danielsjourney blog archive reader. I threw this together while messing about with Flex. I meant to vet some of the entries before posting about it, but even I don't have the constitution to read any of that stuff. If you are interesting in my blogging life prior to July 2005, it's all there...

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There are thousands of reasons why people write blogs. But it seems to me the biggest reason that drives the bloggers I read the most is, we're all looking for our own personal global microbrand. That is the prize. That is the ticket off the treadmill. And I don't think it's a bad one to aim for.

I've started reading gapingvoid again recently after taking some time off (approx 9 months), and have been enjoying it immensely. We're thinking about the same kind of things he just puts them into words and cartoons much better.

Have had a very nice balance of online and IRL interactions this week, (meaning more IRL than usual).

Things are much different for me these days, and yet some things stay the same.

I have to go shower etc because I'm about to go have more IRL with smart beautiful inside/out kind of people.

I get a new bicycle tomorrow.



Yesterday I accidentally clicked "Mark all as read" instead of "Refresh" and instantly went from 1000+ unread items in Reader to like 24 or whatever. A user interface bug that might actually be a good thing.

Dan Wilson: "Come Home Angel" straight into "Cry" straight into "Golden Girl" is a little heartbreaking, but beautiful!

Airbag - Boxes.:

Before there were blogs we had websites. Beautiful, random websites that felt more like a zine — one page looking nothing like the one before or after it — or Wired magazine back in the early days when Jane Metcalf was art directing. Clicking through a website hosted on Geocities was like playing Russian roulette with your eyes but today those horrid pages with disco backgrounds, flaming horizontal rules, and BLINK tags would look more like art today than poorly designed website because we're so used to seeing boxy newsletters (this site included). Content was in free-form, one page might contain a paragraph set in headline tags and the next would be five pages set in nine-point type. Sure it was sometimes frustrating but it certainly wasn't boring. Today's content-tied-to-ads web is very bland in comparison and we desperately need to rediscover the ways of our old, accidental bohemian community.

When content is forced through a entry-commment-trackback-pagerank strainer it all comes out looking the same no matter how the templates are designed. Sure this format is functional but it's more like a Maersk shipping container than a Volvo s50. This is fine for commercial purposes, the blog is certainly the must-have online marketing device, but I miss those days when content wasn't confined to categories, calendars, and links to vote a piece of content into a popularity contest.