Barry Welford and Liana Evans tagged me. (For separate blogs; but I’m combining the response into just one post. Duplicate content be damned. What am I going to do? Give away 10 facts about myself?)

1. In high school and college I was a pretty serious goth. Lots of makeup, all black clothing, the whole 9 yards. I varyingly had extremely long hair (to the lower back, usually) and a completely shaved head.
2. I never owned or lived with a computer before 2001. I’d never worked with any kind of programming language; knew nothing whatsoever about this “command prompt” thingamajig or “objects”. I’ve never held a full-time job in anything in the computer industry. On a related note; I’ve never designed a website using tables for layout.
3. Before going into computers and web development, I pursued classical history and music composition. I’ve been accepted to grad school on a number of occasions for each, but never actually went. Schools I’ve been accepted to include Boston University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and University College London. I still play classical music regularly and read on classical topics, but don’t particularly intend to pursue them academically.
4. I don’t drive. I did finally get my driver’s license two years ago, but have not actually been behind the wheel since sometime in early 2005. I will eventually drive, because it’s an unfair burden on my girlfriend for me not to, but I haven’t managed to take that step yet. Driving scares the hell out of me.
5. I grew up in Montana. My mother grew up on a farm in western North Dakota; my father on a ranch in eastern Montana. My girlfriend is a professional horse trainer. Everybody asks me whether I ride: No, I don’t. I’m a city boy: growing up in Montana is not equivalent to growing up in the country.

I’m going to have to tag some new people, here…let’s see — Mike Cherim, Jack Pickard, Emma Sax, Nadir Garouche, and Michael Jensen. (He says he hasn’t been tagged yet – but he started the whole thing! Seems only fair.)

Yesterday, I installed a great little plugin which tracks my top 10 viewed posts. Unsurprisingly, this gives me a greater sense of what posts people are visiting as well as providing a means for other people to see my more popular writings.

But it came with some surprises…

Currently, and by a HUGE margin, my most popular post is a post announcing Jim Byrne’s latest book. It’s a nothing post: a paragraph saying who Jim Byrne is (founder of GAWDS, a brief sentence saying something nice about the book, and a link to the book’s sale page on LuLu.com.

And yet, it was visited 100 times in the last 24 hours. I’d known that this page received an unusually high amount of traffic; but this is well beyond what I expected.

And, of course, now that it’s in my top 10 (really, top 5 – I edited the plugin), it’s creating a bit of a feedback loop: curious people will continue to visit it to try and see what’s so special.

My assumption is that most of these visitors are looking for review information: advice about the book, etc. So I’ve added to the post. Hopefully, I’ll be giving these visitors what they’re looking for: I didn’t expand the article into a huge review — it’s not a huge book, after all! But it’s a more meaningful article now than it was before.

It’s a good thing, knowing what pages people most frequently visit on your site. Those are good pages to pay close attention to: if they aren’t already, change them to try and deliver what your visitors are looking for.

I enjoy reading; so a literary meme seemed like a fun thing to participate in. And it’s a great excuse to talk about one of my favorite authors, so I’m taking the liberty of going thoroughly off topic. This one, I picked up from Emma, who picked it up from ThePickards.

The rules:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool� or “intellectual� book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

And here it is:

He looked a total tyrant.

“Wipe that smile off your face, Smedley,” he said, “and get you gone back to that hoeing.”

When the whole gang had gone sucurrying out again, Mr. Maxim pranced forward. He was almost as full of himself as Christopher was.

It’s unlikely anybody reading this is going to get that one…it’s “Conrad’s Fate”, the latest addition (minus 1) to Diana Wynne Jones’ “Chrestomanci” collection. Diana Wynne Jones is, for what it’s worth, the absolute best in juvenile fantasy. That’s the category she’s most commonly put in, at any rate – although I consider most of her work to be quite sophisticated and unquestionably well worth reading.

Recommended reading for Diana Wynne Jones (all affiliate links, FYI):

• Howl’s Moving Castle (also the movie by Miyazaki)
• Dogsbody
• Fire and Hemlock
• The Dalemark Quartet
  • Cart and Cwidder (Vol 1) & Drowned Ammet (Vol 2)
  • The Spellcoats (Vol 3) & The Crown of Dalemark (Vol 4)
• Eight Days of Luke
• Archer’s Goon
• The Homeward Bounders

The other day, in a Cre8asite Forums thread, I wrote the following as a tip for blogging:

DON’T:

Attack other bloggers. Although the flame war is an age old online communication favorite, the person who starts it always loses. Just don’t do it! Criticizing an article with a reasoned argument is GREAT – that’s dialogue. Attacking somebody personally is a big no-no.

And yet, I recently found myself on the defense because I did attack two people in a blog post. Was this because I had intended to attack Joe Clark or Jeff Croft? Certainly not. I admire both of them for their work in accessibility and standards issues. I read Joe’s blog regularly and enjoy it because of his unapologetically forthright voice. I only recently discovered Jeff Croft, but on reading some of his additional material I find his perspective worthwhile and enlightening. In that post, I didn’t think through my comments from the most important perspective – the readers.

Ultimately, your intentions are rarely what is read by your audience. Your words are – and if you haven’t carefully thought through every sentence, then you’ve left yourself wide open to making a mistake. In Jeff Croft’s case, I turned a disappointment in the words he wrote into an attack on his own perspective on accessibility. In Joe Clark’s case, I chose to attach a label to his attitudes and perspectives which was not justified, in a failed attempt to make an example. (It is inevitably a failed example, since the label was unjustified.) This is unfortunate; it turned an otherwise effective blog post into one which I feel is highly flawed due to my excesses.

I’m not going to alter my post – the context of the comments would be lost. My blog will continue to exist as is, warts and all. However, in the future, I think I need to take more care to consider the viewpoint of the reader. It’s always a possibility that the person you’re discussing will read your post. Have you written something that you’re comfortable having that person read? Some people go out looking to stir up trouble – they’re pursuing controversy for attention. That isn’t my goal – I intend to write reasoned commentary. Controversial topics, especially, require very careful writing. In this case, I fell short of my aims.

Today, Jeff has posted a follow-up to his previous controversial accessibility article. In it, he lays out his views systematically and clearly. His thoughts are very reasoned – and it does come down to practicality. Ultimately, the client is the boss – if a client says you can’t do something because he can’t pay for it, then you need to stop. From a business perspective, if a designer gives away “free accessibility with every design!”, that designer is heading for bankruptcy. Jeff does not have any hesitation about building every ounce of accessibility into a site which is reasonable and practical. But, like every designer, he has to draw the line somewhere.