new site design

Don't give me free time. I'll just fritter it away on my website.

I wonder how many site designs I've had over the years. I bet it's approaching twenty. Today's tweak takes out the thumbnails for the photo of the day and the book. It also takes out the brown banners and restores an echo of the site's original etherlabs.net-style double-lined top and bottom borders. I want it to be as readable and clean as possible. I might remove the entries from the what's new listing.

In related news, I have this browser plug-in called "Readability". I've been using it to clarify the text of dense and ad-heavy websites ever since it was announced. But success changes things and I suppose the people behind Readability want to cash out. They've made a pay-for version of the utility, and the free version now has ads that appear on every page re-rendered by their otherwise excellent plug-in. This renders the app much less useful for its primary purpose, and it makes it useless for printing web pages–something I've been doing to make the most of my time on the streetcar. I understand the urge to make money from your work, and I'm glad that Readability has found a purpose. But this approach breaks the fundamental concept of shareware, which is that you don't cripple the free version. And because this was released as a free-of-charge experiment, switching to a pay-for platform and robbing existing users of their utility is a very poor way of treating the people who brought the initial success that makes a paying platform possible. Not smart.