[Newspoetry] site design

[William Gillespie]

Dirk,

You just don't get it do you? Look at the following statistics from today's
webmonkey list:

>hi,
>when designing pages, i have been assuming that  most ppl's
>montor settings would still be 640 x 480...
>is this assumption outdated?

> From the last stats I saw before StatMarket started charging was that it
> was down to 10-15% of people with monitors at 640x480, and declining.

You see, Newspoetry has been reconfigured for an audience of people with BIG
MONITORS, BIG COMPUTERS, GIGANTIC SMOLDERING MUSCULAR WORKSTATIONS WITH
SCREENS LIKE DRIVE-IN THEATERS. Not that gerbil-treadmill-powered electric
typewriter you call a computer.

And I have a theory about that. I think Futrelle's in bed with some
corporate interests. I think he's, behind our backs, entertaining offers on
Newpoetry.com's IPO, hoping to sell us off to some silicon alley e-commerce
visionary shark, who will then downsize us and get rid of the poetry, and
make us all write software documentation, or worse, poetry written in the
Hallmark style with a stumbling meter, forced slant-rhymes, and a sickening
sheen of chicken soup. To wit:

   Boeing workers are on strike
   And missile production lags
   Their demands are subversive hype
   I wish they'd call in scabs

So, yeah, he's put in all the whats-its and doohickeys, and the 22-meg Flash
animation, and, if you're using a 4.08 browser or above, the new slogan
becomes visible: "Newspoetry: Marxist unless the money's good." It's going
to be a credit-card-accesible site, all the poetry will be
computer-generated or penned in Asian sweatshops, he's going to publish
pornographic digital images of all of us (take my advice Stratton, check out
your shower for a little box with a lens and a blinking red light and a cord
snaking out of it - or go to www.nudedirkcam.com with your Visa card ready),
and we'll all be out in the cold getting our poems rejected from
www.poems.com and the online Iowa Review.

Yes, I too am in the lowest 10% of the monitor-size caste system and find
that the new Newspoetry frameset splits down the center of the screen,
making the poem and sidebar equally weighted, when I think the poem should
be heavier. Man. And don't fuck with my line breaks: I wrote those
linebreaks, I poured my heart and soul into each linebreak. The words are
just decorative. The linebreaks are my art.

Power to the little computer people!

Foaming-at-the-mouth,
William


Dirk Stratton wrote:

> Joe--
>
> I hate to complain, b/c I know how much time you've put into this site,
> giving it all sorts of super thing-a-ma-gigs and hyper wingdings and
> such, but one change you've made does not seem to be in the best
> interest of readerly comfort. On my screen, the two halves of the site
> appear to be about equal. Making the calender bigger has made the poetry
> space smaller which causes weird line breaks sometimes (the most recent
> example is today's hypersonnet; Wm's sonnet about work also suffers:
> it's 16 lines long on my screen, and had I not known what it had looked
> like before I wouldn't have known it wasn't supposed to be 16 lines
> long). Occasionally with really long lines, the sideways scrolling has
> to come into play, which makes things difficult to read (I realize that
> this wouldn't be completely avoidable even with a wider space, but the
> frequency of such occurences would be reduced).
> Anyway, just one reader's vote for a smaller calender and a larger space
> for the poems. Thanks for all your work. Now I'm sort of glad that Wm
> guy was deposed. Did you realize he is a founding member of that
> Satanist Drug Cult known as the Unknown? Gives me the shivers just
> thinking about it.
>
> --Dirk
>
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