The UX of BFUSv8

This is my site. I'm a designer, the UX is terrible, and I like it that way. For now, at least. Let me explain.

I love having a website of my own. I believe everyone should. Ditch Facebook. Walk away from Instagram. Pick a blogging platform that you can run yourself, even host yourself. How you run that website is completely up to you, which is really the whole point. You get to decide what visitors see first, where the contact info is buried, wether or not you allow comments or any kind of interaction at all.

Two decisions have shaped the current iteration of brianfeeney.us. One, I'm assuming very few people are looking for me. If it can be trusted, my analytics put my visitor count at around 15 people a day. Hi! What are you here for? Probably for little more than seeing that yes, I exist, and that is my correct twitter handle. You want more? Click the "More about me" button. There you'll find my portfolio, résumé, and contact email, and links to the other site pages. 

Does anyone really visit to read my blogs? Either the photos or the writing? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But the links are there if you want them. Which brings me to decision two, which is that I'm assuming if you are interested in my blog stuff, what you probably really want is the RSS feed for following along in whatever reader you use. This is mostly why the blog isn't on index.php, but the RSS icon is set so large. So click that RSS icon and pick the feed or feeds you want. Also, I don't post much or that often, so daily visits or even occasional visits aren't really worth it. RSS is the way to go.

I'd love to redesign and rebuild this site sooner rather than later. In fact, I've redesigned it a few times since launching this version. Just didn't care for the new designs any more than this one, so why rebuild it? I'm sure I'll get the itch to try out the new CSS bits before long. 

Finding Superchunk

One of the thrills of being an active music listener is discovering an artist that really catches you and creates an obsession. After 20 years or so, though, it gets harder and harder to find one of those. Looking back through my listening history at Last.fm, it appears my last major personal discovery was Scott Walker in 2009. Walker had long been on my list of artists-to-listen-to-someday, as I knew he was a big influence on Blur, Suede, Pulp, and that whole scene, but 2009 was my year for him. I went weeks listening to little else. 

Sometimes a new favorite artist comes exactly as you planned it would. And sometimes they happen out of nowhere.

I have stumbled upon Superchunk, and I can't stop listening. My route to them was exceptionally circuitous. A few months ago, I suddenly remembered there was a pocket of music out there in the world I hadn't fully explored. I didn't know the name of the bands, nor the labels they were on. I had only a vague memory of a bunch of music which an old friend used to put on. In the late 90s, that friend was the first person I met deeply into indie rock. He introduced me to Guided By Voices, Pavement, Built to Spill, the biggies. But that's where I stopped listening. I never continued on to the level of artists under that. 

After some determined digging on the Google, I pieced together which bands those were: Sebadoh, Folk Implosion, Archers Of Loaf, Red House Painters, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Superchunk. I’m now loving all of them. But it’s Superchunk which is straight killing me. Once again, I've found an artist strong enough to push out my interest in listening to anything else. 

Problems with Charter Schools

America’s Charter Schools Have A Commitment Problem

But modern charters are not public schools, and they do not make a public school commitment to stay and do the work over the long haul. They are businesses, and they make a business person’s commitment to stick around as long as it makes business sense to do so. That does not make them evil, but it does make them something other than a public school. And it underlines another truth ― students are not their number-one priority.

I think the perfect metaphor for charter schools are those Magic Eye posters from the 90s. If you stare from a very particular angle, cross your eyes, and focus intently only on what’s right in front of you, you get to see the sailboat.

From a conservative point of view, charter schools are perfect examples of how unregulated markets can improve an industry. Competition is good! The better schools will win and the bad schools will close!

But if you look at charters from any other angle, the problems become crystal clear. What happens to the kids when the schools close? What affect does for-profit financing have on the curriculum, or the design and furnishing of the building? Of the nutritiousness of the kids’ lunches? What does it mean when schools play roles in communities more like Walmarts and less like decades-old public institutions.

When I cross my eyes and look at charter schools from the conservative angle, I get it. They seem great. But it’s now obvious there are a hundred problems which piggyback on the one single solution they offer.

I support higher governmental support for our current public schools. Give our teachers huge pay raises. Double the funding for educational infrastructure. Care about the kids. Forget about “markets”.

Own Your Own Site

Anil Dash on the missing building blocks of the web

[T]hings have gotten much easier. There are plenty of tools for easily building a website now, and many of them are free. And while companies still usually have a website of their own, an individual having a substantial website (not just a one-page placeholder) is pretty unusual these days unless they’re a Social Media Expert or somebody with a book to sell. … There’s no reason it has to be that way, though. There are no technical barriers for why we couldn’t share our photos to our own sites instead of to Instagram, or why we couldn’t post stupid memes to our own web address instead of on Facebook or Reddit.

I think about this problem all the time. I love having my own website and I have no doubt more people wouldn’t prefer to have their own domain, too, instead of a Facebook page.

Home Ownership 2018

Now that I’m finally about to be in the market for homeownership, it’s becoming very clear that way way way too many homes are owned by corporations or the extremely rich. One reason home prices are laughably inflated.

It’s a story that’s very familiar to any millennials scanning the property market and lamenting the high cost of a home: renting just makes a lot more financial sense right now. Statistics certainly bears that out. Burns says that while his research shows that homeownership isn’t dead, he believes the younger generation will achieve a roughly 10% lower homeownership rate than their parents.

Renting the American Dream

Corporate Design

Paul Robert Lloyd on corporate design:

Designers like to talk about how they finally have a seat at the table. It’s an attractive idea, especially since companies have started to build internal design teams rather than outsource to agencies. But sometimes it feels as if designers have been tricked into thinking they have a seat, when in fact they’ve been taken hostage, only to develop Stockholm syndrome.

This is such an interesting problem. One that has struck me before, but in a vague way I hadn’t been able to articulate nearly as clearly. I’m not yet convinced it’s actually happening, but I’m not done thinking about it.

Newsletters Are Not My Thing

I’ve unsubscribed from nearly every email newsletter I’ve ever signed up for. It’s no surprise to me that Jason Kottke sees a large number of unsubscribers after every email sent. Two obvious reasons and one personal one. Obvious: 1) people forget or don’t care they’re subscribed until the email arrives, and 2) the easiest way to unsubscribe is at the bottom of the newsletter email they want to unsubscribe from. If another email never comes, they’ll never remember or care to unsubscribe. The personal: I’m not the kind of person who wants casual reading content in my email inbox. It just doesn’t belong. There are plenty of newsletters I’d love to subscribe to, and would probably greatly enjoy reading, if I could send them somewhere which isn’t my email address. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Blogging Again, Again

Back to the Blog, from Dan Cohen:

There has been a recent movement to “re-decentralize” the web, returning our activities to sites like this one. I am unsurprisingly sympathetic to this as an idealist, and this post is my commitment to renew that ideal. I plan to write more here from now on. However, I’m also a pragmatist, and I feel the re-decentralizers have underestimated what they are up against, which is partially about technology but mostly about human nature.

I’ve already mentioned the relative ease and short amount of time it takes to express oneself on centralized services. People are chronically stretched, and building and maintaining a site, and writing at greater length than one or two sentences seems like real work. When I started this site, I didn’t have two kids and two dogs and a rather busy administrative job. Overestimating the time regular people have to futz with technology was the downfall of desktop linux, and a key reason many people use Facebook as their main outlet for expression rather a personal site.

Two problems here which do need solving. One, it’s still far too difficult to publish a post on a self-hosted website. And two, there is a lack of innovative tools which could better connect all of these decentralized websites.

The first problem is actually hundreds of problems at once; a different set of problems for every single CMS. The second problem only needs some love and attention. I believe the answer is in newsreaders and new creative ways of using RSS. Self-owned data and content, but new ways to read blogs in centralized locations.

Arial China

A beautiful set of arial photos of China from Alan Taylor at the Atlantic.

RSS Revived

Wired.com, It’s Time For an RSS Revival:

For many of you, that means finding a replacement for Digg Reader, which went the way of the ghost this month. Or maybe you haven’t used RSS since five years ago, when Google Reader, the beloved firehose of news headlines got the axe. For others, it means figuring out what the heck an RSS feed is in the first place—we’ll get to that in just a minute. And some of you have already moved on to the next article in your Feedly queue. No matter what your current disposition, though, in this age of algorithmic overreach there’s something deeply satisfying about finding stories beyond what your loudest Twitter follows shared, or that Facebook’s News Feed optimized into your life. And lots of tools that can get you there.”

So many posts these days calling for a big return of RSS. I’m here for it.