It looks fine in Firefox 3.6, Safari 4.0.4 and Internet Explorer 8. It’s probably made this site a little harder to read on the iPhone but I can work on that.

The next step might be to switch out the header for some sweet faux-handdrawn sketches that look like they came out of a high school notebook. And stripes. And handdrawn block letters. Give it that real indie appeal. Also, it should star Michael Cera.

Here’s what I need to do:

• Redesign the footer so it works with a longer blog title
• Update the header so it can take a custom image or just display text
• Add support for categories
• Add styling for some default widgets (text, archives, links, tag cloud, etc.)
• Add admin page with customizable theme options

It’s far easier to hardcode everything and know exactly what things I want to display. It’s pretty hard to make things more generic to please everyone.

I spent an hour yesterday afternoon positioning my camera so maybe I could do a video blog. I searched around for various household objects that could give me the height I needed so the camera was at least eye level. Then I got vain and realized I needed to shower and shave before going on camera. After I got out of the shower, I lost all motivation.

On the drive home I’m coming up with these things to blog about. When I get home, it’s straight to the Xbox. Then food and TV. Then it’s nap time. The ideas are gone.

Part of it is that I don’t have a audience anymore. I don’t necessarily mean that in the literal sense. I mean, when I write, there’s no one to write to. Sure, there are still the brave few of you that subscribed to me and never figured out how to remove things from your feed reader but in my mind, I’m not writing for you specifically. Once upon a time, I used to write predominantly for myself, other times for close friends. Now, it feels like I’m talking out my thoughts to a dog; the dog tilts his head and stares at me quizzically before slumping off to his chew toy and ultimately ignoring me.

What I mean is, I need to start getting self-indulgent again. I need to just hammer out whatever stupid thoughts are in my head without censoring and worrying about if people are interested or not. I need to feel ok about ranting about television and video games, I need to annoy everyone with my bad attempts at fiction, I need to put forward my badly-reasoned political arguments and my unwanted opinions on the tech industry. I need to feel like it’s ok to post that sort of crap and feel like I still own this blog and it’s not some lingering ghost of a website that I refused to put out of its misery.

Home page

It was weird to have my home page as some sort of summary. After getting used to it, I didn’t like it that much.

In having only the four latest entries on the home page, it lent this sort of headliner quality to it. Like a real article needed to sit behind each title. I just want to blog a stream of consciousness and not fuss over making things look official and important.

Big fonts

Don’t get me wrong, I still love big fonts. But the font was so big and the column was so narrow that the smallest sentence would occupy four lines. Decided to scale it back. Bonus: it’s now harder for people to read over my shoulder.

Links

I stopped linking to as much stuff. I think it’s because I have less of an attention span so all I ever click on are stupid photos and joke videos. It gets tired. What I’ve really been aching to do is to post a link and write one or two paragraphs on it, something that my previous workflow didn’t allow. Hopefully, I’ll start doing that now.

Comments

I was getting huge numbers of spam comments. I was getting periodic flash floods of around one thousand comments. To the credit of WordPress and Akismet, all of these comments were caught. But I was always worried that a legitimate comment would get lost in the deluge. To rectify this, I’ve turned off comments on all old posts. Too bad, so sad.

Anyway, Deutlich talks about her old BackStreet Boys fansite. It makes me think about the unlikely story (ahem) that led me to where I am today with the web development skills that I have. Allow me this 1000-word traipse down a sepia-toned memory lane of HTML.

Somewhere in the late ninties, I was making pages in Netscape Composer, the free WYSIWYG HTML editor that was bundled with the Netscape browser. I think it was actually quite good for its time. Not as whiz-bang as some of the other editors out there but it was a great starter kit and not as evil as trying to create HTML in Microsoft Word.

Being a high schooler, I was a big fan of putting scary red text on black backgrounds. It was pretty badass. Sadly, I had no content. I had a desire to create a form but no associated function. A battle that I still fight to this day. I think I slapped on an email address, a guestbook and maybe a membership to a web ring.

In the year 2000, I moved on to Macromedia Dreamweaver 3. Professional web development software that I obtained through entirely legal means on my vast income of $0.00 per month. It was a step above and I started getting familiar with the code underneath the surface. By now, I had moved on to Tripod for my free webhosting. I think my website was called “Bullshot” or something like that. It was pretty much a precursor for every web page I’ve done since. I used it to bitch about life, bitch about myself, and write stories about my imaginary girlfriend of the time. (Haha! Yeah, Jack is crazy.) I think there were a few parts that were actually well written, if you’d believe that.

This was the time of what I like to think of as “manual blogging”. You copy and paste a previous post you wrote and then edit the title and content manually. Change the file name and upload it back. Update all the other pages so they point to this new page. Viola, new blog post. It was very quaint and repetitive, like churning butter.

2001 and 2002 saw the beginning of the demise of free sites like Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod. They were still free but they started imposing more restrictions like 5MB of space and all sorts of banners, frames and pop-ups. Somehow, I got into the invitational community of the now-deceased DigitalRice.com. Some dude just gave us free hosting on a subdomain and we even had Perl and PHP scripting enabled. I tinkered around with a few different things until I finally discovered version 2.5 of Movable Type.

I continued to roll my own HTML code in Dreamweaver and create my own custom themes for Movable Type. I think my site went through 3 or 4 iterations until DigitalRice.com finally shutdown sometime in mid-2003. Supposedly for some sort of re-working of the sites features so we’d have all new community stuff. It never came back online. I never got my files back. Which was good because that blog had a pretty detailed account of how I got smitten over a girl, invited her to our “senior prom” (in Australia, we called it something different), convinced all my nerd friends to get dates, and then was promptly canceled on. But that’s all behind me and she wasn’t a very nice person anyway.

Late 2003, I was well into freshman year of college (I can hear my Australian friends cringing as I use these US-centric terms), but it annoyed me no end that my blog was trapped and I couldn’t get it back. In October 2003, after an impatient 30 days, I signed up for hosting with Quost.com.au (check out their logo) and registered boxofjack dot com. To this day, I still can’t give you a good reason for this name. It’s… adequate but it’s not going to win any Blog Title of the Year awards.

Late 2003 was also the time I started paying attention to web standards in a big way. It was in the middle of a big advocacy push and it was really cool to see people share all these techniques about XHTML and CSS. Web designers blogs were full of all these amazing tips and it was just so cool to be on the forefront of something like that. These skills all came in handy when I landed an internship as a web developer in 2005 whilst everything they had so far taught in school was interesting but impractical fluff. Not to say that it shouldn’t be taught but the real world has a curious tendency to fall very short of the ideal.

So far, I think box of Jack has been through at least 10 different designs, two hosts and three different blogging engines (Movable Type, Typo, WordPress). I was asked what it’d take to stop me blogging and all I could say was,

“Blogging has been that constant in my life for the longest time because I’m so connected to the internet. I spend 8 hours a day at a computer and then I go home and spend some more time on my laptop. In between, I use my phone to read the internet.”

Sure, my fire has been diluted somewhat with commercialization, Twitter, Tumblr, blog stats, lack of depression, and the sad loss of my imaginary girlfriend but I think I’ll stick around. Maybe I’ll finally get that book deal.

Note to IE6 users: you’re on your own. You’ve abandoned good taste and the security of your computer to use that ancient browser and I’m abandoning you in the interests of my playtime. Later days. Get Firefox or Chrome and you’ll be happier. If you are on some sort of locked down computer where you can’t install things, there’s always Firefox Portable.

7am Update

Ok I added a few tweaks for Internet Explorer and things look kinda ok? I’m seeing issues where the page is all fucked up in IE and then you hit reload and it displays as it should. Weird?

But I’m trying. I want to change up the design again. Here is what I want:

• Make the font huge
• White background
• Move the links to somewhere less important
• Allow short stupid posts, reduce the burden

Meanwhile, I’m trying to obtain more time for blogging. My priorities both at work and at home have grown and it’s pushed out that empty time that I used to fill with blogging, reading and playing the guitar. Instead, I’ve been spending too much time on my Xbox. Now, a lot of these games are pretty awesome games like Braid, Castle Crashers and Portal but I must admit that Viva Pinata 2 was just a huge time devourer. After I finish up with Portal, I’m not going to buy any new games for a while.

Two things that are in direct contradiction to playing less video games: 1) I just shipped off a bunch of my games to poodlegoose and having less games makes me feel like it’s ok to buy more games. 2) I discovered Wii Fit last night and it’s not as gimmicky as I thought. It’s a well thought out exercise simulator and the teaching techniques seem pretty solid. In a lot of ways, it improves on regular exercise because it monitors your center of balance and it’s cute seeing all your Mii friends cheer you on. My girlfriend’s Mii was the coach that was directing a soccer team to kick things at my head.

Which gives me a nice segue into my severe lack of physical activity. Part of this malaise, this deviation from creative pursuits into mind-numbing television and Xbox, is probably due to the fact that I don’t feel like I have much energy. I sleep weird, I am tired a lot and I overeat. Writing, drawing and playing is like sending out my energy into the universe (see also: opening up my chakra, vibrating at a higher frequency, achieving a new plane of consciousness, playing hopscotch with Jesus). Sitting on the couch is like sleeping with my eyes open.

I have nothing to post these days so I’m going to take a break. This is not so much news to you as it is to me. I post so infrequently that you won’t even know I’m taking a break. The daily links will continue to flood in. Instead, I will tweak my page design a little. No crazy redesigns but I think I’ll tinker with the archives pages. Maybe I’ll even get rid of this sliding menu at the top once and for all. Maybe I’ll get a new header graphic. We’ll see.

New colors maybe? Hmm.

In the meantime, there will be links. And you’re welcome to chat to me or maybe we can do a guest post exchange or something. I’ve never written a guest post before and I’ve only ever had one on this blog but it was a super top secret one. It was secretly a cryptic love letter to pre-Federline Britney. And it wasn’t written by me. Honest.

I think I just want some really comforting soup. Winter is ending and I’d like to send the last days balled up on my couch with a big ol’ mug of blogosoup. To add to the ambiance, I’ll look on youtube for a video of a roaring fireplace and fullscreen it.

Commenters: Give me advice on how to make a blogosoup. Jack needs to be fed.

The first hit on Google for my name is this blog, the second is my Twitter. That’s a good thing because there was some blog post by some guy a long time ago talking about claiming your online identity. Why? Well the worst case scenario is someone starts talking shit about you and all the google results will point to that. When girlfriends, employers and members of the press google you, that’s all they see. Why not head them off at the pass and have your own site that presents a much more rosy picture?

Of course, that’s just my paranoia talking. The real motivation to claim your online identity should already be clear if you watched Jet Li’s 2001 flop, The One; a movie that managed to lose over $5 million at the box office. In the movie, there is a big-ass multiverse and each universe contains one Jet Li and there is an evil Jet Li that travels to each universe and kills off that universe’s Jet Li so that he can absorb their powers and become a superhuman Jet Li. Similarly, there are many people who use the internet and share your name; if not your full name than at least your first name. The challenge here is to kill off every single one of these imposters’ websites so that your website will grow in strength and become The One.

I know this stuff because I used to be a web designer. Industry experts agree that by the year 2048, there will only be one website left. More than likely, it will be a Jet Li fansite.

Anyway, what to do when I have to be in a job that’s more exposed, more public? There’s nothing inherently bad about my blog but if I had the choice, I’d rather co-workers and customers never ever find out about it. I already went through a long phase of censorship after all my friends began reading my blog regularly. Maybe I just need to go through another long phase if work people should ever find it.

Maybe I should just stop with the blogging and start that Jet Li fansite already.