A Little Experiment

Answering the question, what’s up with the weird look to Randomosity today…I am trying a strange WordPress theme today using simple ASCII charters. Its actually a rather complex theme and its surprisingly difficult to actually make WordPress look so low-tech. The theme is called ASCII and is designed by n.design studio Chris Ensell (sorry Chris). Its extremely well done in my opinion.

So what’s the deal. We all know that the net has gown more and more complex over time and its fun to take a step back every now and then and philosophize on some of the bigger trends. I find that I took a bit of a breather from web development after returning to grad school and only started being re-immersed in the technical milieu…without coming up with some cutesy phrasing like Shawn2.0 or the like, one of the most positive trends I see is that content has increasingly moved front and centre. We have gone through growing pains online where glitz and flash (sorry) seemed to come first and only then the real content of any online presence. Blogs, wikis and the like are ‘almost’ a return to the time of newsnet and gophers. Text for textual sake. To that end, I am increasingly aware that Randomosity is a tad heavy on the gadget/whizzbang side. This will change, but that alas, is time resource dependent. Then I came across this theme.

I thought I’d just run with it today and then change back tomorrow. See what it’s like basically browsing using Lynx within FireFox 😉 If content is king, then what’s it like having a blog without the usual accoutrements. Tomorrow, I’ll snap a pic of the blog in text mode and switch back.

That being said, I remain impressed that blogs are really surfacing their content and not having the navigational infrastructure, or simple baubles getting in the way. Admittedly there is an awful lot of info being thrown up on blogs that may only have relevance to the author, but then who can determine that? Perhaps only time and circumstances, so I am a big fan of encouraging open sharing of information and letting the reader make the decision. Moreover, with the increasing use of RSS, more people are simply sucking information via feed from your site and not actually visiting it to see your presentation more than once. I like that its getting easier every day to see the content…the big challenge is just finding one’s way through the every growing haystack of data.