¤ jetless heights

makin’ tea in your underwear

+ Sun, April 10

Out To Lunch, Back At Noon

Just shy of a month and still very much a dollar short.

We’re out to lunch, munching on the tasty bits of the semester’s end.  Papers grilled over a bed of tests, sautéed in a succulent project sauce.

Bear with us through the next week and a half and you’ll be treated to stories of Italian adventures followed by the glowing nights of Ann Arbor summers.

9:35 AM  ×  5 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Thu, August 19

The Domain Name

Picking a site name these days is hard.  Very hard.

You’d be surprised how many names are taken.  A good 90% of everything I thought of had already been bought and squatted on.  I didn’t take note of all of them, but I’d say I either thought up or was suggested a solid 100+ ideas for site names with only 13 of them making The Possible List.

The Possible List

The first item was phild.org, parodying my good buddy nickd at (you guessed it) nickd.org.  The idea being that we’d replace my online presence with a little script that copied his site, changed the name and placed it here.  Maybe one day.  audiophil.org was another idea, smacking of groaning humor with its wordplay on “audiophile”.  As much as that idea tickled my puntacular self, it didn’t survive the One Week Test.

The One Week Test

Just as with a band name or a song name or an anything else name, you’ve got to be able to come back to it and instinctively say, “mm, that is right”.  You have to be able to do that for a long time, some would say every time.  If you can’t find immediate agreement with a name after only a week, there’s no reason to assume you’ll be able to do it in a month, a year, three years.

The Possible List, Con’t

Speaking of songs, it should come as no surprise that quite a few songs registered with me as possible names.  rockaction.org, sonicblue.org, autumnsweater.org and octopad.org all had a moment or two of consideration.  Good, but not good enough.

Moving away from music, The List becomes more varied.  For a short while, cooperblack.org was a consideration.  Cooper Black is a typeface that has seen a bit of a rekindling recently for its nostalgic charm and sophisticated design, you might enjoy a lost VH1 special on it entitled Behind The Typeface.  However, despite the font’s beauty, naming a site after a font is endlessly tacky, limiting in design and downright dorky all at once.  It is a nice font though.

midtones.org had a nice run as the top contender for a while, just as allthearms.org did.  Midtones was a little too mundane and “allthearms” is slightly unreadable without spaces.  Vestiges of allthearms.org can be seen in the current image in the masthead which I photographed last summer in an alley in Ann Arbor.

tappman.org was a tip of the hat to a fantastic book.  I yearn for it tragically.

Finally, I settled on jetless.org, pulling “Jetless Heights” from a misheard Hum lyric:

I dreamt of jet this high,
seeding clouds from the other side,
and glowing softly until the underbelly shines,
and the back skims through the steam,
feeding upturned mouths and sprinkling awake,
like a dusty sleep you took too soon.
And you,
you need watering if you are to bloom.

Hum was an endlessly complicated band, wrapping a beautiful core with layers and layers of delicate sound and development.  Their attention to detail and perfect execution is something I can only hope to achieve.  In any event, the song is If You Are To Bloom and you should buy Downward Is Heavenward yesterday.

In case you were wondering.

6:37 PM  ×  10 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Thu, July 22

Design Notes

As promised, I want to discuss some aspects of the design and structure here.  Below is the unformatted list I used to track the features I wanted to address in the first release of this site:

x  new design
x  MT 3.0
-  choice of designs
-  choice of font sizes
-  better searching
x  rss for linkblog
-  comments for linkblog
x  better archives for linkblog
x  new archive structure
x  kill comment popups for normal blog
x  add trackbacks

X’s are for completed items, -’s aren’t.

The other items in my list are pretty self-explanatory.  Other blogs can send trackbacks to my posts, which you can see on individual entry pages on the side.  These trackbacks are links to entries on other sites with related subject matter to the post on my site.  Further reading and whatnot.  The other items were largely user requested.  Every link I post on the side is now archived forever.  There are rss feeds for the links.  There will be comments for the links shortly (I wanted to get this out in the wild sooner rather than wait for feature creep to rear its ugly face).  Additionally, there will be site searching, but that takes quite a while to develop and again, getting this site online was far more important.  And anyway why would you need a search for two posts?  User-selectable styles?  Did I say that?  We shall see…

You’ll notice there is no firm navigation anywhere to be found on the site.  Yes, the masthead of every page points back to home base, but that’s about it.  I did this because I want this site to break free from the cut and paste format of so many blogs.  I tried to ensure that every page allows access to related pages but only to related pages.  Heavy bloat is a sin equal to skimpy offerings.  I feel that my decision here adds a personalized and logical structure to every page, hopefully making page to page browsing easier and more streamlined for you.

This site was tackled with standards and accessibility firmly in mind from the outset.  At the bottom of every page you can find urls to check the validity of the structure, style and accessibility of whatever it is you’re viewing.  There are a few small errors here and there, but as Mike Davidson so firmly put it, completely strict validation is neither necessary nor entirely worthwhile.  I wrote these pages in xhtml 1.0 strict, but - and hold on here, this is shocking - I use the target attribute in the links in the comments.  This isn’t valid and that’s a-ok with me.  That’s the only error that really comes to mind as a frequently invalid item, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others slinking in the shadows.

As mentioned in the colophon, I owe an absolutely enormous thank you to the wisdom of Jeffrey Zeldman.  Not to suggest he directly helped out with the work here at all, his is the most brilliant of guiding lights in web design.  Dishing out intelligent, practical and applicable advice and techniques, he has helped out more than I can say.  Between his Designing With Web Standards and his online mag A List Apart the debt I owe can be repaid only with results.  I think this site goes a long way in that department.

Web standards, man.  They produce results.

6:56 PM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Wed, July 21

OKGO

Hi, I’m Dokas McClure and you might remember me from such entertaining websites as stereoboy.org and, uh… actually that’s it and you very well might not remember me from that one at all.

Crap.  I’m two sentences in and I’ve already screwed up.  Let me try that again.

Hi.  My name is Phil and I used to run a site somewhere else at some other time.  A few hiccups and server troubles later, here I am beginning anew at jetless.org.  In the time off, I’ve missed writing in a public format more than you’d believe and I’ve sorely missed hearing from you all.  You may look at this site as a one way thing where I talk to you, but let me tell you plainly: your comments and emails are the most exciting piece of this whole publishing deal.

Alongside everything you’d expect to read from me, I’m going to post quite a bit over the next few days on some aspects of the work here, both past and future.  Design notes and explanations, goals and plans.  The nitty gritty.

So in the words of Sloan, c’mon c’mon, we’re gonna get it started.

10:08 PM  ×  41 Comments  ×  1 Trackback