That Was That

Enthusiasm built last night at having finally gotten to know this expensive theme I bought last year. Enthusiasm squished when it is revealed that none of the advanced flourishes are mobile-ready, contrary to claims made by the creators of this expensive theme. That’s unfortunate but hardly surprising, as the slipshod world of WordPress premium themes and plugins is amok with disappointing failures such as this. It’s almost hilarious to read support forums of plugins which developers claim have 100% positive feedback and where all bugs are stomped out within 24 hours. It is almost never true but somehow the illusion is maintained. I’m getting things going here again after staring at it for a few weeks, spending more time writing and creating content than dealing with code and wrestling with plugins and themes that just don’t freakin’ work.

Caught word yesterday that long-time denizen of this web site died a few years ago of a stroke. He was only 39. I cannot say I knew him directly but he expressed respect for my work, which I appreciated and will always remember.

I think of him any time I see a flagpole on someone’s front yard. That’s because he (or maybe it was his wife) once mentioned in passing that they had a flagpole on their front yard. The reactions from others around here could be described as good-natured incredulity.

I see flagpoles in the front yards of Maspeth and Middle Village, and maybe a few around Astoria. It never used to register with me until after my father died, and the man who found him and alerted authorities and such insisted that I buy a new flag for that flagpole in the driveway.

I did, and we raised it half mast for a week.

I have more work to get through and more industry to exhaust after my daily constitutional, which should not reach epic proportions as it has of late. Wading through the hundreds of pictures I took in last weeks 18-mile ramble to Fresh Pond and back I find distressingly little of merit. One neon PIZZA PASTA sign which I doctored to remove window reflections and background objects, and a GUTTED OUT TELEVISION which I consider barely average in quality are about all I can see rising up from all that.

An amusing moment came at one of the cemeteries on Cypress Hills Street. I saw this handsome structure and, from a distance, thought it was a memorial.

Obviously it is not a memorial, as becomes obvious upon further inspection, though some might consider this a sort of shrine, that word defined by Webster’s as (among other strictly religious meanings) as “a place or object hallowed by its associations”:

My goal for the weekend is to at least begin combining Sorabji.MOBI and Sorabji.NYC. It may not be fully realistic to merge the differing formats but I would like to get all my sites under one WordPress Multisite, with fewer rather than more domains and subdomains.

I was talking to a friend about .MOBI the other night. He was only a little familiar with it, having heard a lot of it years ago until it suddenly seemed to be irrelevant. .MOBI was intended to be a top-level domain for use exclusively in delivering content to mobile devices. In its way .MOBI was like a brand. It didn’t matter whose site you were looking at, but if you were looking at anything with a .MOBi address then that meant you were on the move, that you were on the bleeding edge of consuming content through a cell phone or network-enabled PDA.

It was an insanely active scene for a while, with garbage content and recycled public domain materials comprising most of what was out there. A few corporate entities dabbled in .MOBI, giving the scene a nascent, up-and-coming feeling reminiscent of the .COM movement of the mid 1990s.

It never fully caught on, but what really killed .MOBI was when Apple put the .COM button on its iPhone. There is no way they would have chosen a .MOBI button over a .COM as the former was still something of a novelty. By sticking to the traditional .COM (still considered the premiere top-level domain) content providers adapted in what I think is the more sensible and elegant way: by developing templating systems and device-recognition switches that delivered the same content in customized ways depending on what device was used. In time even this has become something of a needless flourish, implemented for buzzword compliance more than necessity, as devices are increasingly able to render desktop-ready HTML as one would see it on a computer.

On that note, I’m outta here.

 

 <br /