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Saturday 14 September 2013

The pitch

I heard Martin Grunstein at the Institute of Architects the other day, speaking about How architects can make profits in a chal­leng­ing environment.

Martin made some unflattering generalisations about architects’ websites. He even offered to help anyone in the audience to make theirs better. I sent him an email after the talk and, a few days later, he responded.

He liked this website but he told me​—​you need to have a stronger selling focus to it be­cause the purpose of your site is to get people to hire your ser­vices. He said I should write a list of reasons for clients to hire me, and put it on the front page.

So I thought of six reasons and wrote them down.

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Tuesday 19 March 2013

Olga Nethersole woodburytype zoomified

Let me decode that headline:

Olga Nethersole (1867-1951) was an actress and a celebrity in England and America. She is a perfect subject to demonstrate the woodburytype.

Woodburytype was a process for printing high quality black and white photographs, used from the late 1860s until about 1900. This Woodburytype print of Olga makes a fine test for zoomify

Zoomify is software for zooming and panning website images.

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Thursday 14 March 2013

What you can do with your comments

Please comment on anything you find (or don’t find) on this web­site, by email, phone or letter​—​it’s easy enough to contact me. I’ll be pleased to hear from you, and I am very likely to reply. It could be the start of a rewarding conversation.

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Monday 11 March 2013

Website revamped

I resolved to finish an overhaul of this website during 2012. The program slipped a little, but yesterday I asked my web host to change the DNS settings to point to the new site. Last night I went to bed quite late, satisfied that everything was working properly.

I woke early this morning and found that everything had gone bung​—​the website had turned into an Account Suspended page and my email accounts were inaccessible. Let’s just say that I was disappointed. But it’s all sorted out now, with a gracious apology from the host.

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Sunday 1 January 2012

Website revamp

I resolve that in 2012 I will get the long-simmered revamp of this site off the back burner and out onto the web. I have been work­ing on some new material, and a fresh home page. Stand by.

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Tuesday 22 November 2011

Still marking time

Just quietly, today marks ten years of this blog.

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Sunday 13 February 2011

A message to Page-Zone

Since 2002 this website has been hosted by page-zone.com, a small outfit based in the USA. Over the years I have appreciated their low prices, and I have been content with their service​—​despite (very rare) outages and sometimes slow response to support tickets.

But recently something has gone seriously wrong at Page-Zone. Here is part of a message I sent them today:

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Thursday 18 February 2010

Halal gelatin

I have mixed feelings about accepting comments on this blog. In my darker moments I feel like I should just close down com­ment­ing, because the comments add so little value to this site, but cost me some housekeeping time. Almost all incoming com­ments are spam​—​these are automatically discarded. Of the few that get through the filters, most are childish vandalism (which I remove one by one), there are a few relevant con­tri­but­ions, and a tiny proportion that I find interesting and diverting. I do find it odd which posts attract the comments. The winner is a piece about my interest in obsolete editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with 227 comments.

My 16 April 2002 post about animal glue has also been popular with the commentariat. Until yesterday 79 comments had made it through the filters, mostly from manufacturers seeking mar­kets for their products.

Today I was cheered up by the 80th comment, left by a manu­fac­turer in Malaysia who was offering something new: Halal gelatin. Well, I wasn’t expecting that!

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Friday 9 June 2006

‘Marking time’ as a diagram

My sincere thanks to Marcel Salathe for his websites as graphs applet. I used it to make this beautiful diagram of the HTML tags within the Marking time index page.

The left side of the diagram represents the main content of the page​—​six blog posts, each made up of a cluster of links and images contained in divs.

The right side represents the right column of the page, with a dense cluster of blue dots (top-right) to signify the monthly archive links. The other dense cluster of blue and orange dots (bottom-right) signifies the subject archive links. The little cluster of yellow dots (far right) signifies the search form.

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Tuesday 28 December 2004

Google destinations

Whenever anyone follows a link to a page on this website, my referrer log records where they came from. Most of my visitors come from Google searches, and the log shows the terms they were searching for.

It’s fascinating to see what people are looking for (and what they find on my site). During the past week the most popular search was sam sloan, which brought five people to a page about a note­worthy ratbag. The Google search put a link to my page at number 10, right at the end of the page.

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Tuesday 21 December 2004

Six special places

I have just added websites for the months of July to December to my collection of special places.

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Saturday 31 July 2004

Placeholder

Actually posted on 7 February 2005.

Until I posted this, there was nothing here for the month of July 2004. That was the month I came back from a New Zealand sabbatical and I was a bit busy. But having a missing month in the monthly archive just looked odd, and I had to fix it. So, here is a dose of lorem ipsum.

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Sunday 2 November 2003

Telling tales: the poster

I have made a poster for the telling tales conference, to illustrate the points I raised yesterday. Its a bunch of pages from this site displayed as if in open browser windows, lined up to speak for themselves.

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Saturday 1 November 2003

Telling tales on the web

I’m going to the Australia ICOMOS Telling tales: interpretation in the conservation and design process conference in Sydney.

Conference-goers are invited to bring posters on the theme of in­nov­at­ive concepts and media to communicate heritage mean­ings. This got me thinking about the ways I use this website to tell stories about people and places, and what makes it a good medium.

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Sunday 21 September 2003

Life, documented

An email from Miles Hochstein: Enjoyed your reverse chro­no­lo­gical autobio… and listed it here: It’s a little different from the others, but I liked your thoroughness and graphics. Well thanks Miles, I liked yours too.

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Wednesday 4 December 2002

Google highlights

I have added bells and whistles to this website: Dean Allen’s nifty Google Hilite. Now, when you come here from a Google search, your search terms will be highlighted on my page. To see it in action, search Google.com for dean allen porridge. Thanks Dean, that’s brilliant!

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Wednesday 27 November 2002

A collection of cartes-de-visite

Instead of sitting in a rustic chair in the company of birds I have spent a little time scanning Queensland carte-de-visite pho­tog­raphs so you can see them here.

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Friday 22 November 2002

First birthday

I began marking time on this day a year ago. I give thanks for the protection of Thomas, patron saint of architects. We need a pa­tron saint for bloggers.

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Tuesday 22 October 2002

Movable Type

Starting with the chilli peppers a few days ago, Marking time is coming to your screen via Movable Type instead of Blogger.

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Thursday 3 October 2002

New web host, again

So far, so good. My new host is page-zone.com, a small hosting outfit in Ohio, USA. The transition has been remarkably smooth. I had excellent service from my previous host, webcentral.​com.​au, but when they sent me heavy bills for excess storage and data transfer I looked for better value.

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Wednesday 25 September 2002

New web host

If you can see this message, it’s coming from a server in Atlanta, Georgia. If you can’t see it, you won’t know what you are missing.

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Thursday 14 March 2002

Redesign

I have rearranged this page, to test some ideas for reworking the whole site. In the new scheme every page has a right hand column, under the logo, containing navigation links (with a breadcrumb trail) and a search form. Yes please, some feedback would be useful.

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Wednesday 6 March 2002

Post a comment?

Thanks to Hossein Sharifi of rateyourmusic.com you can now leave comments here. It’s one of the terrific free web services I use for this site.

Update: Since changing over to Movable type (which has com­ments built-in) I have stopped using the YACCS commenting system.

Another update: I have removed the comment forms.

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Thursday 14 February 2002

Testing

Testing the changeover to Blogger Pro. Yes, that worked. Thanks Ev.

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Wednesday 9 January 2002

Enough already

It’s time for me to stop posting here every day!

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Tuesday 27 November 2001

Readable text (again)

Jeffrey Zeldman has just argued the case for specifying web type in pixels, in A list apart: fear of style sheets 4. He says only two things always work: (1) Use pixels (not points, not ems, not per­cen­tages, not keywords) to specify your font sizes. Or: (2) Use nothing. He makes some good points, but he doesn’t convince me altogether.

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Saturday 24 November 2001

Readable text

I wrote to Andy Crewdson in April to thank him for the enjoyment I’d had from lines and splines, his typography weblog.

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Thursday 22 November 2001

Anne Donald, this is for you

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetaur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum Et harumd und lookum like Greek to me, dereud facilis est er expedit distinct. Nam liber te conscient to factor tum poen legum odioque civiuda.

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Search marquis-kyle.com.au

On this page
The pitch
Olga Nethersole woodburytype zoomified
What you can do with your comments
Website revamped
Website revamp
Still marking time
A message to Page-Zone
Halal gelatin
'Marking time' as a diagram
Google destinations
Six special places
Placeholder
Telling tales: the poster
Telling tales on the web
Life, documented
Google highlights
A collection of cartes-de-visite
First birthday
Movable Type
New web host, again
New web host
Redesign
Post a comment?
Testing
Enough already
Readable text (again)
Readable text
Anne Donald, this is for you

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