Rich McQuail

February 3, 2010

Hello world, how the hell are you? RMCQUAIL site synopsis

Filed under: site — Tags: — Rich McQuail @ 1:04 am

Despite the good people at NearlyFreeSpeech providing excellent web hosting, they can’t be blamed for deleting content if a bill is past due.  I neglected to keep my account funds current (NearlyFreeSpeech is a pay-as-you-go service) and all of my previous content was deleted.  Although flustering, this provides me with an opportunity to start a new project.  My name is Rich, I live in Chicago and as of this posting date work as a bike messenger while attempting to set up some sort of screen printing operation.  To what end I haven’t yet come to realize.

In any case, over the last few years I have acquired a broad range of interests, some being:

  • web standards
  • open source software
  • Linux
  • computers and hardware
  • video games
  • vinyl records and turntables
  • speakers
  • audio equipment in general
  • carbon filament light bulbs
  • vacuum tubes
  • photography and darkroom work
  • field recording and audio editing
  • screen printing flat stock and shirts/textiles
  • design and layout
  • woodblock / linoleum printing
  • typesetting
  • basic (extremely!) carpentry and wood finishing
  • fixed-gear / geared bikes
  • bike messenger ephemera
  • Chicago
  • intellectual property reform
  • seeing the RIAA / MPAA go down in flames
  • delta blues, punk rock, new wave
  • politics
  • morality
  • the study of Certain Individuals
  • our place in the void

Certainly others would be interested in at least a few of these subjects.

I am using Wordpress 2.9.1 with the Classic theme.  The style.css is called Gutenberg by Serge K. Keller, which I’ve modified slightly (fonts, padding width, sizing, and hopefully soon a rotating set of banner images at the top).  This style was released about six years ago for one of Alex King’s competitions and in my opinion provides a beautiful presentation with a size scalable architecture (this site should look fine on an iPhone / whatever).

While adjusting the CSS to fit my idea, the program JR Screen Ruler was helpful when it came time to look around other sites to see what a good width for the content area would be.  It is a very good screen ruler.  I ended up using the same content width as The Atlantic (an attractive site), which I think provides a nice middle ground between aesthetics and display compatibility at 980 pixels including the content area and sidebar.

My preferred method for bookmark sorting is now with tags in Firefox, so I do believe I will continue this with any post I make here and Wordpress now supports tags.

For FTPing I am using CuteFTP 8.0.

Video I can’t post with Youtube I will post with HTML5 in an Ogg Theora format.  Flash video is inefficient and stresses a lot of processors, affecting stability.

Etc., etc.  On with it!

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