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November 12, 2002
Making sense of the site
I felt that downlode was looking too inconsistent, so I've introduced a new navigation bar that lives at the top of the site's pages - you can see it above. It's yellow. Eventually, all pages on downlode will have this bar on them and you will thus be able to tell where you are in the site at a glance.
A little while after doing that another link
Interconnected leads me to the very interesting
for Personal Websites (that's patterns in the
patterns sense.)
This came at the right moment, after the change referred to above. So, I looked through to see what patterns I've implemented on this site. (Incidentally, I didn't know what this kind of
navigation is called; at first I thought it was a "
nav bar", but then I found out that apparently it's known as "
navbar conforms to:
- visible location
- support deep links
- one jump home patterns.
The patterns make a lot of sense from a usability standpoint; I've always
strived to provide only
links, for example.
home page, too. That said, my pages aren't always in a
format, although I try to provide consistency within subsections of the
site; and the new breadcrumbs provide a
header.
You can read more about
breadcrumbs and navigation at Usable Web.
Posted by Earle Martin at 9:05 PM |
November 4, 2002
A picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant
So then the seventh planet was the Earth.
The Earth is not just an ordinary planet! One can count, there, 111 kings (not forgetting, to be sure, the Negro kings among them), 7000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 tipplers, 311,000,000 conceited men--that is to say, about 2,000,000,000 grown-ups.
To give you an idea of the size of the Earth, I will tell you that before the invention of electricity it was necessary to maintain, over the whole of the six continents, a veritable army of 462,511 lamplighters for the street lamps.
Seen from a slight distance, that would make a splendid spectacle. The movements of this army would be regulated like those of the ballet in the opera. First would come the turn of the lamplighters of New Zealand and Australia. Having set their lamps alight, these would go off to sleep. Next, the lamplighters of China and Siberia would enter for their steps in the dance, and then they too would be waved back into the wings. After that would come the turn of the lamplighters of Russia and the Indies; then those of Africa and Europe; then those of South America; then those of South America; then those of North America. And never would they make a mistake in the order of their entry upon the stage. It would be magnificent.
Only the man who was in charge of the single lamp at the North Pole, and his colleague who was responsible for the single lamp at the South Pole--only these two would live free from toil and care: they would be busy twice a year.
— The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Posted by Earle Martin at 1:47 PM |