Design Introspective: Word-Text-Communications

This Design Introspective will be the first of an infrequent column I'm starting, generally rounding out the then&nows of a subject, giving you some sort of insight into how I work. In return, I'd love if you'd make it a point to leave comments for Introspectives, since it's hard to really look inwards without accepting external opinions.

This Design Introspective centers on "Word-Text-Communications", the 'label' I've blogged with for almost two years. Specifically, I'm going to focus on this blog and the design and editorial choices I've made since starting it; but I'm going to indulge myself and give a fair bit of backstory on the blogs that inspired and created Word-Text-Communications 3.0: textual intercourse & discourse in November 2009. If you've noted that this Design Introspective resembles an earlier post I made, "What I Intend To Do With My Blog", that's because it's intended to be the "now" half of then&now.

PART ONE: Vox

My Vox blog, now titled Word-Text-Communications: by Amirul B Ruslan (subheaded "Warning: Big-O-Vision and other overly-hyphenated words.") was originally titled Booooooooooooomblastandruin!, after a word that made multiple appearances in Only Revolutions, a novel by Mark Z. Danielewski. I came to know about Vox while researching Danielewski, actually. I actually had stumbled upon a Voxblog that belonged to a girl who would later be known as Liyana Dizzy, half of spoken word maestros Lizzy & The. Vox was gorgeous: columns, galleries for photos, videos, music, books... It appealed to the OCD in me.



[caption id="attachment_297" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="The current banner to the Voxblog — I used to change banners once every three to six months."][/caption]

I used Vox for nearly three years, only ending my affiliation with them (and even then informally — the blog still lives on, aimless) in November 2009. I liked Vox because it could automatically resize photos for me, even if it were awfully simplistic ways with options like "Small", "Medium" and "Large". Video embedding was something relatively new to me at the time, but Vox crippled it: no matter what size you ask for, the YouTube video you embed would still be small, with a huge empty block of grey space sitting dumbly like Internet concrete.

While uploading to Vox was relatively easy (I say "relatively" because I must've spent countless hours waiting for uploads that would never finish to finish), organizing it didn't really work. If a book wasn't available on Amazon US, UK, FR or JP, Vox pretty much doesn't let you upload it as a "book", so covers you wanted to point out would have to be uploaded as images.

It was the little things like that which made me slowly dislike Vox. Those little things, and then suddenly... the big one. Comments.

Non-Vox users aren't allowed to comment, and this left my blog pretty empty and lonely for a rather long time. I mean, one can only write to an invisible audience for so long. I crossposted Vox to Facebook and I realized that people did comment, and they did a lot. It wasn't for a lack of readership — just that the majority of my readers were unwilling to register a Vox account for the sole purpose of posting comments.

Yvonne, whose Eyefight blog deserves plugging here, fanned the flames of rebellion by constantly reminding me how not having comments was dumb. So I rebelled.

[caption id="attachment_295" align="aligncenter" width="165" caption="Obligatory silly photo of Yvonne."][/caption]

Goodnight, sweet Vox.

PART TWO: Tumblr

I don't know why I came to be so attached to the Word-Text-Communications name; I just did. I liked it enough to include it on a t-shirt I printed that, notably, has nine photos of me (running joke: "There are nine Amiruls on the t-shirt, and one wearing it. If I ever got in a fight with you, it'd be ten on one.").

[caption id="attachment_296" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Uh, yeah. It really does have nine pictures of me."][/caption]

I came across Tumblr during my search for a new blog host via Tasha, who recommended it (despite only making like six posts there). The Tumblr platform was pleasantly easy to edit, and some of the templates there are gorgeous. See the Penguin Books theme for Tumblr.

[caption id="attachment_298" align="aligncenter" width="441" caption="The profile blurb for my Tumblr blog, using the Cavalcade theme, modified to have really hideous colors. Hurrah, Amirul's colorblindness!"][/caption]

I liked Tumblr, but it didn't quite work out for me — the key to what I really wanted was comments, after all. Comments don't come inbuilt for Tumblr, but installing Disqus to enable comments is easy enough. Tumblr worked out nicely at first, but then I didn't dig the themes, I didn't dig what I was doing to it, and most of all, I didn't like that Tumblr seemed to be so hardcore on its microblogging concept that anybody trying to write a post longer than a paragraph seemed to literally stretch the code into an ugly mess.

In the end I used Tumblr more to reblog anything I saw and liked — and I still do; some of my favorite Tumblr users are Juiceinabox, ilovecharts, fuckyeahsubways (train fetish!), ohyeahfacts, and Yvonne's metablush (double-plug, I best get some advertising revenue out of you).

It's just not for writing long text stuff. And you can't have Word-Text-Communications without words or texts. Long ones.

PART THREE: WordPress

I've had WordPress blogs before, but this was the first time I installed it by hand myself. This was actually a bit difficult; there was no auto-install script on the first three hosts I tried, so I attempted to manually install it. Hilarious fail.

I got on X10hosting, which does the current hosting for my site... for free! One gig of space, no popups, so I'm liking it a lot. (There's a bit of a weird clause, though: you have to log into X10's community forums once every thirty days, or else they'll suspend your account. Lame.) X10 had scripts to install MediaWiki, WordPress, and more.

[caption id="attachment_299" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="This is the metaphorical backstage of a blog post on WordPress."][/caption]

I've always had the Arras theme in mind, the one you're seeing now: it's pretty awesome, and rather magazine-like. Those thumbnails make the blog look great, really, but it also means I'll have to put in a bit of extra effort cropping thumbnails into the super-strict 700x300 size Arras demands.

I put in a lot of effort designing this blog, even including an index.html page to the main domain which links to all three Word-Text-Communications blogs; altogether, I think it took me about four days of code-squinting to finish this. It's not radically different from other Arras-themed blogs, I think it's distinguished enough from others (mainly from the site banner and the background of HATS HATS OMG HATS). Arras is one of the most popular themes on WordPress, and for good reason: you could use it as a personal blog for the fancy and stylishly inclined sorts, and it wouldn't look out of place as a "web magazine" site, with each post more like articles rather than weblogs.

Unfortunately, that design perspective has inadvertently affected my writing and publishing on this blog — my posts here aren't so much "blog posts", they're "articles". If you'll look at it, out of the thirty-plus articles I've written at time of print, almost none of them were personal pieces, all "articles", written in the way I write articles for work. This is both a good and bad thing: I have strict standards as to what's publish-worthy and what's not (though I often slip, admittedly).

[caption id="attachment_300" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="This is how the blog looks like, right now. Maybe some day I'll change it and you'll go, "HA! I MUCH PREFERRED THE OLD DAYS WHEN YOU HAD SPACESHIPS AND HATS!""][/caption]

But taking the effort to write pieces that average around 800 words tax me a lot, and in all probability, taxes you too, reader. You're hear to read interesting little pieces of me and the world around me, not to read features written by a journalist. Is the length of articles a problem for you? Comment!

The exhaustion of being at work, writing, tends to lead to a general feeling of languor, leaving me no desire to write anything for my blog: that's just plain bad. Today's an exception, though — I wrote and finished three articles for TELL, and wrote two for the blog, for a total of about 3000 words today! Considering I spend so much time vetting through articles here, I don't feel like it's all that personal. Maybe this is just narcissism talking, but I do think you readers want to know a little about me and the things I do, don't you?

(I do have a blog post about the New Year's Day fun I had — photos are now uploaded to WordPress, so I'll either write it today or tomorrow.)

Without any real feedback, I won't know how to write a better blog, for the enjoyment of the people who do bother to come and read. There's comments — no need to register, guys! — and there's a shoutbox. I don't know if people actually even read all the posts: I've found that the Arras theme's preview setup lets you choose which ones you want to see, so if "Rafiq & Mimie: The Married Life" doesn't interest you, you're free to skip and choose the next, or something else that interests you. This is one flaw of having the magazine look, I suppose.

(I'm wondering if it's possible to code a column or textbox in below the preview slideshow that automatically posts the last post, or at least the first four or five paragraphs. I mean, of course it's possible, but who do I have to bribe to help create that for me?)

I use a number of plugins to get the Word-Text-Communications look and feel I want, and here are the most important ones: Find Me On, WP-Footnotes, and WP to Twitter.

The Word-Text-Communications logo you see in the site banner and below my profile blurb is a stylized icon made in Photoshop that is pretty much just this:

{W}

The W in {W} is in Futura. I was forcibly converted by Stephen into the Church of Futura, though it was clear that Futura worked far better than Helvetica Neue for the purposes of this logotype.

I'm happy with WordPress right now, but I do understand that it does need a lot of maintenance, and having a WordPress does mean complete customizability comes at the price of constant fiddling around.

CONCLUSIONS

I really like WordPress, and this site's look really appeals to me — I was considering other WordPress layouts, and may soon launch sub-blogs for other endeavors of mine. The magazine look still appeals to me, but I somehow might actually prefer the linear blog post setup, where people don't have to click to see the post in a different page. Ideally, my ultimate Arras modification would allow me to retain the preview slideshow and have a few posts linearly displayed on the main page, with links from the preview slideshow as well as the lower archive to other, older posts. If this were possible, at some point I might consider running the preview slideshow specifically for featured posts only, allowing me to post shorter posts without feeling like it's a complete waste of disk space (each post creates a new page, and unlike Blogspot or wordpress.com I actually am "paying" for each page because I'm judged on my bandwidth and megabyte usage.)

Questions for you, reader, because feedback really matters here:

1. What do you like about Word-Text-Communications: textual intercourse & discourse?


2. How strong is the design principle here? What could be done to improve it? What do you think should be let go?


3. What about content: do you like the whole "article" thing going on, or would you really rather more lighter, personal stuff? What sort of posts would you like to see a lot more of?


4. What articles do you like the most here so far?


5. Is Arras the right theme for the content in Word-Text-Communications: textual intercourse & discourse?


6. How frequently should I update? Do you find yourself getting bored because of long lapses between posts?


7. How do you find the length of "articles"/blog posts here? Is there an average by which I should go by? Is there a hard limit on how many words I should do? (Random aside: I do a lot of features at TELL. I literally go, "3000 words? No problem!")

Thanks for your time. I know this article took over two thousand words to broadcast what I wanted, but consider this an introspective properly given enough introspection.