Rich and Strange Aeons

Meta: I have a website

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 21:20:32 GMT

For those who just know my online presence through LJ/DW, I also have a website, stretching back to 1995, with the cutting edge web design you'd expect from that. It's not updated much, barely at all for a while, but it still archives some things I find neat. I'd forgotten about the Little Fractioner, my Achilles-and-Tortoise dialogue on fractions, which I think I in fact wrote for Douglas Hofstadter's son. (The title comes from Dan Friedman's Little Schemer.)

Annoying, it looks least as intended in Firefox on Linux, at least my Firefox and Linux.

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I can has fonts! No, you can has fonts!

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 04:38:40 GMT

Some years ago I played with Livejournal styles, and customized it to use a font I liked. I later found I'd been using Windows, and the Edwardian Script ITC I liked there for display wasn't on Linux, but then I found Elegante, and it was even better. And I found URW Palladio, a Palatino derivative, for the body.

But these aren't common fonts, and while I tried putting in alternatives, like URW Chancery L or Monotype Corsiva or plain old Times, it's not the same. So all this time the way I saw my pages and the way you saw them probably weren't the same. Actually, on my eee, it wasn't the same either, since I'd forgotten how to get the fonts I liked.

But now, that's changed! I've learned about font_face, and thus can serve the free fonts I want for my website. That doesn't work as easily for Livejournal, because Firefox doesn't like cross-domain font serves, but Google Webfonts has EB Garamond and FF will take that. And then it turned out that the the .htaccess magic here works too, so I can serve Elegante through LJ (and DW). Which means I could serve the URW Garamond No. 8 that I found before EB and am using on my computer, too, but eh, EB seems as good.

(I'd submitted Elegante to Webfonts, and I even got a friendly reply despite my not owning the font like they ask, but they don't like GPL as a font license and would like the author to submit under OFL. The author is some guy in Spain, I don't know if the e-mail I found is even him, the one in the license bounces.)

(Note Elegante is GPL, in the ttf-linex package of Ubuntu and maybe Debian? EB Garamond is Open Font License, and Garamond No. 8 under some custom free license.)

And ttf2eot converted the TTF (TrueType) files to EOT, so IE can probably stay with us cool kids. I don't have IE to test it with, though, I can just use my eee to verify that things work on a Linux box without the fonts.

So I predict a radical difference on everyone else's computers when they look now.

This is also how I've been seeing *your* LJ pages; I use "use my style". (Which also means I still see subjects on comments.)

Now if I could fix my DW style. It's very pretty but the header image has duplication and legibility problems.

Side note: seems odd that the Times website uses Georgia instead of Times New Roman. Wikipedia says even the physical paper doesn't use TNR any more. Though I guess Georgia is related.

Edit: worth noting this is related to my question about what fonts people use, not that anyone responded.
http://mindstalk.livejournal.com/345709.html

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In which I discover RSS

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 08:31:54 GMT

I've heard of this for years, and sort of known what it did, but never investigated. I still haven't investigated independent RSS readers or whatever, just what the various social networking sites support.

While you can't subscribe to an LJ account directly on Dreamwidth, you can subscribe to the RSS for it, though doing so requires automatically making an account for it. http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqcat=feeds LJ itself seems similar http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=137&view=full

So seems like with a bit of work I could read all my LJ accounts on my DW Reading page, or vice versa, though I'd have to click through to comment on the other site. But also various blogs (Gaiman, Stross) and irregular comics could be followed as well.

Meantime, support under Facebook or Google+ seems dubious at best, with some G+ link saying promptly that it requires Chrome to work. The phrase "walled garden" comes immediately to mind, as well as "so who plays well with others?"

It's a whole new world! No doubt familiar to most of you for the past decade! "Hey guys, did you know the sky is blue?" And I can obnoxiously go from "what's RSS?" to "don't have an LJ account but want to follow me? Just subscribe to the RSS feed, no need for me to be posting to FB."

Separately, while I grumble about mlc's retreat to a blogger, it does remember my Google account (sigh) login, so all I have to do is click through the links she provides on LJ. Unlike G&S, where it's a tiny private mac.com blog and I have to log in each time to read the occasional updates.

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Social network balkanization

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 03:30:13 GMT

So, lyceum has declared she's actively dumping Facebook for Google+. mlc23 has been more active on G+, as well as retreating much of her content to a private blog. Google+ reportedly now has games, so presumably you can soon play Farmville there instead of on FB. anima views LJ/DW as online community things (like fandom circles), not friend following, whereas for me it's always primarily been about real friends, e.g. joining to comment on her posts and posting myself once lyceum and shiver had joined and followed me, and being happy when mlc23 gave up her *first* private blog to come here.

Le frigging sigh.

At dinner yesterday I mentioned boosting LJ over FB and the fandom-media teacher next to me said "no, Dreamwidth!" Heh.

Me, I'm tempted to cancel FB myself, what with all the changes and privacy leaks, but admit it's hard what with so many other people using it, and even some groups.

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