Cogs can think.

I’m on Twitter now.

Grumble.

So, Focus Shift - the comic loved and hated by OSNews readers - is going to return. Rejoice.

However, it’s going to be completely different from what you’re used to. It’s no longer about wanting to make people chuckle or laugh using cheap jokes in a tech-related context. I want something a little more… Experimental. Something closer to who I am. Something more fitting for a personal weblog.

So, Focus Shift will be more a sort of crudely drawn graphical form of blogging. While the occasional OSNews-style comic might still pop up, the new Focus Shift comic will focus on my personal life, things I experience every day. However, the focus is not making people laugh - it’s more a form of expressing certain things in an extremely vague manner, letting the readers fill in the blanks in whatever way they deem fit.

This is going to be highly experimental, and it’s very likely this won’t amuse a very large audience. That’s fine with me. I’m not doing my blog for other people, so why should its comic be about other people?

Stay tuned.

Focus Shift will return. Right here, on Cogs Can Think.

I just noticed my previous three entries were quite sad and deppressing, or at least ‘heavy’.

Let me make it up to you.

FART ASS PENIS SEX WEE VAGINA POO.

One key feature for most users was a sense of community. Even though blogging is an inherently one-to-many activity, most readers felt a personal connection to the author. This could foster the feeling that the reader belonged to the community even in the absence of participation, and led those who did participate via comments to agonize over their content.

Hi, I’m Thom Arvid Holwerda, born on 1 December 1984. I have two brothers I never talk about, because their (in)actions severely damaged the connection I had with them - most likely beyond repair. And I don’t even care. My mother suffered from breast cancer a few years ago, which taught me a serious lesson about mortality. I have a lot of friends whom I appreciate and love dearly. I vehemently oppose the death penalty, legalised guns, and intolerance. The principle of unconditional equality is one of the two most important values - together with unconditional loyalty to the people I care about.

I am superawesome, incredibly smart, incomprehensibly funny, and NOT AT ALL ARROGANT.

Now, CONNECT GODDAMNIT.

You may not know it, but even your hero, leader, and source of endless admiration (that would be me) draws his inspiration for this weblog from somewhere else. Regular readers will know - Dooce.com.

She won four ‘Bloggies’. ‘Bloggie’ is a word I would use to describe my state of mind last weekend after a litre of Martini, half a bottle of Amaretto, and some Malibu rum, but apparantly, it’s also a series of awards for bloggers. She won Best American Weblog, Best Designed Weblog, Weblog of the Year, and Lifetime Achievement Award. And she got my vote on all of them, which means I’m probably more average than I anticipated.

Or, Dooce is the only weblog I visit every day.

In any case, Heather, congratulations on the four Bloggies, and especially the life-time achievement thing is one you deserve more than anyone else. There are few (if any) out there that can take the most boring of daily things, the most mundane conversations, the most average objects, and turn them into something that puts a smile on my face, no matter if I’m already very content, or if I’m feeling down and out. Heck, you made me realise that one day, I’ll have a kid of my own.

And that kind of power is something to cherish. Please, continue to do what you do. Your weblog alone justifies the horrible concept of the bllllloaaaaaggggg.

It’s finally here, Dooce’s redesign. It looks distinctive, and luckily, she didn’t go all pattern and colour happy. I only see few colours, and barely a pattern. Great stuff. The buttons are a bit… Nineties, but hey, as long as she keeps on writing the way she does I don’t really give a rat’s ass about her blog’s looks. Congratulations to Heather and her coding slave husband Jon.

As I said before, for all I care, she just dumps a text file on the net.

My own redesign is on an indefinite hold. I am way too busy with real life and Grow, and I simply don’t have the time left to dive into Cogs Can Think. v4. It will happen one of these months, but for now, you’ll have to do with v3. I mean, it still looks pretty goddamn nice if you ask me.

Arrogance is a virtue.

I’ve been pondering some massive changes on my blog. I’m not sure each of these will make it through.

• First and foremost, I want to move to a dedicated, real domain. I can use OSNews’ servers for this, so all I’d need to do is buy the actual domain name.
• I want a dedicated page for a daily photo. The reason the daily photo in my sidebar never took off as I hoped it would is because my current digital camera is a, well, piece of shit. As soon as the SLR David and his wife Beth will be sending me arrives, I promise to make the daily photo, well, daily. There’s enough crazy shit to photograph in this country.
• I want a proper navigation bar atop my blog. I’ve already done some mockup work on how it should look, and preliminary beta mockup tester Eugenia was enthusiastic about it.
• Having a navigation bar will allow me to expand my blog further by moving the Cogs to their own, dedicated page, where they will be kept forever and ever, instead of that local text file I use as a backup now.

Now, these changes may seem contradictory to my vision on what a blog should be (simplicity, elegance, cleanliness), but it actually isn’t; adding a navigation bar will make separate pages easier to navigate to (of course, the active page’s link should stand out). Of course, I will make sure it all looks clean, fits in, and is consistent.

Oh, and as you may have noticed, I’ve modified my blog’s header image yesterday. I took the same header, and applied a transparent pattern on top of it, from Squidfingers. Just so you know.

In light of yesterday’s post, I did some, for my standards, heavy tweaking on Cogs Can Think. tonight.

Firstly, I cleaned out the sidebar, and removed any unnecessary fluff. The contact information image is now linked to in the “About…” section. I removed the logo of and link to Pix’d, as that project is not yet finished at all - the page remains up, though. Overall, this gives the sidebar a much cleaner appearance.

In addition, you’ll notice a new feature. Yes, Cogs Can Think. has gotten a feature. Blatantly copied from Adam and Dooce, I’ve added a little ‘link blog’ to the sidebar (imaginatively called ‘Cogs…’). I played with the idea of creating a special page for it, but decided against it as I want my blog to fit on one, single page; it’s a nice way of keeping CCT. focused and organised (no, the FAQ doesn’t count, as you only have to read that once - supposedly, that is).

The structure of each Cog will be the same: “date: link - text blurb (via).” Please note that I’ll be doing this all by manually adding the code to the front page - I do it this way because I) I’m a total idiot when it comes to html and II) this way I am sure it all looks exactly the way I want it to. I’ll max it out at four or five entries (I’ll have to see what looks best); older items will be lost forever (yeah, I’m cold and harsh). I will be keeping a personal back up in a .txt file though, for personal reference.

That’s about it. Suggestions always welcome. Sort of.

As you all know, I’m quite the fan of Dooce and her weblog. There are only a few weblogs I read consistently, but hers is definitely one of them. Interesting sense of humour, coupled with a good sense of relativity, leads to a really interesting weblog to read. But enough with the ass kissing - I want to kiss my own ass today.

Heather also has a small link section in her left column, and yesterday she led me to this website, design*sponge. Dooce is quite positive on this website’s new design, but I really beg to differ. It surely looks good and impressive - lots of interesting colours and tidbits. However - try using it. Then I get stuck. There’s just so much “stuff” in there, it makes my head spin. Backgrounds, labels, patterns, contrasting colours, transparency; you name it, it’s there. But because of all that, I simply lose oversight. I lose focus.

Now, back to the ass kissing - my own ass, this time. When I set out to work on Cogs Can Think. v3 (you’re looking at it) I only had a faint goal in the back of my head on how I wanted it to turn out: clean, elegant, and content-focused. Starting with the classic Kubrick design, I slowly but surely added more of my own elements to this site. What I’m left with now is round and about exactly the way I want my blog to look like.

I don’t like backgrounds, patterns, overly enthousiastic use of ten billion million different colours, transparency, and so on. I want cleanliness. So, the only way the elements here are distinguished, is by abusing fonts. More specifically, by abusing one font, as all text on Cogs Can Think. is Trebuchet MS. I play with point sizes to distinguish the items’ importance - the side column is a small font, the content of the blog is a normal font, while the headers are slightly bigger. I don’t use separating lines, different backgrounds and patterns, or more of that stuff.

Colourwise, I’m easy too. I don’t bombard my users with colours - I give them white, grey, black, and a brownish-orange. This last colour, what I refer to as ‘the link colour’, is always derived from my blog’s header image (masthead in Dooce terms). When the header image changes, my link colour will adapt. Consistency über alles.

I did not build Cogs Can Think. in one day - it’s an ever continuing process of small changes, minor colour changes, font size tweaks, and so on, with or without the help of other people (Eugenia or Adam). I’m actually quite proud of the outcome, and at least a small group of people seem to agree with me (I actually have a hand full of dedicated readers, for whatever reason).

Heather’s weblog appears to be very similar to mine in design (the other way around, actually); simplicity, elegance, cleanliness. The focus is on the content, there’s no avalanche of colours, patterns, or backgrounds. I really, really like the design. I have no idea if all this is on purpose, or that it’s a sort of accidental outcome of her own tweaking process.

Anyway, Heather has been dropping hints lately that she’s working on adding features to her weblog, and of course it makes sense to couple that with a redesign. I’m just really hoping she keeps that same simplicity/elegance/cleanliness combination, and that she isn’t enticed, because of design*sponge, to go all wild with colours and fluff that only serve as distractors from the actual stuff that matters - the content.

And let’s face it, Dooce.com doesn’t need all that fluff. Her content doesn’t need it. For all I care, she just dumps a .txt file on the net.