One of the most interesting blogging-related queries you can do on Google, Why I blog gives a great deal of insight into both our online culture and the nature of our individual needs for self-expression.

I've been questioning my own blogging needs a great deal lately, as a result of having not blogged very much in the last few months. It's not the other way around, deliberately weaning myself off the blog or anything; rather it's that many of the outlets satisfied by blogging over the last five years are being satisfied in other ways.

As Fury's audience has both broadened and become more focused (more people, but falling into sharper distinct buckets (eg work people, friends, google searchers, family, and randoms) I have more trouble self-justifying posts I think about writing. I don't necessarily want to talk to people at work about random dermatological issues (not that there are any, really. Just a hypothetical example). I don't want to talk about upcoming vacations because now that I own my own house, I somehow feel that a cyberstalker breaking in and stealing from me is a greater violation than if they broke into a place I rented, and as the holidays approach, I'm reluctant to have the more personal aspects of my life become kitchen-gossip when my family comes together for Christmas next week.

All in all, I'm coming to terms with the fact that most people who I read online have either migrated toward the livejournal model intended to disseminate relevant life stuff to friends for whom it is actually relevant, or those more highbrow bloggers who have, whether they've noticed it or not, excised their literal personal life from their online presence, showing themselves only through inductance, choosing to pass on this interesting thing on the web, or providing social commentary on this other thing that happened to someone else.

I'm not sure where I fit. Fury has always been about a lack of focus, and whenever I try to narrow the blog, even if it's by splitting it, readers have said the wandering nature is one of the more appealing things about the blog.

So, in the spirit of wantering, I leave you without a conclusion. I hope you'll comment with whatever thoughts this meander sparks in you. I'm still working on the next iteration of Fury, which will be as drastic an information-architecture redesign as it is a visual shift. I'm hoping to make a good balance between the 'inverse-chronological log of compositions' and the more static structured heirarchical site. Think of it as the stage that follows the path from archive-by-month to categories to multiple-categories (or tags). Anyhow, hopefully I'll be able to stop rambling soon and once again produce meaningful work.

Till then, it's your turn...

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Commentspam up the wazoo, a new home, still moving out of an old home, about 300 bites from biting midges (all on the same night on a lonely cove in Baja), a busy and exciting workplace and a blog left neglected.

I think I post so little nowadays because my vision for what Fury should be is becoming so much more concrete, and is so different than what's presently here, that it feels like a step backwards to post.

But then, a step backwards is still more a part of the dance than standing still, and so I'm posting now, and will try to keep it up as I reshape the site behind the curtain.

In other news, despite the upcoming presidential election taking up a huge portion of my personal mindshare for the last year, today was the first time the candidates actually pushed in to my living room, and within 20 minutes of each other. The first was a call from the KErry campaign, encouraging me to vote on Tuesday (like I'd miss it), and the second was the new 'wolves' ad from the Bush campaign. The scariest part of that commercial is that it's playing in California, telling me that they eitehr actually think they have a shot of taking the state, or that they have enough money in their final week that they can blow advertising dollars in decided markets. I don't particularly like either possibility...

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So last night I was the victim of a storm of commentspam beyond that which I can take care of by hand. For the next few days, comments will sadly be down entirely until I finish my new commenting system which will prevent this kind of thing.

Second on the list of to-dos will be to import old comments into the new system. Sorry for forcing y'all to run silent for a few days!

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It's funny that most of the unsung (or at least unposted) content I have is in the form of memes and links, the things that weblogs were 'supposed' to be, before the term matured into much more.

As part of the trifurcation of Fury, I'm going to split off the Meme-o-matic into its own, entirely separate site. I'll probably keep the sidebar here, driven by an RSS (or maybe Atom?) feed, but will have another site, updated several times a day, for slightly more robust pointing.

I'm looking to BoingBoing and Gizmodo as examples of this genre of blog. It's really more of an aggregator than a community, and probably won't have comments.

So now, while I've learned the hardships of desgning by committee, I'd like input on which domain to use for this new site. The candidates are designfoo.com, outgeek.com, memeomatic.com(/net/org) or voxen.net.

Ready? Set... Opine!

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So for the last week or two, 'Housewarming' has been the only thing in the 'Look Ahead' calendar. Problem is that the housewarming isn't actually happening. Thre were too many conflicts, and it's being postponed (again).

Now I'm filling up the Look Ahead with a bunch more things to distract y'all.

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Sometimes I'm blocked by a lack of direction. It's not so much ambivalence as a tugging of several ropes at once, going nowhere.

Reminded by Danah's blog, Apophenia, I often ask myself these same three questions about Fury:

1. What is the writer trying to say?
2. Who is the writer speaking to?
3. What level of expertise is the writer trying to assume?

I really need three different blogs. Maybe then I'd write in at least one of them.

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It gets so quiet around here this time of year... Traffic goes down by more than 50%, and comments down by even more, as the regulars are all off doing their vacationy and familylike things.

Mostly I think everyone just gets quiet... I'm looking forward to next week when things pick up, Macworld Expo starts, and a whole new year opens up before us, like a long sunny valley revealed when the fog burns off the new years peak.

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Ugh, the color is grating on me. The design, while cutting edge in 2001, is grating on me and is growing too heavy. As the site has grown into a community the functional design hasn't adapted enough to facilitate user communication.

My previous redesigns were just iterative, with little or no outside influence. The same can be said for the Fury 4.0 redesign.

Maybe it's Google's influence, but I've really got to lighten things up, throw out the framework and start over. When I do and I roll it out, I hope you all stick around.

I know you're only reading Fury for the beige.

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Back from Hawaii, back at work, working on Kauai travelogue.

Stuff's happening. :-)

(I hate beige)

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So there are things I keep meaning to post, but never get around to. Some are a few weeks old, others may have been sitting in the hopper for a year. This week is Backlog Week, and now all that stuff is going to get posted! (The stuff I've finished and just haven't posted, that is. I still have projects that need to be implemented, of course.)

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Total (approximate) number of visits to the front page since October, 1999: 424,443

Total number of words written in Fury posts since October, 1999 (excluding comments (and this post)): 350,828

Visits per word written on Fury: 1.21

I don't know if I wish this number were higher or lower.

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So with the rash of blog comment spammers (where Movable Type based weblogs are particularly succeptable) I have all the more reason to implement my new commenting system. I have it all spec'ed out in my head, and it's my next Fury project, hopefully to be done in the next few days.

As usual when I change Fury, I strive to solve a problem at the same time as increasing functionality, so there will be some other very cool features to the commenting system as well.

You can see them all implemented by next week at the latest, or you can wait a few months until they get copied into Movable Type, Livejournal, and the other main blogging tools. :-)

'till then, feel free to ignore the silly spammers who can't even type a url right.

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I watch my traffic logs. It's one of those things bloggers don't really talk about. There are those who try to keep their blogs quiet, a small publishing venue for friend and family. There are those who don't care who reads, but aren't out there trying to get the world to read them. These are the ones who don't look at their server logs, don't have webmonitor bugs on their pages, and don't really look into the audience while they're speaking to the world. Less catwalk, more mountaintop.

I'm one of the other kinds of bloggers; the ones who have their stats page bookmarked, the ones who can tell you without skipping a beat that their weekend traffic is 2/3rds of their weekday traffic, the ones who feel a pang during Thanksgiving and Christmas because they know they'll see it as a dip in their weekly traffic.

There are a lot more of us than you'd think. It's one of those things a lot of bloggers do, but none of them really talk about. What's a lot of traffic? 10 people a day? 100? 10,000? It's like talking salaries. If you do it to make yourself feel better, you'll easily find someone who's got you beat, and so much for that (strangely, I don't feel that way about salaries, but I figure some people do so maybe it's a useful analogy).

Back to traffic though. It's tough. Keeping the daily watches on where people come from, and how many people come by gives me a good read on the pulse of the site. I know that it takes one particularly good story to increase my daily traffic by 80%, but that it'll fade back to normal within 4 days. It takes about three weeks of consistant above-average content to start building my regular rolling average, and about two weeks of poor or no content for the numbers to start dropping, but when they drop, they have inertia.

I have two lists, one in my pocket, one in my head, of things to do on the site to double my traffic. Part of me wants to do it for the egotism, part for the knowledge that I must be doing a better job of content creation if I get more visitors.

But the other part worries.

Traffic is more than eyeballs. It's people. One surprising and valuable thing I learned these last couple years is that simmering the pot makes for a great soup of users. If I post things that might get a little bit of attention outside the regular readership, they'll come in and take a look around, read the comments, post a little, and stay if they feel like this is a place for them. This tends to create a relatively like-minded group.

On the other hand, when there's something that gets a lot of attention, a lot of traffic, the whole culture of the site gets overexposed for a few weeks or a month. First time visitors read the comments of other first-time visitors and the maturity of the site folds in half. Some of the regular readrs get discouraged and drop off, and some of the newbies stick around, thinking this is the norm and liking it. This is a full boil, and it can scaldan otherwise great soup.

I've been reluctant to bring the site up from a simmer, mostly for fear of scalding the pot, and to a lesser extent because I'm worried of failure; that I'll do amazing things and nobody will care.

I'm working on solutions to the first, one of which is to create less tenuous ties with you the reader. I'm working on making very easy logins, (possibly passwordless) and letting anyone leave comments, but those comments only appear on the site once they click a link in an email the site sends to their stated email account. The email account can be totally anonymous on the site, but it'll stop the user who just wants to graffiti, or who cares too little about their own content to click the one-time verification link. This site-reader relationship would have a lot of advantages to the reader as well, but we'll get to that later.

Another possibility is something more along the lines of Derek's POWlist. I love ths list because sometimes Derek's site falls off my radar and once a month or so I'll get an email from the list with a particular good or important post, and I face the decision of unsubscribing, visiting the site, or keeping with the status quo of getting these periodic updates. I love it because it's push without being pushy, and I can't even tell how many readers I've lost from Fury when their computer crashed, they switched browsers and lost their bookmarks, or gradually forgot to check Fury, when they never really intended to leave. It's a wonderfully soft way of keeping friends.

I want to cut loose with some bigger projects that would get attention from outside the blogging community. I'm sure that coming across AOLiza articles from the Wall Street Journal while moving yesterday is no small part of this resurgence. So I'm thinking about the best and fastest ways to cement the readers I have, in a worse-comes-to-worst eventuality, I can whisper to you "Psst! Let's ditch these new folks and make it like it was! The new site's over here!)

Or I could just put the new stuff on one of the domains I've owned for years and haven't gotten around to utilizing yet.

Anyhow, it's another late night at the Googleplex, and I should probably call it a night. I'm deciding whether to go to my new place with my newly-purchased bedding, make my bed, and sleep in the new place that feels so empty of both stuff and spirit, though an excellent canvas for both, given a little time, or trod over to Rick and Ammy's, where my toiletries and their guest bed are.

Heh. Ammy? I'm comin' over. The new place will wait one more day. Just so long as I put some things away before the second wave comes from Pittsburgh.

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For those who didn't notice, check out the Badger Badger link in Meme-o-matic.

On a self-referential note: Do you tend to notice when new (red) things are added to the meme-o-matic? I'm thinking about putting in a 'one-liner' kind of post that comes into the main column, but is almost like a header, just to give attention to something that changed elsewhere on the site.

Thoughts?

Oh, the site's overloaded. Here's a local mirror!

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Look! I'm a Young Adult! I should savor this moment. After all, it's only two weeks before my 30th birthday, when I get my 'establishment' membership pin.

The other funny part is that the guy on the left, the example of "High School" is George Chen, known in some circles as "The Internet Guy," a former co-worker of mine and, while younger than me, pretty far past the high school phase...

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Though nobody's brought it up, I can see how someone would look at this process and say "Yeah, I suppose it could be called participatory design, but isn't this design by committee?" My answer to that would be yes and no. What's happening with the user base ("yinz") is more like screening. I get feedback, and redesign, using my discretion on which things are perceived as rough, which are difficult to understand, overly obvious, and aesthetically pleasing or not.

Nearly all the stuff we've been doing here is visual design. At the same time, talking about the visual design, which is more justifiable to do in a participatory process, I'm getting a better idea of your individual workflows. How do you use Fury? How might the interactive design suit that better? These are questions I'm learning about while we dicker over highlight colors.

The actual interaction flows are being worked on in a more structured process. They'll also have their time to be put forward, but in a front-end user-experience form, not the back-end flows and such. This sort of thing is better done in ones and twos, so I need to find and test some local fury readers. Hey, any HCII brethren care to submit to a low-fi test or two?

Anyhow, just trying to say that giving you links and talking about impressions isn't my whole HCI process, but when dealing with expert users of the intended system, as you all are, interviews like these, even en masse in comments, have their place. you can already see the difference when you go back and look at the first mocks to now.

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Like Ali, I still feel that the comment count on the OTP navbox is clunky and jarring. I'm looking for better solutions. I'm not sure how important it is to indicate the number of comments for a given post, just how new the latest one is, and if it's new to you. Basically the same functionality that's already in the timeline bar, but more explicit.

In the meantime, I'm playing with replacing salmon with a dark blue and reversed type. Fury 4.0d7 vs. Fury 4.0d8.

Considering how the OTP box would actually be used, and that it should exist on every individual entry page, I've renamed it to 'new this week' (NTW).

Oh, and in case I didn't mention, the comment popup window will go away completely. Now, lookig at comments will take you to that entry's individual page, with the comments appended to the end of the entry. Following a comments link will jump you down to those comments in that page. I don't have a quick example of that. Davezilla used to do that, but recently redesigned his site and has now gone the popup route.

Anyhow, comment away. Work continues...

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Another day, another design mock.

Changes in d7 include:

• Removal of the '3d effect' except for on the masthead.
• Joining of the top property links to the masthead
• Removal of separators in the 'on this page' (OTP) navbox
• Changing () to [] for OTP comments. (I tried omitting them, or making the color/link just the number, etc. They all looked much worse, trust me.)
• Changing the 'comments' area at the end of entries. Check the first and second entries for examples. The rest are for placement only (FPO).
• 'Track this item'? What's that mean? (grin)
• Removed the legend. More navbox changes to come.

For discussion: How does the color balance look now? granted the white/grey isn't set in stone, but I feel that without the legend, the salmon isn't so overbearing. Comments? Also: When you click on a salmon comment counter in the OTP, should it take you to the oldest comment you haven't yet read, or to the first comment? What if none of the comments are new?

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So, amazingly, after giving you guys this speech about how I wanted to conduct a transparent design process, I squirrel myself away, whipping up visual iterations, changing them, showing them to a few close friends, and making changes. that's exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Still, my current design thoughts have problems, and I guess it's artistic ego that doesn't want to let me show it while those problems are unsolved. Nevertheless, discussion might help solve those problems, so here goes.

The 'current' mock is Fury 4.0d5. Caveats:

• The parts that I focused on here were the masthead, the first entry on the page, and the 'on this page' nav box.
• The rest of the nav boxes haven't been touched yet, though they absolutely will, and several will be going away, and new ones replacing them.
• The HTML and CSS code are very messy. Don't worry about that. This is a design mock and the code will be optimized when I write it into the live system. CSS folk might notice that the 'on this page' nav box is all css, reducing a fair bit of table junk.
• I haven't personally tested this on any browsers other than Safari.
• The 'comments' summary after the first post is still a work in progress. I still need to put in links to the actual posts, see how it looks when there are 25 comments, and not just 2, have a clear link for adding a comment, etc.
• I removed the 'comment dots' from the timeline. They made the design even busier, and their usefulness is diminished by the 'on this page' box.
• The timeline bar items will actually be colored the same as the 'on this page' items, in a gradient (like topics is) instead of the 'new, 1day, 3 day, old' system. (Thoughts on this?)

Okay, now the known issues:

1. The color scheme is either too sterile or too patriotic.
2. The page seems too crowded. (This should be improved when the rest of the nav boxes are done)
3. I'm not sure that I'm happy with the presentation of the # and newness of comments in the 'on this page' box.
4. More I can't think of just now.

Okay, I again stress work in progress, but have at it anyhow.

For comparison and conversational fodder, check out a few earlier versions: 4.0d1, 4.0d2, 4.0d3, 4.0d4.

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Sorry for the slowness of posts. This time though it's completely warranted. I've been putting a lot of effort into Fury 4.0. Right now most of the obvious work has been in the visual design of the front page.

That visual design incorporates some changes in the interactive design of fury, but most of the interactive changes (and they are substantial) will be slower in coming.

I feel the flows have to be validated more, and will require more user testing, while I feel qualified to take a good solid stab at the visual redesign based on my knowledge of user habits, relative importance of various elements, and personal asthetic.

I'll probably have the first static visual design mock up late tomorrow or Thursday. Before that I expect I'll dive in to explaining one or more of the redesigned flows. FYI, I'm redesigning (or designing the initial flow) for: reading comments, posting main comments, posting IMblog comments, registering/login.

And that's just the stuff I can recall off the top of my head.

I'll say this though, after working on the VisDe for 4.0 for the last two days, it's almost icky goving back to 3.2 to actually post...

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So hey, I've long found it amusing that so many webloggers with such tight design skills do their redesigns in private, suddenly unveiling them to the world with a big "here it is!"

Trouble is, this is the antithesis of the traditional interaction design process. Showing the design around to a few of your friends shouldn't be a substitute for an actual usability experiment, for a lot of reasons, most notably an inherent bias towards the designer, a familiarity with the existing site (this is useful, but naive users should also be tested), and most importantly, the fact that a person's subjective opinion is not the same thing as the usability of a site.

So I'm going to (more or less) conduct the Fury 4.0 redesign by the numbers. I'm going to do some low-fi prototype testing, some task analysis, a smattering of cognitive walkthroughs for the identified common tasks, and some rolling usability testing as the redesign comes along.

I've already started with a lot of logfile analysis of Fury 3.2. I've identified the five categories of visitors, and their use patterns:

1. The regular subscriber - You read this site at least once every two weeks, and get here either via a bookmark, by hand-typing the URL, from your RSS aggregator (desktop app, or web-based aggregator), or by a link on your own personal links page (I'm so tempted to link to some of these as examples, but they might be private, so I won't).
   
   You read comments. Most of you use the timeline bar at the top of the screen. You might lurk, or you might post. Most of you check in at least 3 times a week. Some check several times a day.
   
   You almost never visit anywhere other than the front page, unless I linked to it in a new article.
    
2. The general referred user - You saw a link on the sidebar of another site and decided to check it out. You might look around a bit. There's a 30% chance that you'll click on one of the topics in the 'Read by Topic'. If you do, there's an 80% chance that you'll follow the 'sex' topic. There's a 90% chance that you'll be disappointed by it.
    
3. The specific referred user - A blog or news site you read linked to a specific article on fury, and you followed the link to check it out. When you do, you might visit the front page, and it's just as likely that you'll click on the 'Bio' link to find out more about where you are. You're more likely to become a regular reader than any other group.
    
4. The google searcher - You dive in and dive out. You'll almost never go anyplace other than the page you land on (unless it's to the aforementioned 'sex' link). On rare occasion you'll actually leave a comment, but if you do, there's (almost exactly, strangely enough) a 50% chance that you're either a crackpot, conspiracy theorist, extremely vulgar, immature, or some combination. Trouble for you is that, though you don't know it, almost nobody will ever know you left that comment, unless they constantly scour the archives for recent comments.
    
5. Kevin Fox - I use Fury differently than everyone else. When it doesn't suit my needs, I've built hacks in the back end so that I can do what I want. When someone leaves a comment on the site, it automatically emails the comment to me, so I never have to check back to find new content, and can respond to comments right away.
   
   I have hidden pages where I can get up-to-the-second lists of who came to what page of the site, and where they came from. I can spot new referring links easily, and see how popular that link is.
   
   I use the timeline bar as a guilt-o-meter, always wanting to see at least some dark blue on the page, lest I feel the page is growing stale.
   

I've spent the last several months with these use patterns in my head, and they have driven a few changes over the years (the timeline, color-coding, permalinks, comments, etc.) but now I've got enough new ideas that I'm doing a complete rewrite. I closely considered making it 100% CSS, but I found that while the concept of CSS is extremely elegant, in practice the compatibility differences amongst my target browsers (even between IE 5.5 and IE 6.0, browsers of the most common Fury visitors) mean that I'd have to code many kludges just to make it work right, and it would make me more reluctant to institute changes, knowing a small change could wreck the site.

Instead I'm using tables for layout, and CSS for styles, as I mostly do now.

Okay, this post is getting much longer than I intended. Back to the interaction design model, I want your input. I'd like the regular users to be the eyes over my shoulder, I want you guys to play the role of the stakeholder. I'm designing a tool both for you and the other four groups, and while I'll take your comments for what they are, and not gospel, I realize you guys have a lot of good ideas and frustrations, and as long as this post's comments inform the design, and don't drive it, I think it'll make for a better redesign all around.

So, knowing that many of the labels in the following wireframe will need description I won't delve in to until later this week, I'd like to share the preliminary Fury 4.0 home page wireframe.

Questions? Comments? Go for it.

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So there's this thing that happens to some writers, probably best typified by Piers Anthony, when writing the Xanth series.

The author sets out creating an original work from the soul, exploring ideas and delving deep into their own creative well. The work meets success and they do it again. Then they start to find out, in the case of Xanth, that most of the readers are in the 'young adult' demographic, and then he starts writing to that demographic. Happily for both him and his publisher, sales shoot up in that demographic, but what the sales figures won't show, nor would the publisher care, is that it's not the same young adults. The young adults who were enraptured by A Spell for Chameleon and the Gift of Magic are, by and large, repulsed by Heaven Cent, and The Color of Her Panties.

Piers provides another, even clearer line in the 'Apprentice Adept' series, the first three of which are great and inventive, and the second three lowered their sights to the Scholastic Magazine crowd again.

What's my point? I didn't write tonight to bash Piers Anthony, but instead to bash myself.

When I started writing regularly on Fury, I didn't know what I was 'supposed' to write about. I didn't know who I was writing to, and so I just wrote from my heart to the void. Wherever there was passion there were words, and from words came the blog. Before there were comments there was just the void when I peered out from Fury. I knew there were eyeballs, but I didn't know whose they were.

Now I know my audience, perhaps too well. I feel like I'm writing to a specific group of people, even if most readers never leave comments. I've been slacking off on the more inaccessible UI criticisms and insights, and therein lies the problem. They're not inaccessable, but I've taken on the role of a TV producer who want's everyone to get every joke, even if they're less funny on average.

I want to write about love, but i don't, because I know my audience.

I want to write about the interviews I'll be going on in the next month, but I don't, because I know my audience.

I want to write about stupid things that don't matter, but I don't, because I've come to respect my audience, and I have this stupid idea that I shouldn't waste their time.

I know what you're thinking: "Clearly, you don't know us that well."

Ahh, but you can see now that I do. I can read your mind.

And no, I won't do it again. I'm not going to tell you what you're thinking now.

...

Almost every blogger has that time when they go on hiatus, but I refuse to. Maybe it's an aversion to the melodrama of throwing up my hands and saying 'fuck the blog' only to crawl back to my computer master within a few days, weeks, or months, as everyone does eventually.

So instead I slack off.

For every post you read on Fury there are five interesting things I wanted to share, but don't because I feel it's not the right venue, or because I need to make it perfect and extracurricular perfection is the first sacrificial lamb of grad school.

...

So what's the point? I suppose I am saying fuck it, in a fashion. As was the case with all those temporary abandoners of blogs, in all likelihood you won't notice a difference after a few months, and things will be back to usual, but perhaps not.

...

So I'm going to forget my audience. I'm going to close my eyes and divest myself of the compulsion to write posts that will garner the most feedback (this self-serving distraction from schoolwork notwithstanding).

The steady dribble of posts is, at least for the time being, a thing of the past.

In its place, I'll be posting whenever and however I please. Out with the style guide, expectations, continuity, self-censorship to a point, anyhow [shhh!]

No, I'm not going anywhere. In a sense, perhaps, I'm coming back.

I'm so fucking melodramatic.

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A couple years ago I had a third-party spellchecker in Fury as part of the posting process. Then they started charging, with a minimum $100 buy-in, and I never ponied up, so the quality suffered.

All that's changed today, now that Apple released Safari Beta 2. Finally I'm likely to switch over from IE, and one of the features of Safari is now integrated spellchecking in text fields. Yay indeed.

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Hey! I won the Antibloggie for Most Unfinished Projects!!!

I'll write more about that later! ;-)

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Hey! the deadline for voting for the 2003 AntiBloggies has been extended until tomorrow! I'm up for "Most Unfinished Projects" and if you scroll down a few posts you'll see why.

Anyhow, you can vote once per hour so even if you already showed your love and support, go back and do it again! :-) Ya know, if you want to, and all...

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The AntiBloggies, answer to the Bloggies, has published it's list of categories, letting you vote for the most deserving sites.

If ever there was an award Fury was cut out for it's Most Unfinished Projects. To refresh the mind of the gentle reader:

1. Randompixel (aka Cameo)
2. AOLiza
3. Metacookie
4. QWER
5. Blogger Purity Survey (2001 Edition!)
6. Fury 4.0
7. AIMtunes
8. Fury - Mobile Edition
9. Public version of FuryNodes
10. Fury MicroBlog
11. Underblog
12. LogMusic
13. Tao Dice
14. The Mara Story
15. The Butterfly Orgasm Story
16. Trip log for The Kevin and Ammy Cross-Country Show
17. So very, very many galleries sitting in iPhoto
18. Things I've forgotten but will doubtlessly be reminded of by you
19. More stuff I can't even talk about yet...

So go vote! You can vote once every 60 minutes, so vote early, vote often!!!

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I'm sitting on IRC, watching the IRC simulcast of the 2003 Bloggie Awards, being held in Austin at SXSW...

I'm up against Metafilter, Kuro5hin, and a few others, so my chances are slim, but here's to watching, anyhow!

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Google loves me.

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Did a lot of great work on my Game Design project. I now have a dice game that, packaging issues aside, I feel is actually ready to be pitched to small games distribution houses. All I know is that people with no vested interest enjoy playing the game enough that they really want their own sets.

In other news, it's snowing tons. It snowed about a foot in the last 24 hours, and another 6-8 inches in on the way tonight and tomorrow. Add this to the fact that the City of Pittsburgh ran out of salt. Last week they dusted the roads with cinder, and today snowploughs and bravery were the city's only salvation. With tonight's storm, the Pittsburgh weathermen are calling this the worst winter on the books. Last month's average high was around 20, compared with the 40-year average of 36.

Htet Htet, Dana, Rachel and I all went sledding down the hill at Homewood Cemetery, about 200 feet, stopping jst before the frozen pond. I have a little video I'll try to get up once I finish the considerable assignments due tomorrow and Tuesday.

I had a very nice Valentine's Day with Rachel. We stayed in, cooked, and watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I also had a bad crick in my neck, and the doctor said it could take 10 days to get fully better, but backrubs were the best thing for it, so I should get out of the medical center and find myself a valentine. Thankfully I was prepared.

Also, for those of you who use the RSS feed, I did a little code work on the feed, so it shows the first two paragraphs of each article on Fury, with a link and a message showing what % of the post is currently displayed, if it's longer than two paragraphs.

and amazingly, I still like the snow. I've rediscovered the wonder of more-than-four-inches of snow, when the pillowey yet nonslippery powder means you can stop being so careful with your step. Heck, I even jogged to the bus stop.

Now it's time to go to sleep. My game prof is going to mail us by 9:30 to let us know if class is delayed or cancelled due to the snow. Officially, CMU never closes for weather. But then, I wouldn't expect any less from the only institution I've every worked for or attended that doesn't observe President's Day. Apparently that's more common in private East Coast institutions. In California, pretty much all offices close (Am I wrong?).

Well, maybe Mother Nature will enforce what CMU doesn't.

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Just for fun (okay, and procrastination): Choose your own font for Fury.

If you choose a custom font, make sure you spell it right, or it won't work!

(how obvious is it that I'm just pimping myself for the best programmed website bloggie?)

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I'm feeling childlike and mean today. I can practically feel the users running from the site screaming...

If you're not running and screaming, go here, hit reload, then come back to fury and reload.

Update (1/30/03): I took Comic Sans down to maintain reader sanity. If you want to see what Fury looks like in Comic Sans, or any other typeface, go to prefs and give it a whirl!

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Looks like it's that time of year again: Nikolai's posted the finalists for the 2003 Bloggie Awards.

I completely missed the whole nominations process, living in my own little world, but apparently a bunch of you didn't miss it, as Fury got nominated for 'Best Programming of a Weblog Site,' alongside Textism, ScriptyGoddess, Metafilter, and Kuro5hin.

I remember when this happened last year I felt compelled to quickly introduce new functionality, to prove (to myself more than anyone else) that Fury was worthy of competing with MF and K5.

So of course this year's no different. I've got some functions I've been working on for a few weeks and I'm about ready to incorporate them anyhow, and the unexpected Bloggies is just a convenient motivator.

Okay, enough of that. Go vote!

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So Zhaneel and Chris asked (within five minutes of each other, no less!) where all the posts had gone. The front page shows all the posts written in the last eight days. The problem is when life gets too interesting, I don't always post every day, and though this might be the first time in over a year, a week went by without my posting a thing, so they all dropped off.

So I spent ten minutes coding something I'd been meaning to for a long time. Now the front page shows all the posts for the last week, or the last 8 posts, which ever is more.

After all, when I'm too busy with life to post, I ought to assume that other people are too busy with life to read!

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For the nitpicky, I added a whole bunch of items to the 'look ahead' calendar (which at the moment I'm using as my main calendar, keeping me reminded of what I'm doing when), and I changed teh date readout there, so it says soomething intelligent like '1/12" instead of '28 days'.

Oh, and I renewed a promise to actually fix the ugly comments page that I promise to fix several hundred times a day (that is, every time someone looks at a post's comments, where it says "I promise I'll fix this ugly heap soon."

If I fix it right, then there will be a lot to like about the new functionaly beyond a paint-job. Since i don't have anything planned tomorrow except lunch with Karen and dancing in the evening, I may just have the chance to fix it right.

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Because nothing fosters determination like the yin and yang of ridicule and support...

Ammy and I have decided to simultaneously diet, and keep a running blog-tally of our progress. She and I are aiming to lose 21 lbs and 18 lbs, respectively, though her's will probably be a greater challenge since it constitutes losing 13.9% of her body mass, while mine only equates to 9.6%.

Here's the deal: You'll notice a new module on the left-hand navbar, titled "Blogger Diet." That's where we'll keep everyone apprised of our respective progress. Later I might add something nifty like a dynamically-generated graph or something, but I need to get better at gnuplot before that can work.

We're aiming to lose the weight by March 1st or so. 1-2 lbs a week is a supposed 'safe rate', and that means sometime between the end of January and the beginning of April.

Good thing we both had big dinners last night!

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From the comments of this post:

phreakydude: I think we shld have a messageboard on here where we can comment on whatever we want not just the entry. Put it in yr thinking cap.

A very good point, and one that's already under my cap. A lot of the features I want to add to Fury are more in the 'sub-post' range, and probably wouldn't have comments of their own, but I'd like a place for people to talk about the site in general, or whatever else is relevant.

For example, if I loosened up meme-o-matic from one meme a week to maybe 3-5 interesting links I come across each day, and post them without any commentary, I'd still like people to be able to talk about things they find interesting, without having seperate threads for each one. Similarly, I'll be starting a photo-nav on the right, where I can post media bits, be they realtime hiptop pictures shot and uploaded within seconds, desktops like the Fall one I posted yesterday, quicktime clips, or whatever. These might have a caption, or might not, but they would have little or no text, and also wouldn't be able to be commented on directly.

So I'll probably make something like a 'furytalk' which will probably *not* be a threaded BBS or anything too fancy, but just a running log that people can write on, keeping a vague conversational thread going.

Oh yes, and I'm going to be creating logins. Don't worry, it's probably the most simple, least-invasive registration process you've ever seen, but will allow me to allow you to customize the site in a lot of cool ways, not the least of which is supporting 'new to you' continuity across all the computers you might use to read Fury from.

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So what I was going to say yesterday morning, when the website unexpectedly turn a turn for the serving-pages-not-so-much, was I was going to (got, it's almost a recursive sentence structure...) ask you all whether you still use/notice/care about the cell-o-scope widget on the left-hand-nav. I'm cleaning things up, consolidation and making room for some new stuff, and perhaps it's time for Cell-o-scope to go hasta la vista.

Anyone care? Any fond adieus?

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Heya, how many of you use RSS feeds? If you do, please leave a comment here, and maybe a little bit on how you use them. I'm thinking about making an RSS feed for Fury, but I'd like a little more perspective on how people use them.

For those who don't know what RSS feeds are, or don't use them, you'll probably want to check the comments. They're really cool, and I bet a bunch of your fellow readers swear by them.

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A dotcom veteran who refuses to lay down his arms, Kevin Fox is currently an interaction designer at Yahoo!, designing the future of Yahoo! Messenger.

Kevin left his ancestral homeland of Los Angeles in the Fall of 1991 to attend UC Berkeley. After four leaves of absence, he completed his bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science in the Spring of 2001. During his sabbaticals he was a reviews writer for MacWEEK magazine, a seeded developer for Apple's Newton MessagePad, a webmonkey, a perlmonkey, web technical lead for Segasoft, Petstore.com and Hewlett-Packard, an invited member of Microsoft's Internet Advisory Board, and the webmaster and technical lead for Levi Strauss and Co. (where, incidentally, he co-invented the online wish list in 1997).

One of AOL's first beta-testers in 1987, Kevin now prefers Yahoo!, Google, and small software foundries where the love for the product pays better then VC dollars. Kevin is now 94% dark-side free, and tries not to be evil.

Labeled 'usability guru' by New Yorker magazine and 'miscreant' by Wired, Kevin enjoys creating personal projects that play off the Internet's nascent communication metaphors. Most of Kevin's online exploits pass unnoticed (and unfinished), while some have made the front pages of the Wall Street Journal, Harpers Weekly, and CNN.com.

An 11-year Berkeley resident, Kevin is an avid ballroom and Irish dancer, and tries to write a thousand personal words a day. His current goals include learning both kiteboarding and the mysteries of love. Kevin's secret wish is to live in a spacious geodesic dome in the forest, with an attached sprung wood ballroom for entertaining, and an easy commute to the city.

He also likes cheese.

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I was getting tired of standing on my head...

That reminds me of an old joke:

A man dies and, being on the darker side of the fulcrum of judgement, he winds up just south of purgatory.

The devil gently beckons him and tells the condemned that he is to have his choice of eternities, that he is to choose from three rooms where to bide the time until the end of days.

The Devil walks the man to the first of three doors. Opening it, the man sees thousands of people, as far as the eye can see, standing on their heads, hands at their sides, perfectly balanced on an endless hardwood floor. Some are whimpering in agony, and others cry out for mercy when they see the Devil at the door.

The man closes the door and moves to the second, which he opens to reveal a similar scene, only this time the headstanders are balanced on an eternal slab of marble. Looking closer the man sees a few red patches on the floor where skulls worn down have left their sorry marks.

Clearly the first room, for all the similarites, was a better place to endure his torment, for some eternities would be longer and more painful than others. Nevertheless, there's a third door.

Opening the third door, the man experiences a momentary shock as green sludge and writhing, half-dead fish spill over the lip of the door and on to his (real? ethereal? imaginary? convenient? He pauses momentarily to wonder. In any case, now soggy) feet and trousers. This room, like the others, stretches on for eternity, with thousands of people ensconced within, but the second thing to batter his senses (after the fish) is the barrage of smalltalk and good cheer. The people here are right-side up, carrying on animated conversations with each other, smiling, and as oblivious to the man and Devil's presence as they are to the green sludge which reaches up to their knees.

The sludge, while noisome (and wriggling), hardly seems as bad as the inverted eternity on marble or wood, and so, pausing only briefly over such a monumentous decision, the man tells the Devil, "This is the room for me."

"Are you certain?"

(hah, doesn't want me syaing here...) "Absolutely."

[sigh] "Very well, then. Step inside"

The man steps down into the sunken floor, and slogs over to a coterie of attractive people to introduce himself. The door closes, ominously. "Hi, I'm Sa--" as he's interrupted by the booming loudspeaker.

"Okay everyone; Break time's over. Back on your heads!"

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One of the speakers I heard at the Council on Foundations was Mr. Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. One of the stories he told ended with a musician's realization of the 'Beyond the Fuck It' principle, aka BTFI.

The general principle is that when you get to the 'fuck it all' stage of despair, you can come through the other end with an attitude of 'well now that I've said fuck it I can do things my way and I don't care what happens.'

Anyhow, one of the things that's been on my list for a long time is to get Fury.com into a CVS code revisioning system so I can have a real development deployment and a real production deployment and I just need to republish to update production Fury to the last stable version. the sad truth is that this hasn't happened, and so I only make changes to Fury piece by safe piece.

Until I get to BTFI, that is. When that happens you can keep viewing the site and see it work, fail, look really strange, go haywire, until my changes are incorporated and working on the live site. One thing for certain: It makes me sure to complete a feature change before I tire of it, because I'm not going to go to sleep with the site broken.

Anyhow, I'm just about there, which is a good thing for progress, but a bad thing for someone who would like to think of himself as a pragmatic programmer.

Does knowing the 'right way' and not doing it the 'right way' make me a little better than someone who's stupid through ignorance?

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If you haven't voted in the 2002 Bloggies Awards you only have until 10pm (pacific) on tuesday to do it! See Jane Surf. See Jane vote. Vote, Jane. Vote!

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The 2002 Bloggies finalists are in! Happily, Fury has been named a finalist in "Best Programmed Blog" and "Best Non-blog Content."

The first one I'm really happy about, especially since I'm in the company of notable sites like MetaFilter, and weblog-software developers Noah Grey, and DollarShort.org. Mena (dollarshort) brings up an interesting point about whether sites built on public engines should be in the 'best programming' category (wow Mena is altruistic!) but that's not for me to say.

Actually, the truly unexpected honor is getting nominated for best non-blog content. I started shifting into more personal storytelling a few months back, and I can't tell you guys how warming it is to know that you enjoy it. The distinction between a blog and a journal is a fuzzy one to me, but it amazes me that I'd get recognition as someone who's bridging the gap.

So go vote! And more importantly, go visit some of the other sites that people thought were good enough to warrant such recognitions. I like to think of the Bloggies as a swap meet where all the edges of the Blogging readership come together and say "This is cool, and have you seen that?"

The best part is finding out about other great stuff out there, and maybe have a few new people enjoying what I write. That, to me, means more than any award could. Thank you.

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Just in case anyone (the curious reader, the occasional Yahoo! manager, etc...) should wonder how much time I spend posting at work, I'll let you in on a secret:

One of the features I put into Fury 3.2 is 'post embargoing' which lets me write a post, then specify how many seconds, minutes, hours, or days after submitting that the post should appear.

Why do I do this? Because a lot of the time I'll sit down and write, and I'll make like five substantial posts in an hour or two, and other times I'll go a day or two without posting. This way, if I'm going to be away or super-busy for a day or two, I can write up a several things on my mind and 'postpone' (pun not intended) publication of a post or two, so the posts flow freely and regular while I'm in silent-running, instead of in fits and starts.

I only bring it up so that people don't get the mistaken idea that I'm slacking and posting, when I'm actually at a doctors appointment (like this morning), or that I'm writing a huge story when I have a similarly huge deadline looming...

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"Think twice before redesigning your website."

I live by this. And not just 'cause I work for the 'hoo.

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Okay, we're back to the flat dots, until I come up with something a little more clickable and readable, and just as fury as before. :-)

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So, which dots do you like better?

Along the same line, the visual design of fury will likely move slowly and subtly forward like the functional design has been. What's your opinion? Do you like the austere flat functionality? Would you like a little more style (foof), as long as it didn't get in the way, possibly augmenting the visual data presentation?

I'd love to hear what you think.

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Okay, about half my trauma is eased, and about half remains. Ahh, feeling a little better.

Also, I replaced the flat color circles in the timeline with little crystal drops. Better? Worse? Too foofy?

Oh, and I'm not done with enhancements yet. Top of my list is to enable logins so you can be signed in on multiple machines sharing the same 'new to you' cookie, so it's truly 'new to you' instead of 'new to this browser.'

Also, re the Netscape font problem: eew! I think I know what's causing it, though why it should happen now makes no sense, unless Dreamhost changed the server config inexplicably... Anyhow, it should be working and pretty before I go to sleep.

The bad news is that the same problem seems to have brought down QWER. Fixing that may not be so easy.

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Okay, so I did it! The logic took a looot of thinking through, but I've implemented 'new to you' color coding!

Here's how it works:

• The first time you come to the home page since I installed new to you, you get issued a static cookie. Initially, you're fully up to date, and nothing is 'new to you'.
• When new things get posted, they'll show up in the red color on your next visit. Things that are color-coded this way are the message title bars, the 'timeline' bar at the top of the page, and the little 'comment' circles associated with message blocks in the timeline.
• When you visit, look at the 'timeline' to see which messages have new comments since your last visit, and which messages are new since your last visit. you can click on either the message block or the comment circle to have the associated content spring forth.

Here's the slightly tricky part:

• If you visit the site and there's say, 4 new posts, and you follow a link and come back to the site, it would be a bad thing if the system decided that this was another visit, and thus all these things should be marked as read.
• With this in mind, I coded a system where a 'new visit' is made only if the home page view happens more than X minutes after your last home page view. Basically, if you look at the home page every minute, things that were new will keep showing up as new, but when you leave for X minutes and come back, the system will say everything that was posted since the last page view (not counting the current one) are new to you.
• This all sounds horribly complicated, but the point is that you-the-reader shouldn't have to think about it at all, and it should just work like you'd expect.
• 'X' is currently set to be 10 minutes, so as long as you look at the home page once every 10 minutes, Fury will think it's part of the same 'visit'.
• If you want to reset your 'last visit' timer by hand, click on the "New To You" link in the Legend navbar, top right. that will force everything to be marked as read, and will reload the home page.

Make sense? Yes? No? Don't worry about it. If I'm any good as an interaction designer, it should all make sense without my explaining it (except for the 'mark all' easter egg), but I like to keep you posted, and I'd like to hear what you think.

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Hey! The Bloggie Awards are back for 2002!

The categories have been announced, and for the next three days (until Sunday) they're accepting nominations for the various categories.

(so here's the part where I lobby for votes)

Sure I may not have the funniest content, Fury may not be the best-kept secret, or the best Asian site (err, yeah) but I think it just might stand a chance in the category of "best programming of a weblog." If you agree, heck, why not nominate me? Those who are nominated most often make it as finalists, and who wouldn't want that?

Obligatory bulletpoint list of cool things techie things about Fury:

• The Timeline
• Fury 3.1 codebase, which brought Read by Topic, and enhanced google indexing among other things.
• Cell-o-scopes
• Qwer.org (explained here)
• Dynamic Look Ahead module
• Pseudo-static links which are nice, short, and dynamic.
• Half a billion whiz-bang sitelets in beta (Metacookie being a particularly relevant example, war as a timely one, and AOLiza as a timeless one)
• and all the normal niceties like permalinks, comments, and archives...

And that doesn't even get into the coolest innovation, 'Furynodes', an object-oriented, on-the-fly page rendering system so cool and dynamic it was used in the recent reprogramming of LinkStew and the forthcoming redesign of In Passing... Soon I'll have it documented and make a public release for those who are interested in a really powerful content-delivery and management system built on top of PHP.

Okay, that's my speil. I hope you agree it's worthy of a nomination, so head on over and nominate away! And while you're there, I'd also recomment LinkStew in the same category, for Benjy's supercool 'possibly related entries' mechanism, as well as In Passing for "Best Topical Weblog" and Wockerjabby for "Best American Weblog."

Okay, all done whoring for now. I'll talk about something totally differnt later: Reflections of an Expo (many of which have nothing to do with the MWSF Expo at all, but that's where I was when I had a thought and scribbled it onto paper).

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Went to expo. Took a few pictures. Went to work. Busy-busy-busy.

I'm having a little blog de-focusing time. What the blog is for, how it should look, work, who it's for, all that stuff. It's quite likely that at the end the blog will fission into two weblogs, for different purposes. I hope that doesn't insispose too many of you who'll want to read both...

Hey, how's your week going?

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October should be longer, and february should be shorter.

Not the actual months themselves, of course, but their names. October is already too long (though any shorter and we'd miss Halloween), and of course, someone already took a hatchet to February.

No, look to the right-hand nav, where you can view by date. Note how there's a gentle undulation of the length of these links (note also that Fury's code not only adds month archives in realtime, but automatically appended '2001' to each of the 2001 links the picosecond 2002 rolled around, and I didn't even think to check if it worked until now).

Wouldn't it be nice if the months made a nice, clean curve? (Wouldn't it be nice if JASON wassn't always staring at us from the calendar? At least in reverse chronological order he's upside-down.)

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Working tonight on another couple Apple pieces to go up tonight and tomorrow morning, so be sure to check back. :-)

And you thought Christmas was over. Looks like Santa Jobs has other plans...

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Well, I'm packing it in for the next several days as I journey to Carmel for fun in the Family sun.

I may have intermittent web access, and I may not. I'll be taking plenty of pictures, and may even get to writing some more stories during the downtime. I'll be back in full just after Christmas, so enjoy the holiday, cherish your family, friends, and other loved ones, and have a save and joyous holiday season!

And thank you all for reading. I enjoy writing this blog as much as I like to imagine you enjoy reading it. Even though I don't know a whole lot of you, and even though some of us obviously have differences of opinions from time to time ;-) I find it really fulfilling to interact with you, and I want to let you know I'm thankful to a degree deeper than can be measure in hit-counters.

Fare thee well!

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It sucks arguing on your own site, because all you can do is alienate people who already value your opinion.

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I feel so obligated to post something on Monday mornings, especially if I've been quiet most of the weekend.

Well bah! I've got to shower and catch my train!

Busy this morning, but I'll post some stuff up this afternoon when things ease off a bit.

'Till then, any comments on the amazon banner up top? Love it? Hate it? Lifting it? Ditching Fury over it? :-)

Ho-Ho-Ho!

PS: Props to Ernie who got selected for the 'The Weakest Link' contestant pool for the second time in a row yesterday! He bitches about how they only do celebrity shows now, but I don't think he's realized that with his rising weblogging-star, he might be one of those celebrities. Mmm... A-lister The Weakest Link... "(insert witty blog-referencing Anne remark here)"

Hey look, I did write a post. Cool, except now I'll probably miss my train...

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Working on Yahoo! stuff all day (imagine...) but I wanted to tease and say that there are a few stories that are mostly finished, and just need some touching up. One will go up tomorrow, the next on Monday. Regular blogging will, as it always does, happen as inspiration strikes.

Also, if the rain is pouring down as expected on Sunday, I'll closet up in my apartment and get some good coding done. I've got a list of changes, including interface refinements (and the 'new to you' color coding) for Fury, and also some work on the oft-delayed other Fury-projects (metacookie and underblog, this week).

And for those of you who don't read on weekends, tomorrow is National AIDS Awareness Day, so be sure to check out Link and Think today, and check back with your favorite participating blogs to read about others experiences with the scourge of our generation.

Other than that, I hope everyone has a grand weekend! The holidays approacheth!

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Erik asked:

"What are the pitfalls you mention to doing a 'new to you' widget? interested because i've been thinking along those same lines recently."

Thanks for asking! It's two things mostly: First is about how you cookie. If you always cookie with a simple permanent 'last visited' cookie each time they come, then if they follo