9.24.05: Your Back Yard is Boring ‹ Blog

7.09.08: My Current Hobbies
7.04.08: Question: Suicides and Soap Mummies
6.25.08: Panda Mating Fails, Veterinarian Takes Over
6.18.08: This Calls for an Aria
6.10.08: Ants in the Crevices, Ants in the Cracks&#8230;

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
Mahatma Gandhi

Your Back Yard is Boring

September 24, 2005

I think the “clean-’n’-simple layout made to showcase my personal snapshots” trend has gone as far as it should go. Your back yard is boring, your friends are ugly, and no one wants to see your mug (face or coffee cup—either way, it’s pretentious). Unless you’re a remarkable photographer or you’re able to catch lots of highly unusual subjects, your personal snapshots probably look the same as everyone else’s. It’s not really personal then, is it?

I’m noticing a new trend lately, or perhaps it’s the return of an old one: people now want their personal sites to look, well, personal. The trend towards Zen simplicity seems to be drifting away; people now want graphics, backgrounds, fancy headers, the whole kit ’n’ kaboodle. I could claim to be ahead of the trend but, to be honest, I’m so far behind that the trend has come full circle and made me fashionable again. I love it when that happens.

Speaking of fancy personal site layouts, I’ve been fiddling with mine all day. I finally wrote my own random image script, so that the fellow in the header can fly over whatever scenery he likes. It took a bit of tweaking, but I’ve got it just the way I want it. Unfortunately, it only looks good in Firefox. I’m seriously considering having separate style sheets for each browser; it’s not really as much trouble as it sounds, and it saves me a lot of mind-sweat in the long run. It’s probably considered cheating by the ultra-purists, but hey, I do what works.