Almost “there”: Tweets from 2014.02.21
I agree with pretty much everything in this post at the WPMU DEV blog on “common web design UX errors,” especially in regard to the dysfunctionality from a “UX” (user experience) perspective both of big “Vanity Images” and of “Sliders,”…
This is the first of what I intend to be a series of notes on WordPress and general installation, customization, development issues. I’ll mainly try to note what I’m doing as I do it, though in future entries I may also seek to catch up on and review what I’ve learned over the course of years working with WordPress and other Open Source applications, from my first efforts hacking PHP, CSS, and JAVA code that I only just barely understood, to writing my first functions and plug-ins the “right way” or as right as I can figure out how to do it.
TNR’s web designers would hardly be the first to make war on the ideology of the naturalistic image or on some other mode or claim of representation.
The approach I’m recommending would require some overall guidance, based on a much more detailed consideration than I have attempted here, but it would not require a single, all-or-nothing effort at any particular phase. Much might depend on the sophistication, capacities, and enthusiasm of individual sub-bloggers, but each blog would remain “small enough to fail” without doing much harm to the larger enterprise. On the other hand, any particular sub-blog or even sub-network of sub-blogs could end up growing far beyond the current limits of the League. The result could convey the Gentlemen’s characteristic commitment to liberty and human scale, and indeed to diversity, the latter being something which the League has thusfar been extraordinarily successful in achieving on the level of ideology, if much less so in other ways.
…though a testimonial blurb reminds us that Jacobin means to be “radical left,” the site’s quaint user icons, “prettied up” fonts and washed-out tones and and half-tones, Toussaint-Louverture period graphic, and mind-numbingly cute and self-conscious article excerpts convey an overall impression that’s about as radical and polemical, as revolutionary and Jacobin, as a restaurant menu. It’s “radical leftism” as de-constructed period piece or bourgeois diversion, hardly as a life-and-death confrontation with power.