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Excuse My Mess – BBAH Update

Dan Studnicky — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:53:25 +0000

I have some time this week, so I’m going to try doing a custom WordPress theme for BBAH.

I want to do these things:

Make the typography smaller
Get rid of that header image
Go to a single column layout
Decrease the width to around 700-800 pixels.
Completely remove comments

Please excuse my mess.

Some cleaning up

Dan Studnicky — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:08:03 +0000

You may have noticed this site has been scaled way back. I admire sites that focus on the content and don’t have a lot of visual clutter. So I changed the theme to reflect that.

Part of that was because of this, where the author makes a case for refocusing on writing, which is why these things ever get done to begin with.

I’m also going to start writing in Markdown, which I hope encourage more writing. I’ve used Marsedit for about forever, but writing larger articles in HTML gets tedious very quick.

…So there.

Edit: Some links didn’t work because I don’t know Markdown that well yet.

Switching Hosts

Dan Studnicky — Sat, 30 May 2009 17:27:46 +0000

I plan on switching hosts this weekend, so bear with me.

Photo by Flickr user ilja

Edit

Everything went alright. Even rocking a new theme.

Back to the old theme

Dan Studnicky — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 21:22:57 +0000

If you’ve been reading the RSS/Atom feed, you wouldn’t have noticed that I changed my theme recently. Today I changed it back.

Web design is kind of a funny thing these days, especially if you get most of your internet reading material through feeds. Design should help you navigate and read content. If you’re a heavy RSS user than you may have taken that for granted, like I have. Frankly, I didn’t think the theme I was using for the past few months did that very well. It looked alright, but I don’t think it fit very well with what I like to write about, and I don’t think that it gave enough width to the posts area.

So, not wanting to spend more time finding the perfect theme, I went back to the one I was satisfied with before.

Why My Blog Is Currently Anemic

Dan Studnicky — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:10:19 +0000

It was May 2005 when I first started BBAH.

A few things happened around that time. For starters, while I graduated college in December ’04, most of my friends graduated in May ’05. There really wasn’t anything like a Facebook 3 1/2 years ago (and I hate MySpace, so that was out), so starting a blog was a necessity to keep friends up to date on the general points of your life since you’d stop seeing them every day.

So most of the earlier posts on BBAH were meant for a very small audience – me and my friends – about 5-10 people.

Today if I want to keep in touch with my friends there’s the Facebook. There’s Twitter. There are a whole bunch of other social networking sites we could use, but my bread and butter has been those two.

So why continue to put so much energy into a blog for these kinds of updates?

I think this is something that’s generally going on in the internet right now – personal blogs are on the decline because of new tools like Twitter and Facebook.

I think it might be a good thing. I know I’ve spent an hour writing and editing entries for this blog, but with Twitter I can sum up my basic point in 140 characters and still feel like I’ve said something and move on. If somebody is interested in what I said, which is almost never, they can @reply me. Meanwhile, I can just move on.

The investment of time in Facebook and Twitter is significantly less than rolling your own solution.

Still, BBAH has its purpose when it comes to longer content. When something requires more than 140 characters or a quick wall post, I can turn to a blog. On the flip side, if something requires communicating to a small group of people (for convenience or, ironically, some kind of pseudo-privacy) I can turn to Facebook – where only people I’ve approved can view that communication.

So really:

Social Network = Everyday use
Blog = Longer entries

From now on I’ll reserve this space for bigger things. I’ll only enable comments on the posts that I think deserve comments. If you like what I write here you can check out my Twitter. I’m on Facebook, but if you know me in RealLife™ you probably already know that.

I haven’t died

Dan Studnicky — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:13:16 +0000

It’s been about a month since I’ve written anything for barbarism.net. I had no intention of taking a 43 Folders style hiatus – but in September I thought I’d stop talking about music, Logic Pro, etc and get back to it.

So I decided I would try to dedicate 1 hour each day to learn something new and 1 hour to be creative in some way. It’s worked for about a month. I haven’t been strict about dedicating that amount of time to further education and creative pursuits – but it’s still much better than it was a few months ago.

But I haven’t died. I have a list of things I’d like to write about. Stay tuned.