{"id":150,"date":"2000-05-20T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2000-05-20T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2000\/05\/20\/selfemployment\/"},"modified":"2024-11-28T01:21:23","modified_gmt":"2024-11-28T06:21:23","slug":"selfemployment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2000\/05\/20\/selfemployment\/","title":{"rendered":"Self-Employment Limbo"},"content":{"rendered":"

The drawback to working at home<\/strong> is that it feels like I\u2019m developing narcolepsy<\/a> or something. OK, maybe it has something to do with the complete lack of structure to my day, and my recent tendency to stay out all night one day and then try to catch up on sleep the next. Whatever the reason, my circadian rhythms are shot to hell. I\u2019m sure I’ll even out eventually, at about the same time I rediscover the discipline to sit at my desk and be as constructive as I ought to be. I bet the first serious deadline I face will whip me into shape.<\/p>\n

Design has been on my mind a lot lately, even though most of my waking hours have been spent on more mundane tasks. But design certainly has been a popular meme among the webloggers set lately (see here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a> and here<\/a>), and it still keeps coming back to the old \u201cform versus function\u201d debate that the Modernists all worked themselves into such a tizzy about.<\/p>\n

I maintain that I think flashy websites are like cotton candy. The appeal lasts about five seconds, even if they\u2019re incredibly beautiful. Even I can\u2019t read \u2019em, or if there\u2019s actually nothing to read beneath all the bells and whistles, then I don\u2019t go back. Any web site that\u2019s legible and elegant (and I don\u2019t use elegant as a stylistic term) has my undying loyalty. The web is a flexible medium as far as design goes, which is great. Good design isn\u2019t window dressing, however, and that goes for any medium.<\/p>\n

With this site and Rumpus Room, for instance, the design has grown out of specific issues of content or structure. I try to keep the pages consistent so that it\u2019s very clear when someone leaves the pages I\u2019ve worked on. Both sites are text-driven, so I try to make the text as legible as possible, considering the inherent problems of dealing with text on the web. I try to make sure that in a pinch the sites can be read with lynx, a text-based browser. Even the coding is consistent, because I use CSS to format everything. That way, even the guts are developed by design, not just the look.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s taken a long time to set them up properly, but now that I have, I could redesign both sites in a few hours. But don’t hold your breath, because I haven’t been convinced that the sites or their context have changed enough to warrant that just yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The drawback to working at home is that it feels like I\u2019m developing narcolepsy or something. OK, maybe it has something to do with the complete lack of structure to my day, and my recent tendency to stay out all night one day and then try to catch up on sleep the next. Whatever the … Continue reading “Self-Employment Limbo”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultracultural","category-ultranerdy","category-ultrapersonal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71602,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/71602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}