Long Pauses

Category: Web Design

  • Version 13

    Version 13

    Or, A Study in Parenthetical Asides

    I was in my twenties when I built the first version of Long Pauses. In a move that still gives me occasional pangs of regret, I’d decided a few months earlier to give up my graduate research fellowship and take a full-time job as a multimedia developer and instructional designer, figuring that a steady paycheck and a boring day job would bring some stability to our lives while also keeping me motivated to study for my comprehensive exams. I must have been under the spell of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who managed, miraculously, to write quite a few good stories after tolling away all day at the Custom House.

    Long Pauses was intended to be a workspace for testing out ideas, both as a writer and a web developer. Looking back over the hundreds of posts contained within it today, as I’ve done in recent months preparing for this relaunch, I think it’s met that goal. A quick scroll through the various design iterations is a useful snapshot of web design trends over the past decade – from table layouts and FONT tags to javascript, cascading stylesheets, and database-driven content management. (I’ll always remember 2002-2006 as the days of 11px Verdana.) Technically, the word “blog” predates Long Pauses by a year, but I’d certainly never heard it when I was poring over my copy of The Quickstart Guide to HTML. (I didn’t move to Blogger until Version 5 and didn’t add commenting until Version 7.) My writing has evolved, too, though not as impressively as I would’ve liked. It’s still too precious, too littered with em-dashes, and too reliant on pseudo-intellectual space-fillers. (I hereby promise to retire the word “defamiliarize” and, instead, make a greater effort to describe, specifically, how a particular work of art defamiliarizes the world.)

    I shelved Long Pauses in 2010, soon after my daughter was born, because, frankly, the web had become boring. Like everyone else, I’d made the move to Facebook and Twitter, both of which facilitate the kind of small talk I hate so much (and am so very, very bad at) in real life. This relaunch is an effort to steal back those hours of my life, to rediscover silence and the hard work of writing, and to stop giving a shit whether that person I haven’t spoken to in twenty years likes my latest photo of Rory. On a more practical level, I also want to reclaim ownership of my content and to file it away in a searchable, logical, movable archive.

    Launching a blog in 2012 is nothing like I experienced eleven years ago. I remember sitting at my little cubicle at work back then, exchanging emails with Pascual Espiritu, whose website, Strictly Film School, was one of the very few places outside of usenet groups and discussion forums where I could read about contemporary foreign cinema on the Internet. I ate up her advice and mimicked as best as I could her design aesthetic for Version 1 of Long Pauses. I discovered just a few days ago, even, that longpauses.com was still associated with the antiquated domain registration service she recommended to me then.

    Over the next few years, the film blogosphere slowly evolved, thanks in large part to free, user-friendly services like LiveJournal, TypePad, and Blogger, and along with it came a new community of writers, many of whom have since become friends. Revisiting those days has made me all kinds of nostalgic. For good and bad, the early bloggers were creating a new and vital communications medium. (I was notified a year or two ago by a graduate researcher that I’ve been credited officially with coining the term “blogathon.” My name and Showgirls are forever linked, apparently – and in the most wonderfully esoteric way!) When I mentioned on Twitter that I was rebuilding Long Pauses, one friend wondered how we had ever found the time to write so much, and my off-hand answer was that we blogged instead of pissing our efforts into the social networking ether. That’s at least partly true, I suspect. Just as likely a culprit is the exponential growth – the goddam deluge – of content that now threatens to drown us all. There’s too much to digest and reflect upon, so we skim it all and retain little more than trivia. (Cue the Portlandia “Did you read?” sketch.)

    Generally speaking, what remains of the original filmblog dialogue has relocated to Twitter and to sites that grew out of the blogosphere but now more closely resemble traditional publications with editors and teams of contributors – places like Indiewire, Mubi, Slant, the AV Club, and Fandor. Don’t get me wrong: film blogs still exist in large numbers, but the discussion has moved (or evolved, or in some cases atrophied). Girish’s site is one of the few living monuments to a kind of conversation that was once more common and that I now miss. (I love that Girish still uses his original Blogger template. He told me once that he briefly considered changing it but decided that it’s become too essential to the voice of his blog.)

    None of that is news, really. But what surprised me as I combed through the Long Pauses archive is that vast swaths of the original blogosphere are gone. Many of the sites I once included on my blogroll of “daily reads” have been deleted entirely, and the authors have vanished right along with them. Presumably, they’ve settled into new phases of their lives – like me, they’re now raising children or managing greater responsibilities in their professional lives; like me, they’re in their forties – while others simply lost interest after a short-lived burst of blogging enthusiasm. The Wayback Machine salvages bits and pieces of the wreckage, but the Internet, it turns out, is an ephemeral place. Moreso than I’d imagined. (I was disappointed to discover a few days ago that someone has beaten me to the punch: Internet Archaeology is already a thing.) Our virtual world is indeed a palimpsest.

    This gone-tomorrow-ness of the Internet is another of my motivations for relaunching Long Pauses. For archival purposes (and at the risk of offending friends and editors) I’ve added essays and interviews to this site that were originally published elsewhere, and I’ve noted them as such. I can control my database; others are a fickle business. I’ve also made the move to WordPress and have tagged and categorized every single post, giving Long Pauses its first-ever relational structure, along with a slightly more usable main menu. (The term “Debris” comes from my long-standing habit of creating hodgepodge posts called “Miscellaneous Debris.” “Debris” includes all posts not categorized as “film,” “music,” or “words.” Two other recurring themes from the archive — Songs of the Moment and Mix Tapes — have also found their way into the navigation.)

    And one final word on Version 13: This is the first iteration of Long Pauses that I didn’t design by hand. It’s a modded version of Slate from Okay Themes. Why did I buy a template? I’m not a web designer. Not really. I was supposed to be a professor, after all. I stumbled backwards into this career and have only in recent months worked my way, finally, into a job title that more accurately describes what I’m good at: communications director. I plan to build my first responsive design this fall, and I’m beginning to know my way around the WordPress functions.php file. But for the time being I’m content to benefit from others’ talent and devote my efforts, instead, to learning how to be a writer again.

    As always, thanks for reading.

  • To be continued . . .

    To be continued . . .

    In the nine years since I first read Denise Levertov’s poem “Making Peace” and pulled the words “long pauses . . .” from it, I’ve bought and sold two houses, changed jobs three times, and launched a freelance business. I’ve attended nearly a dozen film festivals, interviewed several of my heroes, and developed lifelong friendships with an amazing group of bloggers, filmmakers, writers, and fellow travelers. I’ve started and abandoned a doctoral dissertation, cried in anger and shame over the actions of my country, and felt occasional but startling moments of pride and patriotism. I’ve left the church and found my faith. I’ve celebrated nine of my fourteen wedding anniversaries, suffered the loss of two people I loved dearly, and, as of Tuesday, April 27 at 4:09 pm, become a father. And it’s all documented here in this strange archive of my life. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished here at this site and am even more proud of the man I’ve become in the process.

    I’d been thinking about shuttering this iteration of Long Pauses for quite some time, but the timeline was accelerated by Blogger’s decision to end their FTP service. When I finish this post and click “publish,” the last bits of content will be pushed to longpauses.com/blog, where it will stay, in this form, for as long as I decide it belongs there. I’ve archived it all and might eventually drop it into another format, but for now I’m content to let it stand as a document of this stage in my life.

    I’m not sure how long — or even if — commenting will work. I’d hoped to post this a few days ago to leave more time for that kind of thing, but my daughter’s early arrival threw a wrench — a wonderful, beautiful wrench — into the works. You can find me on Twitter and Facebook, and I suspect you’ll eventually see me back here at Long Pauses.

    Until then, thanks for reading.

  • Long Pauses Version 11

    On October 1st I left my job as the University of Tennessee’s lead web designer and moved across campus to Alumni Affairs, where I’m now serving as Communications Manager. When I interviewed for the position, we talked generally about the rapidly evolving world of electronic communications, and I used my friends in the film blog-o-sphere as an example of what most excites me about the field right now. Although we see each other only once a year in Toronto, on any given day we exchange emails, pass notes in Facebook, comment on each other’s sites, chirp in Twitter, text message, discuss ideas on forums, listen in on podcasts, instant message, and, occasionally, when the mood strikes us, we even call each other on the phone.

    The variety of communications tools would be overwhelming but for the fact that my friends and I are engaged in what is essentially a single, extended conversation. It’s all come to feel perfectly natural. I suppose some tools (forums, long-form blogs) are more suitable for, say, serious debate than others, while Twitter is obviously more immediate and superficial. And Facebook — wonderful, addictive Facebook — is so damn good at social networking that it’s changed the way I use the Internet (despite my long-held resistance to it). Perhaps we could draw an analogy between these tools and the various types of conversations we have with local friends when we go out together for a long dinner, sit side-by-side at a book club meeting, or run into each other at the grocery store.

    Long Pauses version 11 is a snapshot of how I’m currently using the Internet. It’s almost literally divided down the middle, with frequently updated microposts on the left and occasional, more thoughtful bits of content on the right. Feel free to interact with it however you like. Here’s a breakdown of the web apps (all of them free) I’ve stitched together for this strange patchwork of a site:

    Blogger
    Because Long Pauses predates blogging, I jumped on the first free, viable tool that didn’t require a locally-hosted database. Seven years later, I have nearly a 1,000 posts in Blogger and, both out of familiarity and laziness, have resisted moving to a more robust CMS like WordPress or Expression Engine. Frankly, I kind of enjoy solving the problems associated with building an entire site from a single template.

    Haloscan
    Early iterations of Blogger didn’t include a commenting feature, so my first add-on was Haloscan. Again, by the time Blogger caught up, I had a deep archive of comments that I was hesitant to abandon. Until now. Because Haloscan uses a pop-up window, the advent of tabbed browsing has made it a major pain in the ass. I’ve officially made the switch to Blogger comments, which will hopefully prove to be more user-friendly and readable. However, the old archive still exists. At the bottom of each post, you’ll notice a small, grayed-out discussion icon. For a trip down memory lane, click that icon on old posts to read past comments.

    Twitter
    I resisted Twitter until the Facebook addiction kicked in. Once I figured out how to synch Twitter with my Facebook status, it was all over. I’m hooked.

    Tumblr
    The front page of Long Pauses version 10 was actually built from two Blogger blogs — Long Pauses and Miscellaneous Debris. It was an ugly and unsatisfying hack involving a PHP include, but it was the best solution I could come up with at the time. And then I found Tumblr and its embed javascript. Miscellaneous Debris has become a kind of Siamese Twin — a separate blog with a unique purpose (collecting random oddities from the web) but still joined at the hip of Long Pauses. You can leave comments there and subscribe to its feed. The ten most recent bits of debris will display on every page of the main site.

    Disqus
    Tumblr doesn’t yet have a built-in commenting feature, but Disqus can be added by copying and pasting two lines of code into a Tumblr template. Added bonus: Disqus publishes an rss feed.

    Let me know if you find anything broken.

  • The Day Job (Part 2)

    Redesigning the UT Knoxville front page was the first step in an on-going overhaul of the university’s web presence. Step two went into effect today, when I officially released the design template for all colleges, departments, and units. Conceptually, this design was actually the greater challenge — much to my surprise. Our priorities went something like this:

    1. Carry through the same brand identity that was established with the front page redesign, but do so in a way that draws subtle but significant distinctions between the two web spheres.
    2. Aspire for full web standards compliance, while acknowledging — and even embracing — the fact that we’ll never be able to properly “police” the code. As I wrote in the documentation, “I’m betting that it will take less than three weeks before we find a live template page that has been completely rebuilt with nested tables.” And I’m okay with that.
    3. Strike a deliberate balance between consistency (of design, brand, and navigation) and freedom. UT has eleven colleges and more than 300 degree programs, not to mention the hundreds of academic institutes, administrative offices, outreach centers, research initiatives, and support units. Each has a unique audience and unique goals; each should look like it contributes directly to the university’s overarching mission.
    4. Make this transition as painless as possible for the community of web developers across campus who will have this template dropped in their laps. Inheriting someone else’s code always sucks. I did my best to streamline it, to predict and prepare for eventual problems, and to comment the heck out of the code. We also decided to provide developers with a toolbox of menus and design ideas. If, in the process, we also manage to foster a more collegial attitude among campus web professionals, so much the better.

  • Why It’s Been So Quiet Around Here

    Before & After

    My office at work is fairly small. Windowless. Tidy. Lit by three underpowered lamps. Spartan. The back wall is dominated by a large dry-erase board that, for the past four months, has been covered in brown scribbles, which is a kind way to describe my handwriting. Sometime back in the fall I wrote myself a long to-do list on the board, and in the weeks since I have slowly but steadily crossed off each item. A brown stroke through each brown scribble. On Wednesday morning, just before 7 am, I erased the board.

    Or maybe this is a better way to begin . . .

    Back in July, when I attended the Seattle Web Design World conference, a woman with whom I was having a nice enough conversation, gave me the most pitiable look when I told her why I was there.

    “I was just asked to redesign the University of Tennessee homepage, and I’m looking for any help I can get.”

    “Really? [pitiable look] I’m so sorry. [pause] Good luck with that.”

    Most high-traffic websites serve a very specific function. No matter how much it continues to evolve, for example, Amazon still sells things, and so its chief concern is getting its users as quickly as possible to that thing they want to buy, while also showing them other things along the way that they didn’t know they wanted to buy. A university homepage is a design nightmare because it must simultaneously address the distinct (and often competing) purposes of its many and varied audiences. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll divide them into two camps: those within the institution (administrators, faculty, staff, and students) and those outside of it (prospective students and their parents, alumni and donors, legislators, people in the surrounding community, sports fans, business and research partners, journalists and media, other educators and scientists and institutions, people with an interest in culture and the arts, job-seekers and employers, and the list goes on and on). The site must also be navigable, which, relatively speaking, is the easy part.

    Previous incarnations of the University of Tennessee website were very efficient, particularly in regards to navigation, but they didn’t “tell the UT story.” Taking that as our cue, we looked to the standard university menu buttons — Future Students, Faculty & Staff, Academics, etc. — as themes or chapters in an anthology. Rather than simply compiling lists of links, we’re now using those pages to spotlight people, events, and resources from the university community. I kept imagining a user who knew little about the university — a high school junior taking her first peek into college life, a researcher in China mulling over his post-doc options, a new Knoxvillian trying to figure out where we’ve hidden all the culture — and my hope was that, by clicking on each of those main menu buttons and watching the spotlights rotate through, he or she would get a good sense of what the university has to offer.

    There were other design challenges particular to UT Knoxville, the most significant of which is this:

    which I toned down slightly:

    and which, in predictable web 2.0 fashion, soon became:

    Accepting a web design position at a university means surrendering whole swaths of the color palette. For those of you not acquainted with college athletics in the States, the University of Tennessee Volunteers are also known as “The Big Orange.” Orange is not just our signature color; it’s our only color. To make matters even more complicated, the blues and purples that naturally compliment orange are completely off-limits. Why? I bet the sports fans know. Mixing orange with light blue makes us look like Florida; dark blue drifts into Auburn territory; and purple is Clemson’s secondary color. So orange it is. And a lot of it. We settled on a “blue sky” campus photo for the header, which is a bit of cheat, but an effective one, I think.

    Another significant complication was the UT wordmark, which was a mandated element of the university system’s larger branding initiative:

    It’s an elegant and traditional wordmark that employs an elegant and traditional serif font (Goudy Old Style). It looks great on business cards, letterhead, and signage. It doesn’t looks so good on the web, where the delicate vertical and horizontal lines in each letter inevitably bleed and lose their contrast. With a limited palette to work with (“Did you try setting it against an orange background? I bet that would make it really pop!”), I settled on gradiated shades of grey. It was the best of several less-than-satisfying options.

    Some of the other major changes:

    • The site is web standards-compliant and displays properly in IE 6. (Thanks to Jason for all of the debugging help.)
    • We’ve integrated a campus events calendar into the site and are using it to create and broadcast audience-targeted RSS feeds.
    • Using tracking data, I’ve restructured the subpage navigation to give greater prominence to the most popular links (Quick Links) and to bury the least popular (see the “expand the full list” link near the bottom of the Current Students page, for example).

    All in all, I have to say I’m pretty damn proud of it.

  • Version 9.0

    Welcome to Long Pauses 9.0. I’ve always added .0 to my version numbers out of some odd devotion to conventional, software-related naming conventions, but I suspect that this version might actually experience the occasional upgrade before the next full-blown redesign. Be on the lookout for 9.1.

    I had two main goals this time out. First, I wanted to return to the conventional blog format. As I said in my announcement of the last redesign, the widescreen format was an experiment — a usability study, really. And what I discovered was . . . it wasn’t as usable. I did like having my links grouped together, and it all worked perfectly well on large, widescreen displays, but the scrolling-right got old. Also, I got tired of having the main content pressed to the left side of the screen. One reason I haven’t posted much lately is because, for the first time in nearly five years, I got tired of looking at Long Pauses.

    Second, and more importantly, I wanted to stretch my CSS skills a bit. It’s not perfect yet, but I’m fairly proud of the coding here. The buttons and the rollovers (including the Song of the Moment) are all controlled by CSS. And it all works perfectly in Explorer for Windows, even when the browser’s text size is set to “largest.” The only design element that is negatively affected by IE is the transparency of the Song of the Moment image.

  • Now in Widescreen

    Screen capture of Long Pauses Version 8

    Welcome to Long Pauses (version 8.0). Consider this redesign a usability study. The centered, two-column blog format has become the industry standard, so to speak, but I’m not sure if it best mirrors how I actually interact with this and other sites. I seldom click through the long list of links (scroll, scroll, scroll) on other blogs, for example, but I click through my own collection of “daily reads,” um, daily, and so I wonder if having them collected in one spot, out of the way of the main blog content, will positively affect the user experience.

    I’ve also decided to publish only the most recent post on my front page. I like the idea of having a single white page to write on. It better reflects my own conception of Long Pauses, which should be considered a journal or a diary, a workspace for immediate reflection and experimentation. (Each time I redesign Long Pauses, I spend the first two hours convincing myself that graphics, colors, and columns aren’t just distractions from what really matters — the words. But then the wannabe-designer in me takes over.) To aid navigation, I’ve created a drop-down menu in the content area that will direct you to any of the ten preceding posts.

    I suspect that one downside of the redesign will be a slight reduction in the number of reader comments. Once a post drops from the front page, readers will be less likely, I assume, to continue old conversations. Or maybe not. I’m eager to find out how/if the interactions change. For what it’s worth, I’ve turned on email notifications for the first time, so I’ll always know when someone has posted in the archives. I promise to do my best to respond.

    One thing that bothers me about the redesign, though, is that it includes a simple, three-column table, a major no-no in CSS design. It’s there for one reason: Internet Explorer for Windows, which is still the browser of choice for most Long Pauses readers and which can’t seem to solve its floating div problem. I tried every trick in the book, but couldn’t make it work to my satisfaction. Any CSS guru who wants to tweak my code will forever have my gratitude.

    I just looked at the redesign for the first time on our office G5 with a 30-inch Cinema Display. I like it. Feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated.

  • Selling My Soul to Blogger

    Welcome to Long Pauses version 7.0. For those of you who were kind enough to critique a rough draft of this redesign and are wondering why the hell it doesn’t look like what you saw, well, that was version 6.0, which I decided, after a two week break, that I hated. It was kind of you to not crush my spirit by saying that you hated it as well.

    Warning: The rest of this post will be filled with dork-speak. People who blog are, by their nature, archivists, and posts like this serve to capture a significant (relatively speaking, of course) moment of development. I found several such pages while digging through the archives and enjoyed revisiting them.

    The Outside

    The large image at the top of the page is a still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, my favorite film and the film from which I also grabbed the running woman that has, in some sense, served as a logo for the site. I’ll be changing the image frequently, using stills from whatever I’m watching to extend the long pauses metaphor. I got the idea after staring and staring and staring at that image of Lynn Carlin’s face.

    How do you like that image link? It is a hard-won compromise, and I’m really pleased with it. I wanted to remove as much of the clutter as possible from the main content area, while also keeping screen captures that reinforce subject matter. As time allows, I will go back to my old film responses—those that used to be supplemented by small stills—and add context-sensitive pop-ups.

    The images link is controlled by my Cascading Style Sheet, which is a thing of beauty. The entire site is now built from CSS—no more nested tables, no more Dreamweaver templates, just a single Blogger file and a single styles page. I would guess that, in the process, I have eliminated 10,000 lines of code, and the entire site validates, so no more worrying about cross-platform compatibility.

    I’ve also customized Google’s search tool, which is a pretty efficient way to search Long Pauses. I’ll use it even if no one else does.

    The Inside

    Redesigning the interface took less than a day. The hard part was feeding hundreds of pages of old content into Blogger. But now that the work is done, there are several benefits. Site management is the big one. Commenting is the other. Except for the front index, every single page in Long Pauses now allows commenting. Been looking for an opportunity to mock the horrible writing in some of my earliest film responses? Now’s your chance.

    I toyed with Moveable Type for a while and also considered switching over to Blogger’s internal commenting tool, but I decided to stick it out with the Blogger and HaloScan combo. Mostly I just didn’t want to sacrifice the old comments, which are as essential to the spirit of this site as anything I’ve written.

    Please let me know if you run into anything that looks broken. Thanks.

  • CSS Zen Garden

    With my last reworking of Long Pauses, I attempted to rebuild its architecture from the ground up using CSS. Cross-platform and cross-browser problems stopped me dead, though. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, I’d open a page in Netscape or Safari and watch it all blow up.

    CSS Zen Garden is an amazing example of what good CSS-based design can offer. I have a feeling that I’ll be ripping off Springtime sometime soon.

  • Evolution

    Long Pauses just swam on shore and sprouted legs. The revisions aren’t too dramatic this time, but you will notice a new option at the top of the page. I wanted to go with smaller text for the main content, but I’m also trying to be as sensitive as possible to accessibility issues. You can now toggle between two style sheets, which will give you the option of switching to larger fonts and standard links.

    If you’re interested in adding multiple style sheets to your site, do what I did: read Paul Sowden’s excellent tutorial, then rip off his script.

    Happy Thanksgiving!

  • Heavy Industries

    Y0ung-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents is just about the coolest damn Website I’ve found in months. Finally, someone is doing something original with Flash — and by “original” I mean a backward glance to early-Godard all jumbled together with politics and sex and Blue Note jazz. Great stuff. You might want to start with ARTIST’S STATEMENT N0. 45,730,944: THE PERFECT ARTISTIC WEB SITE.

  • Speaking of Blogs

    I spent Thursday afternoon with UT law professor, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit), and thirty or so other faculty and staff in a discussion of blogging and its potential impact on academic life. Reynolds’s talk was informal but familiar, leading me to assume that, during his two-year climb to the top of the blogging heap, he has participated in countless such presentations. The biggest surprises to me were learning that his daily audience outnumbers that of Phil Donahue’s failed return to television (and for less than $40/month in overhead) and that UT’s administration is downright supportive of his efforts. I figured that someone would be troubled by his partisan editorializing on university time. Apparently not.

    We reached little consensus during our post-presentation discussions. There was much interest in the potential of blogging — particularly as a tool to foster critical thinking and cognitive development in our students — but finding a real-world application is tricky. In practical terms, there is little that can be done on a blog that can’t be done using, say, a class discussion forum or an email list. The big perk, it seemed to most of us there, was the very public nature of the blog. Glenn recounted the thrill of receiving his first emails from readers in Thailand, for instance, a thrill to which I can testify from personal experience. Feedback validates the blogger’s efforts, while also raising the bar. Or, in a nutshell: This thing has made me a better writer and a better thinker; I’m sure that some students would undergo a similar process.

    If I were teaching right now, I think I would set up free Blogger accounts for all of my students, host them (again, for free) on Blogspot, then require each student to “journal” on the Web. For some in the class, it would, of course, be busy work. (But, for those particular students, everything is busy work, so who cares?) I bet a certain percentage of the class would really get into it, though, and would continue blogging even after getting a final grade. Imagine that: students coming out of a class with a desire to continue that critical thought process.

    Anyway, here are some notes from the colloquy and our student paper’s write-up.

  • New and Improved?

    After a year of stubborn resistance, I finally knocked the HTML chip off of my shoulder and joined the Blogger world. Management of the blog itself — and of the archive, in particular — was becoming too great a burden and was detracting from my actual writing and posting. Plus, with Blogger’s recent announcement of enhanced free services, the timing seemed perfect.

    I think I’ve worked out all of the kinks, but please let me know if you run into any bugs.

  • Simple Design

    When I was hired nearly three years ago as an “Instructional Designer and Multimedia Developer,” it was with the promise that our online learning venture would be “cutting edge” and “outside the box” — that it would contribute to the on-going democratization of higher education by making college degrees available to underserved and isolated student populations and by appealing to the broad spectrum of individual learning styles via new media previously unavailable to distance educators. Ah, the beautifully naive, halcyon days of 2000. Seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?

    So I did like most educational designers: I broke open Flash and began building unnecessarily shiny, happy learning objects, some more interesting and effective than others. Nearly fifty online courses later, I don’t remember the last time I built anything with a bell or a whistle or a motion tween. You know why? Nobody cares.

    Last month, Jakob Nielsen posted a better than average Alertbox. In “Low-End Media for User Empowerment,” he offers common sense wisdom that should come as little surprise to most designers, but it bears repeating:

    Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users’ feeling of control and thus support the Web’s mission as an instant gratification environment.

    After cataloging the standard gripes — bandwidth remains an issue (witness my dial-up), Webcasts almost always suck, and complex media do a number on navigation — Nielsen focuses on the strengths of simple design, particularly the importance of readable, relevant, and quality content. I especially like this point:

    On average, low-end media has a higher percentage of information-rich content, while high-end media has a higher percentage of show-off content. Low-end media is certainly not fluff-free; witness the pictures of “smiling ladies” where product photos should be. High-end media, however, positively revels in embellishments and irrelevancy. Getting to the point seems to be beside the point when you invest a fortune in fat media. After all, you’ve got to have something elaborate to show for your money.

    He also adds:

    Think of Googlebot as your most important user — and one that is blind to high-end media.

    For a site that has only been around for a little over a year and that gets relatively little traffic, Long Pauses shows up with surprising frequency on the first page of Google searches. That’s partly because my reading and film responses fill a small niche — like, apparently not many Websites devote an entire page to Ordet or July’s People. But I’d like to think that it’s also because content is king, and the sharing of content is the only reason that the Internet continues to excite me.

  • New and Improved

    With more than one hundred html documents, nearly three hundred images, and thousands upon thousands of words, Long Pauses was getting a bit unwieldy. If I’ve done this correctly, the redesign will help in a number of ways.

    • CSS — God bless Cascading Style Sheets. My main goal in this whole endeavor was to make better use of CSS, giving me site-wide control of formatting. More than a hundred pages and not a single <font> tag to be found. It’s a thing of beauty. I originally planned to design everything with CSS, even abandoning nested tables, but there were just too many browser issues. One of my earlier designs absolutely exploded in Netscape 4. This one is a good compromise, I think. Not bad for an English major, eh?
    • Variety — That gray background was getting old. This design, as you’ll see in the coming weeks, allows me to change the entire look of the site in about two minutes. Should be fun. So, if you don’t care for the current Long Pauses banner (bonus points if you can name that film), be patient. It will change often.
    • Content — I also wanted to continue paring down the design, focusing more of my efforts on the content rather than flashy images. I’m hoping that you’ll find the new format more readable, and it should print more accurately, too.
    • Spring Cleaning — Revisiting every page gave me a much-needed opportunity to fix broken links, check spelling, and clean up fat code. At times I was also tempted to revise history — to edit some of the writing that no longer seems quite as insightful or clever as I once imagined it to be — but I fought the urge. The only links I didn’t check are those from my blog to external sites. I’ve always assumed that most of them would break. It’s just the nature of this beast.
    • Blogosphere — Since I launched Long Pauses, the Internet, along with many other media and traditional journalism, have been reshaped by blogging. This new design reflects that change to some extent. My blog now looks and functions more like others, including the addition of permalinks (Karen!). I decided against making it interactive, though, for several reasons that aren’t really worth sharing.
    • Experimentation — Long Pauses will always be a blank canvas, of sorts. If I were able to draw or paint or sculpt or create in other ways, I probably wouldn’t spend nearly so much time sitting behind a computer. But I can’t, so I do. Hopefully it’s worth the effort.

    So, what do you think? I’m guessing that an assortment of bugs and CSS quirks will reveal themselves over the next few days. Let me know if you stumble upon any. Unfortunately, blog updates will continue to be few and far between for the next week to ten days. Things are a bit hectic around here.

    Thank you for reading, and thank you especially to everyone who has sent kind notes over the last few days, asking for updates. I genuinely appreciate it.