Back in a Bit

All the new stuff is here.

The best of the old stuff (which, rather distressingly, made up about half a percent) is here too.

The sporadic posting and sometimes lengthy breaks between, while not particularly deliberate, is almost celebrated (hence the name).

Super. Carry on.

People keep asking, so here is my wishlist. I remember the days when you could just search for “Mo” and there I was. The internet is on a mission to make me feel like an old fart.

In spite of the bugs, I may as well throw this thing open. Hopefully will be more Frasier than Joey. Welcome.

Since its return, I’ve come to notice that this site (or rather, the selection of posts I’ve made of late) has been described in more than one place as “intelligent”. I find this quite interesting. I think what is actually meant is something more like “considered”, but even so it has got me thinking about intelligence and what it means.

Conventional wisdom on writing for the web tells us to use simple language, short straight-forward sentence structures and brief paragraphs. This is because we are fundamentally lazy readers, particularly when staring at a screen. The same wisdom also instructs us to place black text on white pages, for the same reason. I used to subscribe to these points of view, but as time has worn on I’ve drifted away from them.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to organise weblog posts, and I think I may have something.

In the search for workable ways to organise chunks of content on a weblog, I looked at how I organise things in the real world, to see if there was any existing system that could be adapted. I turned to my CD collection, which sits in racks that cover one wall of our flat. The CDs are organised alphabetically by artist, starting at the top of the far left column. There are several things that can be observed about the system I employ: firstly that the alphabetical sorting is quite informal—artists are grouped by the first letter of their name, but I’m casual about exact alphabetic sorting. I don’t worry about Radiohead coming before REM or Kraftwerk before Lenny Kravitz. Relatively simple name-grouping is sufficient for me to find what I’m looking for, without increasing the overhead of returning the CDs to the wall or adding new purchases. Secondly, there are spaces in the racks between each alphabetic group, again to allow me to add new CDs without having to reorganise the entire collection. Thirdly, I notice that, within the alphabetic groups, I tend to place albums by the same artist together and, in some cases, organise these albums in order of release.

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