You can do some Cool Things with it too
I’ve been fiddling with graphics for my site, adding a little bit of colour here and there. I thought I might mention my brother, who I have been linking to since my first post (I make that sound like a long time). He runs a site called “The Room Project”, if you didn’t guess from the banner. Check it out if you want to see what one of the rooms in my house looks like.
I think people should use their screen names in real life. I’ve been debating in my head if I should distribute the real names of people I know, and I can’t decide whether to be paranoid for the sake of other’s personal info or not. I don’t want to begin a rant on the subject of “nobody is ever going to read my web log”, for the sake of sounding too much like a Live Jounal. But the fact remains that this is a public web site, and assuming it exists until infinity, every government agency in the world will see it.
It’s great that people have screen names. They can reveal as much or as little as they like about themselves (but are probably still unknowingly giving away more than they realise), or they can even pretend to be someone they are not. People never mind if you refer to them by their screen name, it’s like a public domain profile. The problem is, you don’t usually know how sensitive people are about their “private” profile, their real name and life. At the risk of using an Americanism, “free speech” is a feature of the internet which I feel too many people abuse. I could say pretty much anything I wanted to now, without fear of wrath. But I choose not to.
This is why people should use their “public profiles” in real life. It prevents having to ask awkward questions like “If I wanted to refer to you online, would you take offence if I called you by your real name while I described your psuedo-illegal activities?” Remember folks, it’s just an opinion.
I spent the evening cranking up the l33t factor of the site, you may now check it’s compatibility with XHTML 1.0, by pressing the button on the front page. This meant running my HTML through W3C’s validator, screaming at the error reports, and taking a crash course in CSS. Well, at first I tried to get HTML compliance, but it seemed I had picked up too many bad habits from old HTML guides. It’s going to take me a while to re-adjust, and also to ‘repair’ the existing pages. CSS didn’t scare me as much as I thought it would, there hasn’t been anything I’ve seen yet that isn’t sensibly done, and you can do some cool things with it too.
The digital clock on my mousepad says “5:A”. I guess that means I should get some sleep…