randomosity

Answer­ing the ques­tion, what’s up with the weird look to Ran­do­mos­ity today…I am try­ing a strange Word­Press theme today using simple ASCII charters. Its actu­ally a rather com­plex theme and its sur­pris­ingly dif­fi­cult to actu­ally make Word­Press look so low-tech. The theme is called ASCII and is designed by <a href=“http://www.ensellitis.com/wordpress/asciiwp-theme/” target=“_blank””>n.design stu­dio Chris Ensell (sorry Chris). Its extremely well done in my opin­ion.

So what’s the deal. We all know that the net has gown more and more com­plex over time and its fun to take a step back every now and then and philo­soph­ize on some of the big­ger trends. I find that I took a bit of a breather from web devel­op­ment after return­ing to grad school and only star­ted being re-immersed in the tech­nical milieu…without com­ing up with some cutesy phras­ing like Shawn2.0 or the like, one of the most pos­it­ive trends I see is that con­tent has increas­ingly moved front and centre. We have gone through grow­ing pains online where glitz and flash (sorry) seemed to come first and only then the real con­tent of any online pres­ence. Blogs, wikis and the like are ‘almost’ a return to the time of news­net and gophers. Text for tex­tual sake. To that end, I am increas­ingly aware that Ran­do­mos­ity is a tad heavy on the gadget/whizzbang side. This will change, but that alas, is time resource depend­ent. Then I came across this theme.

I thought I’d just run with it today and then change back tomor­row. See what it’s like basic­ally brows­ing using Lynx within Fire­Fox ;-) If con­tent is king, then what’s it like hav­ing a blog without the usual accoutre­ments. Tomor­row, I’ll snap a pic of the blog in text mode and switch back.

That being said, I remain impressed that blogs are really sur­fa­cing their con­tent and not hav­ing the nav­ig­a­tional infra­struc­ture, or simple baubles get­ting in the way. Admit­tedly there is an awful lot of info being thrown up on blogs that may only have rel­ev­ance to the author, but then who can determ­ine that? Per­haps only time and cir­cum­stances, so I am a big fan of encour­aging open shar­ing of inform­a­tion and let­ting the reader make the decision. Moreover, with the increas­ing use of RSS, more people are simply suck­ing inform­a­tion via feed from your site and not actu­ally vis­it­ing it to see your present­a­tion more than once. I like that its get­ting easier every day to see the content…the big chal­lenge is just find­ing one’s way through the every grow­ing hay­stack of data.