Insomnia

I’m tired. I can’t sleep. Check the timestamp :-p

Been using some of my undesiredly available time to mock up a design for the church website, which has been lying unattended for months while Adrian and I both have other things pressing down upon us. I quite like this design. Okay, so it’s fairly derivative of a particular kind of corporate site that was popular a while back, but I like it. It’s clean. It has a certain class. And it’s not blue. Seems like every site I’ve designed in ages has been primarily blue (this one, for instance?). Go me.

And it’s been dawning on me lately, that none of the sites I go back to again and again are particularly pretty. There are some spectacularly beautiful websites out there, ones that just make my jaw hit the floor. And there are some spectacularly usable websites out there. But I can’t think of any that fall into both categories. Certainly there are usable, functional sites that look good, and good-looking sites that are usable and useful. And it’s possible for a spectacularly usable site to look rather nice.

But I suspect that it’s the nature of the web - built around the transmission of information rather than the display of beauty - that in order to do really jaw-dropping aesthetic stuff we have to sacrifice some aspect of usability, be it accessibility or compatibility or whatever. So I think I’m quite happy that my new design for the St. Cath’s site may not win any beauty contests, but should work.

And if we don’t use it for the church, I’m sure I’ll employ it elsewhere at some point - with some development to overcome its inherent 1 a.m.-ishness, of course.

Another sleepless project is a Flash Blogger button. I wonder will the guys at Blogger mind me using a non-standard button? Dunno. Maybe best to ask them. Not much point until I actually design the thing, though. And while I’ve been designing it in my head, the phrase, “Join the revolution.” keeps popping up. I think it fits in quite nicely with the whole (supposed) blog-culture. “…but you won’t fool the children of the revolution.”

Something I’ve been meaning to share, that is encouraging me to finally do that Linux install, and fool around a bit and actually learn something about it. Actually, I could do that now if I don’t sleep. But then, the partitioning would probably go wrong on account of some insomniac error on my part, and I’d be in for my second reinstall in ten days. And I’d lose everything I’ve produced in those ten days - and they’ve been an impressively productive ten days, so that would suck. Big-style. Perhaps tomorrow, instead.

Actualy, that’s something I could do to fill my sleepless hours: go backup! I’ve been getting very, very paranoid about data-loss lately. I think it was that hard-drive meltdown last week. It’s a lesson you only ever learn the hard way, but once you learn it, you’re unlikely to forget it. Learn from my mistakes, grasshopper, learn from my mistakes…