jeweled platypus

 

tuesday, december 16, 2003
please excuse our dust

later, i added eyelashes

ichalk is rather amusing: rendezvous-enabled doodling, yay!

i especially liked the “submit to new yorker” item under the tools menu…

comments (0)
tuesday, december 09, 2003
cross between a snail and a butterfly

snail2

without the eyes, it looks kind of like a sideways flying heart.


made with the latest version of pixen! yay! (thanks shawn, again :))

comments (4)
friday, december 05, 2003
ten elements of interesting stuff

Ten Elements of News

  1. Immediacy or timeliness
  2. Proximity or nearness
  3. Consequence or impact
  4. Prominence
  5. Drama
  6. Oddity or unusualness
  7. Conflict
  8. Sex
  9. Emotions and instincts
  10. Progress

from page 15 of Scholastic Journalism, by Rolnicki, Tate, & Taylor (aka my journalism textbook).

we were reading this in class and i was staring at this list, thinking…”hmm, these are actually the elements of a good linklog link”.

then, i realized any interesting thing has these qualities…the order of importance varies by format. for linklogs:

  1. oddity or unusualness
  2. consequence or impact
  3. progress
  4. sex
  5. immediacy or timeliness
  6. proximity or nearness
  7. emotions and instincts
  8. drama
  9. conflict
  10. prominence

but i’m sure people’s criteria for interesting linklogs varies more widely than criteria for good news.


it would be interesting to keep a parallel delicious with these categories.

comments (0)
thursday, december 04, 2003
this is longer than usual

i like messing with category schemes.

i reorganized my delicious categories today. i had them in a scheme similar to this blog’s, but it wasn’t working. it took me a while to consciously realize that entries and links are much different things. also, changing a link’s categories used to make it “new” again.

sometimes, creating categories reminds me of third-grade “sort the buttons!” exercises.

my class never did them, but my mom taught third grade for a while. i was in middle school and the buckets of miscellaneous keys/bottle caps/pen tops/small toys/etc still held my attention…

i like uncategorized things, too.


the average blosxom blog seems so much uglier than the average movabletype one. hmm.

it could be that movabletype’s templating system is better, or that its default templates are better, or that more people use it, or that it has a more design-oriented audience than blosxom. or that the majority of blogs i see use movabletype, so it sets the standard.

haha, i felt flattered the other day when i showed somebody a blosxom blog i’m working on & they asked if it was movabletype.

i think some of it is in the permanent/category/comment link configuration. blosxom blogs usually do the all-at-bottom thing, while movabletype blogs usually just put comment links at the bottom. the movabletype way makes more sense (category should be near title, so people quickly know what they’re reading about), so i changed my flavours/templates a little.

i think it looks worse. oh well. i still like blosxom more than i like movabletype.


i haven’t figured out yet why blosxom blogs (including mine) generally don’t use whitespace well.

comments (0)
tuesday, december 02, 2003

*new things in the pantheon.

the top right corner of my screen

comments (2)
*

I’m Britta Gustafson.


Popular posts

Fold a paper icosahedron

My handmade map of California

How the internet feels like a city

Blade Runner in San Francisco

Learning to see telephone poles

How UCSB joined ARPAnet

What is a book?


a little pixelly man, upside-down