Since joining the so-and-so times interesting yet rarely often engaging enough to warrant a sphere branding-osphere two years ago, I have seen a multitude of very good and very bad blogs crash and burn in a manner comparable to throwing a match onto a gasoline-soaked tyre swing harbouring a newborn puppy and fastened to a branch overhanging a radioactive-powered shark-infested whirlpool.

Having myself once succumbed to the temptation of nudging updates on this site one notch lower on my priorities list – for a long time classing my blogging activities with such laudable pursuits as sending emails disguised as spam to random accounts just to see whether spammers are susceptible to being struck dead by concentrated wishful thoughts involving steamrollers and wrong right turns – I have often found myself on a new blog, perusing the peppy first few posts, when an invisible entity has seized me by the shoulders and shaken a mental image of tumbleweed with a bad case of heartburn into my blood-curdling screaming head.

Each case of this thought-provoking maelstrom has always brought me back to two fundamental questions: why do new blogs die so easily? And why is it so bloody entertaining to witness, calculating such odds as number of remaining posts before author will-to-write snappage occurs and so on, and all?

Of course, we all know the answer to the first question.

Lack of readers. Lack of comments. Lack of subscribers. Lack of ad click-throughs. Lack lack lack lack. Subscribing to that rhetoric, it’s hypothetically possible that a lack of private emails from readers praising oneself by utilising creative euphemisms along the lines of eating a banana or sucking dry a pomegranate is the bastard culprit in making at least one blogger pack up shop.

Forget lack. From my own experience, sites overflowing with positive attention and online eminence are just as vulnerable to good show folks but fuck it syndrome as newer blogs and blogs so new they could be comfortably described as prenatal are. Forget lack, and at least try to come up with an excuse for your aversion to writing able to be voiced without attracting several bunched fists into the more breakable parts of your jawbone.

Which brings me to a screeching halt to the novelty-store, candle-lit doorstop of the second question.

When was the last time you cast your eyes on the first few posts of a blog, only to be thrown backwards across the room onto your ass¹ by the sheer force of forced words flowing before your line of sight? Forced words being a one paragraph feature on such meaningful things as the exact shape, texture and colour profile of your pet iguana’s gallstones. Forced words being a one sentence overview of an event already disintegrated and meshed within the fabric of the blogosphere’s echo chamber. Forced words being a one word obituary of the latest deceased celebrity figure.

Forced words coupled with those sites most agreeable to providing them – otherwise known as prime tourist destinations for ad-copulation sight-seeing – provides at least one answer to the second question: “I am laughing maniacally at this blog’s future fading away into nothing because my own decision to abort my plans to create a cash-cow blog which would have somehow generated thousands of dollars in monthly ad revenue despite having content deserving of a peak reimbursement of several cannonballs being fired into my crotch one after the other is now justified”.

The rest, as usual, is attributable to either human nature, or the realisation that witnessing an online weblog’s self-implosion hardly approaches the unprecedented enjoyment levels derived from the limitless potential offered by a flamethrower and an abandoned chemical factory.

¹ Yes, I do mean literally.

Coupled with a culling of each site’s expert overviews (shiny!), think of it as either a concentrated effort to concentrate the quality of each site presented, or a re-realisation that one’s or anyone’s opinion on admirable site design holds as much weight online as the hybrid of a YouTube and Myspace comment does in a post-doctorate thesis.

5. Easily Amused – Banner

A luscious watercolour effect utilising a beautiful shade of aqua.

4. Maikel Neris – RSS icon

Wonderful tattered née grunge effect, blending very well into the tiled wooden background while still standing out.

3. Adit Shukla – Header/Sidebar

Very original, and wonderfully presented.

2. Orange Coat – Logo

Cute imagery which fits in very well with the site’s slogan and overall theme. A clever hover effect, too.

1. Nofrks – Navigation

Not even addressing the pleasing graphics decorating the Nofrks Design Studio site, nor the loving attention to detail paid to both the day and night theme, the sliding navigation applied for the four links located in the navigation bar teeters on the precipice of the kind of originality able to elicit simultaneous glazed eyes and rambling declarations of envy. A favourite minutiae: the brief flash of clouds within the night theme when traversing from the bottom of the screen to the top.

Barring those of you not in regular contact with young children and alliteration pundits, the sudden feeling of blue murder currently laying siege to your veins should be a familiar one. Unfortunately, the trend towards attempting to bludgeon people’s inner ticking mechanisms in such a way as to get them to do exactly what they don’t want isn’t confined to the arsenals of those with a maturity cutoff permitting them to utilise grade school tactics.

Abusers of the faithful art of reverse psychology? I’m onto you.

You succeed at it on a scale commonly referred to as ‘fail’

Reverse psychology has been around since before it was phrased for good reason: it works.

Caveman: Grunt. (I don’t want you.)

Cavewoman: Grunt. (Take me now!)

Well, to a point.

The problem with psychological techniques which have proven effective in coercing the majority kind of humans into doing a lot of unintelligent shit throughout history is that they invariably fall into the hands of morons with the unique ability to lower by two squared by a million percent the effectiveness of anything they touch.

Consider, for example, a pervasive figure in a particular facet of your life. He heaps you with his list of wild grievances with the one best friend of his you happen to detest, in order to eke out your grudging defence and eventual approval of said friend.

P1: And he slept with my girlfriend!

P2: But I’m your girl- … oh, screw the fact he just finished community service for beating up my pet bandicoot with a spanner! The fact you hate him means I now must embrace his awesomeness!

Only that last part of your acquaintance’s brilliantly thought out reverse psychology play never happens. He is, in more succinct terms, a luddite of the wonderful mechanism that is saying one thing in order to procure the complete opposite sentiment.

And the specific gender noun usage may mean I am in fact projecting, when in fact I’m not. Really.

You muddy the mind-controlling waters of better reverse psychologists

Putting aside its regular misuse, I have lain witness to some magnificent displays of reverse psychology in action. Unfortunately –

P1: Can you please …

P2: No! Stop! I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to … reverse-psychologise me into doing your bidding!

P1: What?

P2: Yeah, Bob tried to pull that voodoo on me last week! I see through the both of you.

P1: Oh. Bob. Just because I managed to get him to drink a gallon of detergent that one time, he thinks he’s an expert on reverse psychology now.

P2: Can you please kindly get the hell away from me?

– skilled practitioners of reverse psychology have that much of a harder time fighting the tidal wave of ineptitude brought into the field by those incapable of understanding that being subjected to it does not change the fact that they suck with the power of a supernova at it.

You need to get that there are other brainwashing techniques out there

Like subtly forgetting who someone is and igniting their feelings of inferiority. But … god, can you stop reading already, what’s-your-name? I’m trying to write something comprehensible to the average visitor here, and having someone belonging on the left-hand tail end of an IQ chart prying around here is even less helpful in achieving that than a multilingual bandicoot is in proffering its services in beating you up with a spanner!

Like dropping teasers and building anticipation. But that will be expounded upon in a future post.

Like throwing in random, inane twist endings. But for now, I’ve exhausted the limits of my brilliant imagination with the ‘example followed by satirical statement’ structure and rampaging marsupial anecdote of bygone paragraphs.

Needless to say, Tanya was the last person I wanted to bake a tray of cookies with while reminiscing about the good old days of her giving me the hypothermic shoulder. I passed her in the library corridor, my eyes averted, my mouth sealed. After a flutter of indecision crossed her face, she did the same by way of turning back to her heart-to-heart with the freshly-painted plaster wall.

The part of me buried underneath a pile of carefully amassed psychological fail-safes wished that a conversation, no matter how confrontational, had been struck.

At least then someone would’ve finally called me out by way of actual words.

I was 12 years old going on 13. The circle of friends who would carry me through high school had already been established the year before. Tanya had begun year 8 along with a hundred or so new students. I wouldn’t get to know her for another two years.

“You know what this means?” I mouthed excitably to my best friend from the corner of my mouth. “We’re going to be in the same form class for the next five years.”

Her name was Raileen¹.

“You know, all I ever wanted was a why,” Raileen said to me as those five years came to a close. “I never said anything about it because I knew it must’ve been bad.”

It had never stopped flummoxing me why she had never brought it up before then. Before I could rein it in, the question slipped from the recesses of the other unsolved high school mysteries stowed away in my mind.

“Because at least if you’d been angry at me, you would’ve brought it up to start with,” she replied. “But you just stopped talking to me. I never knew why. Jane never knew why. You just shut me out, then it stopped, and we left it at that.”

Walking through the library, the conversation came back to me – descending from that unique limbo made up of l’esprit de l’escalier and the reluctant adoption of foreign expressions when the English language just doesn’t do its damn job of handing you the right word – as I felt Tanya’s eyes burning a good-sized chunk into my back.

I considered about-turning and finding a way to ask Tanya the name of the person she had discovered everything from, without satisfying the usual need of being within 20 feet of her. However, lowering my cupped hands from my mouth and dissolving my makeshift foghorn, I re-estimated my ability to shout over the crowd while simultaneously managing to divert their attention to the library’s fascinating plaster wall at the same split second.

Knowing it would be the last time I would ever see her again, I walked away.

¹ As is probably obvious by now – ‘probably’ lying on the junction of ‘blaring it into your face with a foghorn’ and ‘commissioning a virtual airbag to fly it around the site every few minutes’ – each name used in these personal posts have been changed. I find it lends a credence on par with client testimonials embedded within spam emails.

Her. Looking straight at me.

Lex talionis;

The law of retaliation, whereby a punishment resembles the offence committed in kind and degree.

Tanya.

Looking back on high school, we all like to think we emerged victorious. I know and admit for a fact that I alighted on the lower end of the straight flush spectrum. And yet, being a PhD thesis-worthy case study in basket-case hypersensitivity, my apparent thwarted chance of being able to fondly look back on my school years was purely self-inflicted.

I was never bullied. Studying at a strict private girls’ school in a year level with cliques largely apathetic to each other, the most abusive words ever directed my way uniformly involved indifferent mentions of ‘pipe bombs’ and ‘wrong lockers’.

But then, there was the plague treatment. And Tanya.

She was a latecomer to my field of friends. The quintessential friend of a friend of whom you’re never quite sure whether to bear hug or prime as a patsy in all cases of misplaced explosive devices. Coupled with never having been particularly close to the actual friend – Jane – it wasn’t the most rock solid paragon of hand-holding chumminess.

So it was in year 10, having conjured up a future for myself inevitably as far removed from my current one as subtlety is to soap dramas, that I landed myself in science class with Tanya and Jane (TJ), while the rest of my group allowed themselves to be swept away by a large dose of cosmic humour and siphoned into alternatively offered computer and computer graphics classes.

Of course, being a teenager and choosing one over the other had to mean a minimal good friendship with TJ, and it was there. I even remained on speaking terms with Tanya up until graduation, after which I erased all memory of her from my mind for fear of all post-Tanya friendships not being able to live up to the one we had.

In the way of not being ensconced in crap, that is.

Our science classroom was made up of long rows, each with three seats on either side of a wash basin. For a few weeks into the school year, I perched with TJ in the front row, Tanya in the middle separating me and Jane. Beaker and test tube shattering hours passed without ego-marring incident.

Then, in a grammar school act akin to coating a friend in wool and cannon-balling them into a wolves den, Tanya shifted away from me. Literally.

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning during the first few minutes of science class, she would make a show of screeching her chair as far to the right as it was possible to get away from me without her and Jane swapping DNA and becoming conjoined twins. A casual observer might have thought me deficient in the way of molding myself into a human squeegee. In reality, I was an eight ball permanently set on question mark.

Within the pure triviality of each case of steadfast body distancing lay the genius in Tanya’s tactics. There were no words involved. The last thing I could do was wave a cudgel in the air, beat my chest and holler, “Why the hell are you moving half a metre away from me again? Matching it with the exact length of the stick nestled up a certain aperture, are we?”

However, taking into consideration Tanya’s complete non-acknowledgement of my existence during science class, along with the witting students watching everything from behind us, the aforementioned apathy of my year level’s cliques and the more pertinently aforementioned hypersensitivity of my ego, I was cowed into mortification. Worst of all, Jane never said a thing.

Okay, there are worse ways to humiliate someone than through verbal spitlicking. That was a lesson better taught by dunking your head repeatedly into a vat of hydrochloric acid. Why’d you make an example out of me?

Though Tanya’s behaviour eventually stopped – a year later – seeing her again having not even surmised that we’d been studying at the same university dredged up a wilted question of renewed burning proportions.

I continued walking towards her. She turned away from me, but didn’t move. I formed the question into one able to be verbalised without getting me dragged away by campus security.

Then I realised mid-step that she had believed I was getting nothing more than I deserved. All those years ago, someone had told her what I had done.

1. Stolle’s Tricycle Terror – Colour scheme

At first glance, the Tricycle Terror’s product page seems quite a mark off unique or groundbreaking. It’s a fortunate thing, however, that the temptation to shoe in a more ostentatious layout or illustrative background was kicked to the curb. The site’s unique colour combination of meticulously chosen shades of aqua, yellow and orange works more than well enough in setting the desired ‘vintage childhood’ mood.

2. Timoni.org – Sidebars

Refined and regal.

An immediate impression along these lines is all that can be said for Timoni.org upon absorbing its solitary emblem, drop-cap header typography, eye-pleasing ‘skinny’ content and fleuron embellishments. Compounding this, one foot is firmly placed in ‘who would’ve thought of it?’ territory with the placement of the site’s sidebars in two banners encompassing its header. It’s a refreshing break from the usual so-called innovation out there consisting of such design elements as ‘nature elements on top with dirt and roots in the bottombar and footer’, and ‘logo sticking out top left as a name-tag/tape’.

3. Silvia Victoria – Header

Silvia Victoria is another non-complex structured site with a single outstanding element placed less for show and more for getting the services offered by the site across. Its header is more than just a pretty thing – its intersecting watercolour landscape and lady portrait on collage setting conveys its slogan of ‘Paintings, Drawings & Collages’ in an understated and effective way. Statements against nature, sticky tape and top-left logo placard design elements which may or may not have been made in the immediate past are, in this case, retracted, if only to allow us all to learn the definition of ‘mercurial’.

4. Ian James Cox – Logo and logo trail

Along with another case of ‘skinny’ content, Ian James Cox’s site has something else pleasantly unconventional in its logo. Prescribing to the school of stating the obvious in light of the above image as I mention this, it’s a seagull carrying the site name in its talons. Adding to the eye-catching mix, a white background trail subtly highlights the site’s other targeted areas – a short blurb about the author, and a feed icon linking to the site’s feed which again proves (carrying on from last week) that there are other ways of making an element pop than through its size.

5. Amanda Harbaugh – Background

Rounding out our list this week, sometimes I’m able to put aside the question of a design’s relevance to its site’s subject matter, drop my jaw for a moment, and utter, “Background. Shiny!” This is one – and pretty much not ever the last – of those times.

¹ “Return sweep: moving our eyes from one line of type to the next.” – This definition is nowhere to be found online. The crime of there being no definition of the common phenomenon of “Why am I able to measure the time it takes me to read from one end of the screen to the other in light years?” is definitely one of the Internet’s worst.

Simply put, no-one wants to be told why they use what they already use, or why they should use something different to what they already use. Furthermore – before anyone puts the last sentence up for Nobel laureate contention – actually eking out something useful from a blogging platform rhapsody by convincing a reader to test drive or even switch to your object of affection is a rare feat.

Simplier putter (I mentioned my laureate worthiness, didn’t I?), posts such as the one you’re already a third of the way through are nothing more than bleating, self-assuring filler.

So, after being allotted a small corner of pixels on We Love Textpattern, yet being mindful of perpetuating the core spirit of you-disagreein’-with-me doucheasses hibernating in all pockets of cyberspace, I’ll keep my infatuation with the Textpattern CMS powering this site to a bare minimum falling just short of ‘mindless raving rabble’.

Textile: valid and good semantic markup

While I sometimes wish for the MySQL gods to resurrect my old database and a particular post where I proudly proclaimed no damn of any sort being given about the 100 or so validation errors once spouted by this site – we all need an embarrassing tidbit borne from immaturity to fall back on when confronted with a current one, after all – I now strive to maintain a valid site, if for no better reason than to proclaim, “& should be &! Now bow before me and wipe my validation error crushing boots, you twit!”

Despite a few hiccups I’ve had with Textile, my attachment to it has surmounted all ironic invalid code generation through its punching of my gut hard enough to set off my lightbulb moment that not only does it aid my valid code quest, but it also encourages this site to squeeze itself together with semantic markup.

Hence, my being able to append “And put your headings in heading tags, not more frickin’ dividers!” to my favourite house party opening statement, and making you feel less worthy, and rightly so.

Templating: sections, pages and forms

One argument in favour of Wordpress – which I agree with – is the endless collection of themes its users have access to, and the ease with which they are able to install them.

The process of theme installation for Textpattern (for those unaware of the mcw templates plugin, that is) goes somewhere along the lines of renouncing all claims of faith in common decency and investing in a brand new career instructing others in the fine art of uncontrollable sobbing.

However, getting past “Error on line 134 … whoops, still an error on line 29 … nope, another error on that first line, boofhead” messages, there is a method to the seeming madness of Textpattern’s presentation system. There is one term which spirals down the many pluses of the sections, page and forms which make up a Textpattern theme: Textpattern template tags.

Though two years free from the Wordpress loop and the oftentimes furniture throwing inducing complexity of its template tags may have strengthened my personal avowal to steer clear of even uttering the damn thing’s name ever again, Textpattern by comparison is the wizened professor who helps you learn everything you need to know, while doing 90% of your homework.

Spam: canned (seriously, laureate)

Lastly – to cut off what would otherwise never end with the strongest point of all – Textpattern is a spam assassin.

When having no spam protection plugins in place and instead using a simple ‘preview’ comment function (as you can see below) results in absolutely zero spam comments coming through – as opposed to upwards of a thousand a day with three spam protection plugins in place, one of which marks several readers as spammers themselves cough Akismet – you know you have a winner on your hands.

Stayed tuned for the blueberry scone’s take on its willingness to convert to Textpattern.

“Oh, please,” replied the purveyor of bad taste judgements present in all of our lives. “You know it’s a different story when no-one else’s looking. Back there it was a bit of shouting; for all we know, the rest of the time it’s backhands and NASA-approved, industrial-strength foundation to cover up black eyes.”

My head made a spasmodic leap into my palm. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

“Hey, you were thinking it.”

And I was.

To rewind for a moment, the afternoon was so humid that the sun was melting the heat around us into tiny lava-filled balloons, pricking them with pins and giving them all insatiable, downward-whizzing attractions to anything immersed in chlorine. Fast-forwarding to a more irrelevant if less glug-glug description, we were a quintet of pool loungers in a friend’s backyard.

In our eyes, this friend’s life was charmed. I need not go into more detail about the purveyor of unspoken riches and extractor of envy present in all of our lives. We’ve all had that special ‘I don’t know them quite so well, but just enough to hate them for having such a perfect family!’ person in our lives at one time or another.

Until, perhaps, just one moment tipped over the hourglass of opinion on them.

Until they stepped out of their own pool for a moment, went inside to grab a drink, and came back with tears in their eyes in no way attributable to a nostalgic reunion with the family fridge.

After engaging in what I like to term ‘feline-appendage dodging’, I along with purveyor of bad taste judgements volunteered to go inside for snack refills. Our eyes slid from our damp-eyed host’s indifferent expression to each other. In a flash, we were sliding open the back door, and freezing as noises reached us which the preceding years had practically conditioned us to consider a criminal offence inside such a cozy household as this.

Yelling. Parents. Upstairs.

Purveyor of bad taste judgements quietly blurted out the ultimate in bad taste ideas, “Should we go ask what’s wrong?”

After making sure her head was firmly slapped upside itself, I pushed her back outside and shut the sliding door behind us. Our host stared at us as we returned empty-handed, armed to the teeth with excuses of not being able to find the fridge comfortably sized twice as large as my bedroom.

“You think she wanted us to hear?” purveyor of bad taste judgements asked as she drove me to the train station after we had left.

“Get off it,” I replied. “Think about it. Her parents have been together for –” I had less of a clue than a blind person at a bomb defusing convention “– forever, and everyone knows they’re perfect, and they have one off-moment, and now everything’s been a lie and they’ve been secret spokespeople for 101-keeping-up-appearances all along?”

“Exactly!” came the chirped reply.

I deflated in my seat, feline-appendage dodging around a clearly recognisable losing battle.

“What if we thought they were the most miserable couple in the world?” I mumbled. “And we had walked in on them laughing with each other and pretty much doing the opposite of what they did today. Would you automatically assume they were secretly the happiest couple in the world and just wanted everyone to assume they hated each other?”

Purveyor of bad taste judgements pondered my hypothetical double standard for all of two seconds, before answering with a profound, “Whatever. You know I’m right!”

I left purveyor of bad taste judgements that day swearing that I would call our friend to ask for her version of swear-word-spitting events … only I never did.

Because despite my reluctance to admit it, I too had already made up my mind.

Rather than posting screenshots of entire sites along with additional glib appraising comments – in a bid to differentiate myself in the most unimaginative way possible from every other showcase post out there – I will instead post snapshots of specific site design elements which I find particularly pleasing, along with additional glib appraising comments of hypocrisy (cancelled out by awesomeness).

1. Darren Hoyt – Header

The entire colour scheme of Darren Hoyt’s portfolio and personal site is gorgeous, and the pink detail in his header serves as a neat highlight. As a plebeian site design enthusiast fed up with the usual all-or-nothing usage of pink (typically wrapped within an overly floral brushed and girl silhouette vector dotted theme of eye tic inducing proportions), I salute a rare example of pink done right.

2. The Old State – Logo

The Old State’s perfectly symmetrical logo caps off a design made up of some seriously lovely typography. While many parts of the logo could have been overdone – such as the side embellishments – it instead successfully complements the whole site while still sitting on the right side of attention-grabbing.

3. Designing The News – Header whitespace

Despite clashing with my aversion to site headers with a height equal to the length of my insides able to digest my hatred of having half of my screen swallowed up by superfluity, there has always been something about excessive whitespace in headers which I have adored.

Adding an appended ‘when done right’ to the last statement, Designing The News has done this to perfection, providing the right amount of breathing space while guiding the eye across the screen through shape (from circular logo to circular hire sticker) and colour (from pink – joy! – logo border to pink RSS icon).

4. The Seen – RSS icon

While it may seem strange to pick out a RSS icon from a flash site overdosing on grunge and sticky-tape-on-sticky-note effects, I contend it as a highlight for the mere fact that it proves largeness and garishness aren’t always necessary to attract attention. In fact, cute-as-a-buttoness and a splash of colour does just fine.

5. MacAllan Ridge – Background

There’s nothing I can really add to the subconscious whistling emitted by anybody’s brain upon viewing a site such as MacAllan Ridge’s. The peeking sunrise in the background valley – to use an adjective which should only be abused where critically required – is sublime.

Next week: stay tuned for five more design bites. And after that, I’ll realise you already get the point. Come again!

These people have digested the constantly fed myth that a diamond can thaw the most battle-worn heart of a woman, or that a flat-panel television screen with dimensions more suited to wallpaper deckage can alleviate the most stubborn grudges held by a man.

No such people exist, of course. Even among the most hardcore useless crap procuring individuals out there, deep down within, there is a persistently quelled (in favour of one’s pride) yet ever present acknowledgment (in favour of one’s balls) that the myth trumpeted by materialism is merely a wonderfully terrible bullshit-laden excuse for taking the easier option when it comes to meting out an apology.

After all, everyone knows about the full-on knee and floor connecting, wailing and hand wringing alternative to emotionally void material purchases when it comes to apologising to people. Right?

A spat and a gift-wrapped apology

I am an atrocious, and utterly predictable, passive-aggressive. Upon being hurt or insulted, I somehow manage to cling to a five-year-old’s belief that completely shutting off from the offender in question will result in my eventual upper hand in procuring victory, retaliation sparring wise.

So it was recently with a friend who, to wrap the story up in a nice little PG bow, set up the horse-drawn carriage of dissent among others about something I hadn’t done, attached the rotting corpse of my reputation to the stirrups, and did a good dozen rounds through shrapnel-riddled mud before the truth came out.

It was explained to me at the time, through the proverbial messenger’s lips, that she was sorry. I reflected.

My friend (though, in retrospect, an appended ‘of a friend’ is probably mandatory until the last of my passive-aggressiveness dies down) is not a prize mistress of accountability, or discretion. A roadkill squirrel could observe her actions and correctly deduce her status as the only child of fawning, upstart parents.

Taking into account my already tiresome admission of passive-aggressiveness, she could not be more of a polar opposite to me than if we existed on opposing spectrums of a black hole.

Thus it was when we bumped into each other later down the track. As though an incorporeal storage bubble had been floating in her wake ever since my exoneration, she pulled a bag out of nowhere and presented it to me with a huge smile on her face.

The bag harboured a brand-new jacket. I ogled it. Memories surfaced, and I realised I had previously ogled the beautiful piece of clothing during a mall outing. I wondered for an inexplicable moment whether friend-of-a-friend and I were in fact dating and I was repressing.

After some more ogling, I met friend-of-a-friend’s winning smile again. Without a word, I pushed the bag back towards her in almost disbelieving disgust, and walked off.

There’s no such thing as a lucky spoilt child

Friend-of-a-friend and I eventually reconciled. Fact is, I’m one of the weaker species of passive-aggressi who are unable to feed their own discontent with other people for longer than a week. (Excepting all incidences involving shopping trolleys and roadkill chocolate ice-cream cones.)

Getting back on point, I soon succumbed to my curiosity. Learning during another mall outing that she had refunded the jacket, I asked friend-of-a-friend why she’d even brought it to me in the first place. A new alien species seemed to sprout on my forehead at that moment, as she goggled at me.

That was me saying ‘I’m really really sorry’, she explained, preschool teacher to crayon-eating student.

I considered asking her whether she was serious in her presumption that the key to my forgiveness was through my jacket-ogling shallowness. Looking at her, however, I desisted. That’s the thing about over-adulated people. They rarely find the need to act in defence of themselves as they rarely face criticism. Therefore, they make terrible liars.

She wasn’t lying. Despite our differences, we were close enough friends for me to be able to play out in my head a mini-rehash of her past falling-outs with other friends. Her falling-ins had unanimously involved a purchase of some sort.

Friend-of-a-friend had never once concluded in her life that her ability to patch up her disputes had been attributable to her gestures of goodwill, and not her gestures of credit-card swiping. Her parents had taught her that love could only ever be tied in with such things as lavish birthday parties, brand-name clothes, and every other avenue to appeasing her materialistic self which existed under a sun that in all likelihood had never witnessed her receiving even a simple parental hug.

As I returned to my chocolate ice-cream cone, I couldn’t help but distract myself from an approaching trolley of groceries for a split moment in order to feel sorry for her.

5. Blog directory ranking buttons

So, you’re ranked third in the such-and-such section of a decent online blog directory. This seemingly consequential directory has even been generous enough to provide you with a shiny button – blinking text, glossy finish and all – which allows you to flash from your sidebar your consequential status to the world.

Hell, once you join every other blog directory out there, you’ll be granted a whole picket fence of randomly numbered buttons ranking you among sites you happen to never have heard of, but all of whom will no doubt join you in your journey in being blown out of the muddy waters of blogging anonymity.

Not quite.

Truth is, many blog directories out there exist merely to lap up your backlinks, and act as a playground for spam sites. More importantly, there are a near-plethora of true top blogs which are listed to the amount of nil in these directories. People with a healthy brain trust of neuron clusters instilled with common sense are aware of this, which in turn accordingly adjusts their own grading of you as a desperate amateur.

Cull them all.

4. Individual feed service subscriber buttons

Thankfully, another prevalent sidebar picket fence ideology, based on the common belief that the majority of site visitors require constant assistance on a brain-prepping front, has in recent times been a dying one.

In less styrofoam-padded terms, individual feed service subscriber buttons are useless to the only group of people who could ever make use of them. Those who know their way around Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator, Netvibes and so on won’t – or, at best, will only use once – your buttons conveniently linked to their preferred online feed reading service.

Now consider the probable vast number of your subscribers who use desktop feed readers. And still more, those who are unaware of how feed subscription even works.

One subscriber button is enough.

3. Polls (of Ajax-ian, irrelevant proportions)

Many bloggers can come up with an interesting question and some humorous multiple-choice answers off the top of their post-wrangling heads. Further along, many within that cluster can concoct a poll with a semblance of resemblance to their main content.

Most, however, lack in the most crucial department – giving people a reason to give a shit.

Sure, it’s nice to be able to contribute something on-site to a blog you love besides comments. When it comes to your site, however, unless a poll contributes or will contribute to one of your posts and the overall theme of your blog, or is designed in a way such as to be relevant –

Not relevant – Do you: (i) love your job; (ii) hate your job; (iii) not have a job; or (iv) witty joke about quitting your job at the point of voting?

Relevant – Are you a [insert list of occupations applicable to your readership]?

– then, by a rather large stretch of the imagination, it is irrelevant to your sidebar.

2. Blogrolls (of never-ending, ad-disguising proportions)

There are two types of sites to be found within a blogroll:

• Ubiquitous blogs which are all cancelled out by their overarching eminence; and
• Anonymous blogs which as yet have yet to blip across the radar of those orbiting the stratosphere of your site.

The former types – other than serving as a ready palate of your online reading tastes – are useless. The latter types – other than serving as a ready palate of your online reading tastes which you hope to pass onto others – are useless if they surpass the extent of your linking goodwill in size, and have nothing provided in the way of an idea on what each site is about.

While adding short descriptions in your blogroll may seem like an idiotic suggestion in a post about cutting down on sidebar superfluousness, if you insist on keeping your blogroll, then give your readers a reason to use it the way you want: becoming interested in and clicking on the links therein.

And don’t presume to treat anyone like an idiot by throwing text link ads into the mix.

1. Ads (of multifarious proportions, if not nefarious purposes)

“Don’t visit my site, then.”

“Well, gee, put ads on your own site if you feel so left out.”

“Not Adblock Plus! I have kids to feed/student loans to pay/put so much time into this site!”

In order to avoid similar confrontation sparked from my past diatribes against site ads, and also to address my last point in the last section, I have nothing against text link ads, or pretty much any ad so long as it can be guaranteed that it has at least some winking relation to what you write about.

If you just can’t help what kind of ads appear on your site, then no problem. You still get the ad revenue, and I get the message that you aren’t getting any closer to caring about your readers.

Conclusion: the default concept required in all design-culling posts

Give a user too many choices, and they will end up making none.

Blog directory ranking buttons, individual feed service subscriber buttons, polls, blogrolls and ads are hardly crimes against web-savvy humanity. However, if they were to be thrown into a mixed bag of sidebar choices including –

• A short excerpt about yourself or your site
• Contact information
• Search bar
• Recent posts
• Popular posts
• Categories list

– they should lose every time.

Reduce the sidebar choices available to your readers down to the bare necessities. The rest is noise.

Case study one: On the beach

During a long bygone long weekend beach outing, stretched out over sand and wedged between sunscreen lotions and useless paper fans with architectures more appropriate for heat dispersing than heat destroying, I fished a notebook and pen from my freshly baking shoulder bag. Plucking pen cap from pen tip and fitting jack to brain in order to lever out any remaining intelligent thoughts, I began to write.

“Beaches aren’t supposed to serve as pathways to glorious eulogies for assignments done on them.”

I glanced up at the source of the voice hovering near my left earlobe, plans for distorting her stream of swear words into a wildly inaccurate quote already bearing fruition in my mind.

“It’s not an assignment,” I replied, watching my companion sit cross-legged beside me. She carefully positioned a newly acquired grease bucket of doom – otherwise known as a fish and chips combo – in her lap.

“Love letter?” she pressed. “Stalker letter? Letter to a stalker finally admitting you requite his love?”

I finished the flourish of my pen blotting out another supremely superfluous word from the page. My companion chewed. I knew that revealing the prenatal blog post snippets lying within my notebook would only earn me a stare emptier than the most vapid gaze on the most desolate desert plane, and eventually, a prank involving my towel and a packet of tomato sauce.

“It’s my diary,” I finally said, the taint of idiocy in my lie spreading faster than I could have imagined.

My companion studied me intently, plans for intricate placement of superfluous condiments within my towel lighting up her eyes. Smiling, she pinched my arm.

“This isn’t the day to be a dork,” she said. “You’re outside in fresh salty sea air, for God’s sake. Put that away and enjoy it!”

Case study two: On the train

Sitting at the far rear of a train carriage a few days later, I retrieved my notebook and pen from my freshly tanned shoulder bag. After a few minutes of scribbling, my train swallowed up a handful of passengers from the next station. Glancing up to ensure that the station was not mine and that I was safe from utilising shrubbery as a blanket for another night, I met eyes with a gentleman coming my way.

He rolled his eyes before sitting down.

Furious plans for combining my past research into spitting death rays from my eyes and overreacting after taking things far too personally in order to exact my revenge swirled through my hands and onto the paper before me. Another station flew past before the man got up to leave. He paused next to my seat, and as I prepared to strike him down with one well-placed ray-spitting glare, he chuckled.

“Heh,” he murmured. “I thought you were going to ask me to do a survey.”

He was gone before I could complete my theatrical gape or cutting reply.

Conclusion: No-tech writing, the original and best

Nothing is more individual than one’s personal preferences when it comes to their mode of writing. However, in my own experience – which increasingly seems bedecked with what is now designated by our technological society as off-the-charts looniness – a simple pen and paper combo not only suffices for but improves my writing process.

Distractions of the wi-fi channelled variety disappear. Words flow freely when dictionaries and thesauruses are out of the reach of a simple click. And pre-written words act as the ultimate remedy to the common disease known as ‘post beginning about my cat and ending about the body buried in my backyard’.

Off-line writing. Try it some time, and you’ll know by the end.

Some facets, however, have undeniably been accorded a large tenure of hilarity. Yesterday, I was once again afforded the pleasure of partaking in a life experience reimbursement through an act many Asians are deemed incapable of forming their mouths around (bald-faced swearing), and an act all Asians are expected to collaborate on together (same-ethnic sympathising).

The intuitive response to a fake-out train

Drawing up to the train station in my connecting bus, I glanced up from my music player’s screen pad to see the very definition of indisputable, divinely apportioned ill-timing speeding towards my platform. Taking a crazed leap from the bus and sprinting as fast up the station steps as I was genetically able to without evolving into part Road Runner, I came to a halt on the landing.

The train was gone. It had been an express train.

Evoking a long day at work in the only way it should be, I swore at the top of the lungs battling with my rib cage to belly-flop out onto the concrete.

The vocal range of my cursing had been amplified from its intended under-breath mutter to a high-pitched squeal of the stuck pig variety due to the headphones I was wearing. Unbeknownst to me until the following split second, a gentleman had also made the mad dash from my bus towards the phantom train. He grinned at me in the kind of way that can only be described as enviable in terms of worldly ignorance.

I took a seat on a bench, storm clouds heralding an idea for a post with a lame moralistic ending gathering within the brain crash-dummying itself numerous times over into the base of my skull. A short while later, the gentleman ambled over.

“[Indiscernible] of [indiscernible]king [indiscernible], huh?”

As though I could somehow aurally puncture the headphones still wrapped around my skull in order to make out what he was saying, I gave a tight smile, and didn’t reply. After an awkward few moments, he walked off, his hands almost itching to slap his temples a few times in order to stamp out the disembodied voice he had just heard.

I wondered whether the general assumption of strangers as to my inadequacy in their language was such an unfortunate thing after all.

The ethnocentric standard of pity

Not an hour later, I stopped by a food shop for a long-forgone meal. As I tried not to utilise the waiting time for my order by activating my salivary glands through excessive gawking of the window display of cakes and pastries, I listened in on a nearby couple’s conversation about a news piece spooling out on an overhanging television.

“Terrible,” the man commented.

“Can you imagine if that was one of my parents in the rubble?” his companion asked.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” the man replied, patting her hand.

At that moment, she noticed that I was also following the news bulletin.

“Hey,” she said, drawing my gaze. “Hey, do you have any relatives who were caught in the earthquake?”

I, for lack of a better term, gawked at her. The man patted his companion’s hand again.

“She probably doesn’t understand you,” he whispered, nodding his head smartly.

Never mind that they’d just seen me listening to the news bulletin. Never mind that I just might be a little stunned that they couldn’t contemplate the possibility that for starters, I’m fucking Vietnamese, not Chinese, no disrespect intended to the earthquake victims, thank you very effin’ much.

Departing with my order, I wondered whether it was possible to answer one question borne from cultural idiocy with an act liberally ensconced in even greater doses of stupidity.

Enter an addendum, stage right

Australia is not a racist country.

In my experience with foreign friends and associates, my country is often deemed a redneck-teeming nation stained by the sins of past atrocities against Aborigines and current, everyday racial slurs against overseas-born dwellers. Certain local productions have been the most effective in dampening any movement in simmering opposition to this view through the entertaining utilisation of footage of shifty dog eye-esque Chinese and stuffed crocodile-wielding Romanians.

Yet, underlying a truth prevalent in all countries, racism is itself a minority in Australia. While I have been subjected to my fair share of mock broken English from local strangers, and in turn witnessed their cringes in preparation for an onslaught of my own imagined broken English, I’ve more often found these stereotype-fuelled encounters a well of potential devious fun.

Extreme cases, as occurred yesterday, have in turn led to paralysis of the humour-induced kind which, in another universal truth, is the sort which we at every opportunity should appreciate the most.

Why don’t people wear headphones in public?

There are infectious diseases, and there are epidemically-proportioned diseases. There are quaint diseases you could throw an arm around while slugging back a bourbon. There are less agreeable diseases you couldn’t laugh at no matter how close their proximity to a fish tank immersed hairdryer was, nor how accommodating they were in including screams of terror in their definition of laughter.

And then, somewhere down the line, there are enigma-wrapped riddle diseases, the rabid hybrids of all of the latter encapsulated so well through their epitome – the pervasive demonisation of headphones as the worst sin of sensibility (in regards to music listening) since the earliest square-shaped stone wheels (in regards to avoiding death by dinosaur hoof flattening).

Comparison of headphones to Biblical-era technology aside, there’s something to be said about the mass adoption of the worst form of sound-projecting earmuffs over the original and best.

Earbuds. Not exactly earmuffs, but … goddamn earbuds.

Nothing is more admirable than two sleek wires leading up to two mini-Dalmatian bongos barely visible to the naked eye. Lest sarcasm complete its cheap takeover of this paragraph, the accompanying ear canal strangulation and pathetic outside noise blocking make the choice of earbuds over headphones less a questionable one and more a sanitarium questionnaire acing one.

Noise-cancelling earphones. Noise-cancelling earphones!

Marvellous. Adding a few extra digits to the price tag of your earphones of choice for something more than capably handled by headphones, just for the sheer pleasure of using something as easy to yank out of your head as your encephalon is through a single pore of your face, is a marvellous move.

But I want something I can pull out and put away quickly! Something that won’t get me hit by a bus because it’s too hard to take off!

They’re headphones, how bloody hard can …

Whatever! They look stupid!

I’ll say this much: if your goal at the end of your music player’s life is to hold its ailing body in your palm and spiel that its spirit of indefinite coolness will live on in the earbuds it afforded you, you’re a sentimental type in the wrong kind of way, and you never had a single good listening experience in the player’s life.

Equating portable music with an acceptable aesthetic, instead of daring to broach the shockingly inexcusable arena of a damn good listening experience, merely makes you deserving of a very white and very woolly wardrobe.

You’re making these quotes up to prove your point! I refuse to be faux-represented using this many exclamation marks!

Granted, there are issues like compactness and greenbacks in the bank which smarten up the choice of earbuds. And some headphone abominations (oh, behind-the-head variants, how you complete my collection of material anathemas), simply put … abominate.

But, disregarding the inexplicable aversion kindled within all tiers of music-bopping humanity by them, it’s time for headphones to have a meatier turn in the spotlight.

In any case, following are the Mac OS applications I find indispensable when it comes to writing, blogging, and assimilating new ideas and methods on refining my expertise in procrastination.

7. TextWrangler

TextWrangler home page

Syntax highlighting, optional line numbers, tabbed browsing between open files – naming all of the features of TextWrangler feels almost like doing it an injustice. Nothing is tacked on. Everything is perfect. The fact that TextWrangler is entirely free boggles the mind when thinking about what else the paid version could possibly include.

6. xPad

xPad home page

More tabbed browsing between open documents fun, only with text formatting capabilities and an interface which truly lends itself to xPad’s primary purpose as a digital notepad. Sticky Notes epitomise the meaning of redundant in the face of this light and speedy app.

5. Alarm Clock 2

Alarm Clock 2 home page

There are many alarm clock apps and dashboard widgets out there. Few have as simple yet beautiful interfaces as Alarm Clock 2, which are accessible from the menu bar, and which at the same time have a hook into the real world due to their inclusion of such vital options as ‘wake my computer/laptop from sleep so as not to render my simultaneous installation of this app and membership into Greenpeace entirely effin’ pointless’.

4. InstantShot!

InstantShot! home page

Another menu bar accessible app, in this case with an uncomplicated yet powerful array of screen-grabbing options. One particularly pleasing feature is InstantShots’ ability to ‘shoot’ inside rectangles with predefined dimensions. (You may snicker immaturely now).

3. Get-A-Matic

Get-A-Matic home page

The interface is plain. The development is non-existent. Yet like an unloved child abandoned to the filthiest corner of the lowliest orphanage, this download manager … well, heck. Download managers shouldn’t be waxed lyrical about, no matter how useful, free, and smile-inducingly simple they are. Screw it.

2. Genius

Genius home page

Students, quiz show fetishists and anyone attempting to learn a language who aren’t already using Genius should, you know, install it effin’ now. A study area designed to be as free from distraction as possible, along with a clever Learn-Review feature (you’ll see) make this a must-have gem.

1. Scrivener

Scrivener home page

This is the (I refuse to emphasise that last word, though the intended effect is hopefully appreciated) app for writers. While ‘shareware’ must be uttered here, there is a gracious 30-day trial period during which you will definitely (I refuse to emphasise that last word, though the intended effect is hopefully not misconstrued as an attempt at brainwashing) fall in love.

Among its innumerable features, some favourites which make it my first choice as a blog post writing tool include its nested folders, ‘Paste and Match Style’ feature (ideal for pasting links from your web browser without having to redo formatting) and full screen mode.

Time for a witty closer …

Enjoy, and download safely.

… You blew it

Yup.