I decided that since I’ve made fun of the way the new Republican Party website looks, I should be fair and take a look at the sites for other political parties to see how bad they are. (I’m going to avoid the fringe parties and just focus on the major ones.) The first one I’ll look at is the Democratic Party website. Now their website is much cleaner looking and much better organized while keeping to current web standards and fashions. It also loads fast, and doesn’t present you with all sorts of flashy graphics and videos. It even looks more patriotic—the background is a nice stars-on-pale-blue, and the red color comes in when you mouseover the menu buttons and just a few touches here and there, which is just enough red. That’s so much better than that in-your-face “we represent the ‘red’ states” scarlet brand which makes the RNC site actually painful to look at. Red can be a dominant color on a website, but it has to be used a certain way—it’s so loud in itself, for one thing, that a major-red site should have few other graphics, animations, and so on. Most of the websites on this page follow that rule and are better for it. Anyway, though the Democratic Party site has blue as its background color it doesn’t have blue all over the place, so you aren’t having the Blue State vs. Red State thing shoved in your face. The RNC site is just too loud and pushy, and that makes them look divisive. I can understand the Republicans wanting to have the same functions that the Democratic site has (they more or less seem to have the same setup when it comes to sections and functionality) without looking like a clone, but it just looks like whoever was in charge of the design asked for “like the Dem site, only bigger and louder!” Not good.

Since this is a two-party system, the rest of our political parties aren’t exactly powerful. Still, they exist. What of their websites? Let’s take a look:

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I got a fifth or ninth or whatever spam comment on my Library site, so I finally remembered I had a WordPress.com account and thus an API key and set up Akismet. Die stupid spammers die.

The comment fun in my previous post makes me wish (sort of) that I had nested comments in this blog, so people could reply to comments and thus avoid confusion. WordPress has them, but I decided to run my blog under Expression Engine, which doesn’t. Maybe there is a plug-in, though I did sign up with Disqus which is a pretty neat commenting/forum service which includes a reply function and I could add that instead. Then again, I don’t get all that many comments, so would it be worth it? Or maybe I should just change the blogging software on this site to WordPress.

And in other, non-blogging areas, I’ve been thinking about ebooks and web-fiction lately, and I have to agree with this guy that as things stand now the way web-fiction is presented on the internet sucks. For one thing, a lot of writers don’t seem to have any idea about how to make their text actually readable—they just think “ooh, I can have pretty colors!” so you get their novel or story in red text on an orange background, or something. And then there are the extra flashy things everyone seems to have on websites these days—ads and flash things and Youtube embeds and so on. That’s okay, I guess, for blogs (she said through gritted teeth) but I’m not going to read a web-novel if each page takes ten thousand years to load. And then there is the issue of screen width—it’s wearying to read long text entries that go all the way across a screen. And I will leave unmentioned (because then I won’t stop) those websites with fixed widths that are wider than the average monitor so you have to scroll across—horizontal scrolling is a nononononono for text-heavy sites. (Graphical arty sites are another matter. I’m not talking about those.)

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By way of explaining why I haven’t been posting much lately…

Yeah, that’s it, it’s the cat’s fault.

Also (grrr) I’ve been having some trouble with my Library site. I decided to upload a simple table of contents plugin widget thing, and try out some new themes, and now it’s being all balky. Also some asshole using a gmail address and a fake xanga.com url is spamming my comments over there with those stupid “asdfghjkl thanks for this!” comments. I have comments set to moderation but registration isn’t turned on, but I may have to do that. Well no one has commented on the Library site yet. It may be the theme I’m using—it’s pretty, but I’m thinking it’s not the best theme for my purposes (web-fiction) as some others. But I don’t want to play with the site if someone is trying to hack it.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I have an interview with a local school where I’m trying to get a job substitute teaching. Yeah, I know, teaching, ugh—but it’s not “real” teaching, and it will be better than the big nothing I have now. And I’ve been wanting to work on more of my story but I can’t seem to concentrate. Argh. Woes.

Update—the problem with the Library site seemed to be with the Table of Contents plugin I installed. I removed it, and now things work fine. I’ve switched to a plainer theme right now, but I’m still not sure what I want to do. Oh well, bedtime.

I’ve written part 2 of the first chapter of my story, if you’d like to read it. (Of course you do. You want to please me. You want to OBEY me. You! Will! Read! Ahem. Yes.)

I’ve finally written something new. It’s science fiction, of a sort—and I actually more or less have the whole thing in outline form in my head, which is unusual for me, and I’ve actually started a real physical outline, which is also unusual for me. All that’s left is to flesh out the details—this is the first part of that. (Note: I’ve also cross-posted it at one of my Blogger sites, as an experiment mostly with the way it looks. I may or may not continue to do that, but the main site will always be the Library.)