Weblogism

Spammers had quickly found their way through our mailbox. Then came anti-spam tools appeared, allowing the Goods to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Today, as blogs quickly spread, spammers follow the trend and post their “insightful” contributions onto this new type of sites, adding their insidious messages in the list of comments. Movable Type, the very popular publishing system, is badly hit and has recently published an article praising Jay Allen’s MT Blacklist plugin, also mentioned on Luke Hutteman’s blog, SharpReader’s author.

Forums like phpBB are also hit as has been le Sauna: extraneous subscribers were appearing lately, all with email addresses whose domain was “mail.ru” and linking to a website proposing interesting products such as pregnancy tests. The answer was rather simple but not perfect: ban every user whose email address finishes with “mail.ru”. The door is still open to any other spammer to come and try to subscribe to the forum. Luckily enough, those users cannot post messages without their profile being validated before hand.

As an active member of “Cut spammers’ balls off” association, I can only applaude to Jay Allen’s move, even though I don’t use Movable Type (yet) and encourage any move in that direction.

A List Apart is “back” with a brand new design, according to CYBERCodeur.net! Terrific!

To be frank now, I’ve never heard of it since I’m only beginning to deepen XHTML and CSS matters with a real shovel, but as the whole community seems to shake with excitement, I had to follow the great lumpen of people where the author starts to feel embarrassed.

Nice design but the fact that I’m not a big fan of MS Trebuchet tends to spoil the ecstasy I should feel. The colours are however harmonious, with a painting-like banner and a logo which is really really well done: the typeface is just perfect, conveying modernity as well as rigour and plainness, reflecting the spirit of XHTML and CSS.

I’m no expert to comment the contents as a Dave Shea might do, but I’m somewhat pleased to see a “Typography” section. And dead pleased to see that Dean Allen, whom I’ve already mentioned within this mess, has contributed to it, since his site is still a reference to my eyes.

Since I’ve begun this blog, I keep wondering who the f*** would be interested in the constant spilling of topics only interesting for their author. Well, at least, I am, and that’s more than enough. Let’s say this blog’s fate is to become my scribbling pad to which I’ll refer when I need my notes…

I’ve just had a typographical orgasm. That’s something rather violent but really good: the reactions subsequently go from “Waaoowww!” to “How come I didn’t come across such an idea before?” That’s what has just happened to me as I was browsing through typographi.ca: my wanderings led me to Speak Up and the feeling overcame me immediately.

First contact: “Waaoowww!” Plain, whitespace is given back its proper rights, pictures don’t deface the whole lot but fit in there just perfectly, light textual contents – note for myself : 11px/18px in Georgia – easily readable and enjoyable thanks to the magnificent and well-thought layout – traditionnal 3-column layout. The typeface for the titling looks grand in small sizes: I wonder what this one is… Its caps version looks stylish for the title. And the fleurons (Is that the name?) are just lovely.

Conclusion, still for myself: keep learning, you little crap, you might get to something like that some day!

I’m kind of reading-addicted. Everything which can be read will be read, as my voracious eyes wander around in the desperate hope of finding anything! I often have to yell them back.

In this struggle to keep my eyes steady but fed, RSS appeared to me as the panacea when I discovered it onto Textism, a site I keep coming onto because of its spirit, pleasantness, plainness (those two last ones are somewhat related)… and just a ’cause!

But so far, I was using an ugly Java application called RSSViewer… I really cannot figure out why it has to be so bad-looking. It kind of works cough cough, why not use this working cough cough again programme as a basis to write a somewhat more attractive application?? I just simply cannot get it. I’d do it myself if I had the time to do so, but, well, thank you but no, thank you.

Anyway, I was a bit fed up to see a DOS console being launched every time my computer started, so I began to search for… something else. And I came across SharpReader which simply does it. And nicely. And quickly. I shall order my troups to build a statue to Luke Hutteman, who wrote this programme in .Net. Now, my crave for info is going to be satisfied in a wonderful and simple way.

A Dutchwoman, Natascha Frensch, has released a new typeface designed to be read by people with dyslexia and called Read Regular.

Based on the accentuating of differences between letters dyslexics tend to confuse, Read Regular proposes a different shape for letters like ‘b’ and ‘d’ instead of flipping the ‘b’ to get a ‘d’ and uses large openings for letters like ‘a’ and ‘o’. Ascenders and descenders are extended and no serif is added to prevent the reader from visually “closing&rsdquo; the shapes. It also uses a relatively large hinting to create space around the letters, especially for Read Space.

The PDF presenting the font shows an example of Read Regular typeset in 10pt/14pt and 8pt/12pt: the result is quite nice and certainly more pleasant than Comic Sans, which was regarded as a good candidate for typesetting texts for dyslexics, because of its assymetrical shapes.

The next step will be to make this typeface widely available so that it can be used on websites, for example: I’m pretty sure it would look very good on screen. It would be interesting to know if Natascha Frensch has made tests in web pages… I’d be one of the first to use Read Regular, that’s for sure!

I’ve been looking for such a study for quite a while and I finally came across this one, which begins to be old craic (2 years-old): Usability News.

I am Sébastien Le Callonnec (tychobrailleur). I live in Ireland. I am a software engineer, working primarily in Java, but in my spare time, I also do a lot of PHP and Ruby. I am passionate about coding, and I also love photography, typography (anything that’s “-graphy”, really), and basket-ball. So Weblogism is about a bit about all this. I used to try to keep to one topic, but I’m a very curious person, and definitely interested in tons of subjects, so don’t expect any logic in here!

The method to make a company go from bad to worse is somewhat straightforward. First things first, spread rumours implying that the company loses money. Loads of it. That way, employees who have worked hard will feel relieved to see that their efforts are useless: whatever the amount of work, money won’t get in.

Next, send random people, that no one knows, in the offices to take measures. Order them to remain silent. They just look, try to spot the network plugs, look again, nod thoughtfully and mutter: “We’ll put the machines there”. “There” being the place where you’re sitting right now, the atmosphere thereby created will be all the more tensed. In the following hours, rumours will spread even better and people will gather, being non-productive and puzzled. And a bit scared as well.

The chairman must then send an email to all employees, letting dangle in the air that redundancies are expected according to the Board meeting. Write also that you cannot say anything, just mention redundancies. That’s all. The effect will be tremendous: people will shit their pants off and stop working.

The method does work. It’s somewhat smelly around here today…

A font that carries my name: here’s the news to make my day. It can be seen on Storm Type Foundry Web site, pismolijna.cz.

Five different weights, each with italics, small caps along with italics. The font is authored by František Štorm and is very pleasing to the eye. It also provides a fair amount of arrows, certainly as a tribute to the way the saint carrying the same name died as a martyr.

Those characters are going to join the already fantastic family Serapion II.