Sean Tevis on running for office xkcd style.  And the rest of his site is pretty well designed too.  Simple, slick, to the point.  But it may be too slick.  Who knows.  Nice to see something other than typical political templates.  Even if he is on the other side of the aisle, I give him a tip of the hat.

UPDATE: His weblog on the site is interesting as well, a nice insider look on running for office.  Not sure if that hurts or helps him, but it’s interesting reading from the outside.

7/18 9:30am UPDATE: Seems he’s already broken the 3,000 donor barrier.  (Scroll down to see more.)

All the web designing cheat sheets you might ever need.  (via Kottke)

ShopRVA sounds good in theory:

ShopRVA is a coordinated effort to direct the public towards shopping at local, independently owned businesses. This is not only to benefit small stores. The act of buying locally allows cities to be more self-sustaining and helps prevent intervention from corporate business. Small businesses also add to the unique nature of the city by providing services that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Through this campaign, ShopRVA hopes to provide incentive through education as to why shopping locally is a wise way to give back to your community.

…but looks poor in execution. Yeah, it’s a couple folks who had to throw a site together for class, but there’s so much more that could be done for something like this.

The Commonwealth Times has a press release dressed up like an article in Monday’s issue. (C’mon, guys, you couldn’t have interviewed someone OTHER than one guy, Derek Chamberlin, involved in the site? Not even one of the businesses who are associated?) By the sounds of things, this is supposed to be the greatest revolution for local businesses since, well, ever. And while the title makes a grandiose statement “Student-led campaign supports Richmond businesses, aims to halt corporate takeovers”, there’s really nothing in the article that then addresses corporate takeovers, not by the author or any statements from Chamberlin. But that’s more an issue with the article than with ShopRVA.

The website is just there.  From a design standpoint it’s not bad (simple, kinda pretty), but in the realm of functionality it’s lacking.  Not a whole lot of information is given as to what ShopRVA really aims to do aside from a paragraph or two as a mission statement. You an request to be partnered, but what does that get you other than a listing on the site? Speaking of the listing, it’s page four, under “Partners”.  Not only should it probably be up front and center but a big better presentation would be more useful than a straight list.  According to the CT article they’re aiming to have a Google Map of the businesses which will be nice, but in the current design where will that fit?

Part of this may stem from the fact that this is the result of a graphic design project and may simply focus too much on presentation and not enough on actual interaction or how best to deliver some content.  Or maybe I’m just spoiled by the pretty, rich in detail and presentation community sites that have been popping up lately (RVANews for one).  Yes, it’s just getting started, but with such a whimper that I wonder if it’ll grow the legs it’ll need to last.

J’s Notes has had a bit of design tweaking this week, going to a three column format, having the scribbles return on the sidebar, and a brand spankin’ new banner being chruned out today.  It’s all still rough and up to some changes, but bit by bit it’s turning into something that less resembles a template.  I hope.

How many HTML elements can you name in 5 minutes?  I was only able to pull of 35 and am smacking my forehead at some of the 56 I missed.  Via Kottke.

So yesterday I started experimenting with titleless posts, which isn’t so hard to do.  Half the time the hardest part of a post is coming up with a catchy title.  But if what I’m blogging really isn’t all that long or doesn’t contain much original thought, why give it a title?

Because RSS feeds want titles, for one.

The titleless move was not only based on content but a design idea as well, one stolen from Kottke.org where the blog is a series of short posts interrupted by longer, more thorough posts and the like.  The shorter posts don’t have titles on the blog, but they do when they pop up through the RSS feed, which makes subscribing easy and the display of posts on sites like RVABlogs that much easier.  So I guess until I can figure out how to make titles not show on the blog but pop up in the RSS feed, I’ll have to keep coming up with titles.

By the way, if anyone out there has any suggestions on what I can do to fix this issue, I’m all ears.

Which leads to my brief thoughts on WordPress.  While I’ve played with WP a bit in the past, there certainly is a bit of a learning curve moving to WP and PHP from Blogger’s more or less straight HTML.  PHP will do what you tell it to do, for sure, but there are certain nuances in WP’s stuff that I’m still trying to figure out.  Which is why I’ve not only had this recent issue with posts but why I’m also still on the default template.  But I’m making tweaks here and there with the display and all.  Hopefully there will be a slick new design in the next couple weeks, but we’ll see.

So please continue to bear with me as I get the hang of this puppy.  There’s some slick stuff in here and I’m just starting to get the hang of it.

Rita Flórez writes at GOOD Magazine about how zines continue to florish, even in the face of easier and cheaper means of reaching a wider audience with the Internet.  One part stands out to me:

To Pagan Kennedy, creator of Pagan’s Head and author of ’Zine, blogs and sites like MySpace are just the natural extension of zine culture. “In many ways, the zine world is very much like the internet,” she says. “It’s just that zines happened through the mail, so it happened slowly. Even the conventions of the zine world—the personal zine, where you tell your life story—are very much like blogs and MySpace.”

Still, for avid zine readers like Rowe and Frederick, there’s a distinction between blogs and zines. “I don’t think MySpace has the zine spirit,” says Rowe. “The motivation behind a zine is [personal], but you don’t care about getting noticed. Print gives you many more options. If you publish it online, it’s limited by the coding.”

Emphasis mine.

Websites, zine or otherwise, are only limited by their coding in as much as their author’s knowledge of coding is limited.  As someone who has written online in assorted forms for the last ten years, I can tell you that presentation is very important, not just in blogging but in presenting any content on any site, especially when trying to present something like fiction or a journal.

While the web presents the author with a wider audience, it also presents the audience with a wider pool of things to get their attention.  The author’s job then becomes not only to provide solid content but to figure out a creative way to present that content and make it stand out.  If you were aiming to publish a zine online, to stick to a blog format of just pictures and text is to set yourself up to be lost in the crowd.  With so many tools available, as basic as Photoshop or an understanding of CSS and DHTML or as advanced as Flash and beyond, there are many ways to take text and make it so much more.  It just takes time and commitment, just about as much as you’d have to put into making a solid print zine.  But if you care about your material and getting it into other eyes, you should be willing to do that legwork.

(Via Kottke.)