for the onset of the second epochI blogged the second epoch here.: The rise of the journal-ists, who embraced the ease of the blog medium and used it as a tool for personal writing on topics that mostly had nothing to do with technology.
And now, in the past six months, we’ve seen single-issue pro blogs come of age in Sweden. Some of these are predominantly in English: JKL Blog, for example, is group authored by a Swedish strategic communications firm. Media Culpa is penned by a Swedish PR professional. And pro-globalization writer Johan Norberg has been blogging for a just over a year nowSome Swedish language-only media/politics pro bloggers: Gudmundson, Erixon, Lindqvist Arrue., so he was a little ahead of the curve. We’re still waiting on the emergence of a Swedish Gawker or Andrew Sullivan, but to be fair, getting paid to blog in a language other than English sounds somewhat of a tall order right now. There just isn’t a critical mass yet of Swedish blog readers who aren’t also blog authors.
Finally, want to remember what web publishing was like circa 1997, before blogging? Take a look at The Local, an English-language news site about Sweden that launched three months ago: Once a week, it publishes a new issue with a roundup of the week’s stories in the Swedish media, translated and given a contextual spin.
What’s frustrating about The Local is that the publishers position the content right for their intended audienceThey have a good English-language overview of the Knutby trial, for example., but steadfastly ignore every lesson learned about web publishing over the past 7 years. Publishing “issues” is what web sites did before they realized this was a scarcity induced habit in the print world that has no justification on the web. Not publishing articles on the web as soon as they are ready means news is staler than it should be, for no reason.
Instead, if The Local were to adopt an irregular publishing schedule dictated by the availability of news, this would mean readers tend to visit more often, which means more impressive numbers to show advertisers — which The Local says it is trying to attract. And what’s with the reliance on email as a publishing tool? You can even get “bulk subscriptions” via email (?). Email is completely passé as a one-to-many communications technology — RSS syndication is the way to go on that front. Basically, this website needs to become a blog ASAP. When it does, I suspect it will become successful.
