journal

Archive for April 25, 2005

Revisionist's History

Posted on 25th April, 2005 at 7:47pm by joel

I have a problem. No matter how well-written anything of mine is—be it an entry here, a post at MAF, an email, whatever—I am utterly incapable of publishing it “finished”. Even worse, chances are that I revise the writing within minutes of publication. Case in point: last night’s entry. For those of you reading this site via the RSS feed (the Atom feed appears to have updated itself), compare the last point of the version in your news reader with the last point on my site. I wrote the post in TextEdit and was happy with it. I added it to my WordPress queue and was happy with it. I reread it again 10 minutes later and was still happy with it. I clicked “Publish” to post it, went to the live site to read it one last time and instantly felt the need to revise. Argh.

That said, I’m going to leave the news feeds as “Full Text” for now, but don’t be surprised if they’re scaled back to “Summary Only” in the future to ensure that my [two] readers actually see the final post (chances are, any changes are made within 15 minutes of publication. I typically don’t go back, say, 3 days later to change anything). Does anyone else have this revision problem or am I just weird? Lastly, feel free to place bets in the comments on the number of changes I’ll make to this post.

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On Portfolios

Posted on 25th April, 2005 at 1:19am by joel

headline image for “On Portfolios” Three new additions to the websites portfolio

I added three more websites to my portfolio today and it got me thinking about the compilation and philosophy of portfolios. What's the best way to pick your pieces? Quality? Quantity? Both?

There are three new websites in my websites portfolio as of a few hours ago. These three sites are relatively minor, however. Two of them are really mini-sites and it is quite apparent that they use nearly identical templates. The third one was a collaborative effort with John Whittet and his Basseq Technologies. So, all things considered, these three sites are small pieces, but are still sites that I want to include in my portfolio. It wasn’t a fast or easy decision, though. I pondered for a long time whether or not I should add these. In the end, however, I decided that I had to keep them. But should the decision have been that hard?

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