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.  2/20/10: Got rid of the sidebar, now using a plugin named Menubar which provides the top, horizontal menu solution I was looking for.  It is beautiful, isn’t it?
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!