I wasted an inordinate amount updating the look of this web site. Why did I do this? I have no idea why I did this. It makes me so angry.
I always have grand ambitions for my web site design, which then crash into the ugly reality of my utter lack of design skills. My most recent vision for adamstein.org was based on some illuminated manuscripts I saw in a cathedral in, I think, San Gimignano. You’re probably thinking that I am joking, that I couldn’t possible be that pretentious, or at least not so stupid as to admit said pretention. Sadly, I am not joking.
Anyway, I ended up doing what I usually do in these situations: I ripped off the look of a well-designed site, while somehow managing to drain the ripped-off design of all character and appeal. The site in question this time around is the lovely and worthwhile dooce.com.
Ripping off the design would have been fairly straightforward — after all, it’s just HTML — if not for the countless hours I spent tracking down a flaw in my code that caused the pages to render poorly in Netscape. To the 10% of readers still using Netscape: get with the freaking program.
Anyhow, the only noticeable change is that my site now includes a rotating series of pictures of myself in the upper-right hand corner, culled from various Wall Street Journal articles about me.
When I joined Wharton, I was issued an obligatory subscription to the Journal. And while the Journal’s reporting is as excellent as its editorial page is scary, I find myself most drawn to those little stippled pictures of various politicians, celebrities, and non-celebrities. Particularly when those pictures are pictures of me, Adam Stein.
I had assumed that those little stippled pictures were a holdover from the Journal’s hoary past, some pre-Guttenberg technology that befitted the paper’s conservative tone and seriousness of purpose. Turns out the pictures were first included in 1979, and were designed to look like holdovers from some fictional hoary past.
Anyway, I like the little pictures, and find them as well-suited graphically to the web as they are to newsprint. So I’ve decided to rescue these bits of artistic ephemera by, um, repurposing them on my web site. I will continue to do so until the Dow Jones Corporation asks me to cease and desist.
Oh, I’ve also worked a little JavaScript magic to rotate the wacky slogans that appear below my site’s banner. The present slogan, “Sin sombrero no hay fiesta”, is a bit of graffiti I saw spraypainted on a wall in, I think, Ecuador. Latin Americans have the best graffiti, hands down.
I can’t get the SmartyPants plugin for MovableType to work, so no curly quotes for now. You don’t really care, do you? Fine then.
Coming next week: new posts.
