Here’s my motherfuckin’ company’s website, MANOVERBOARD, transliterated into the shiznit via Gizoogle. I couldn’ta said it better:

MANOVERBOARD: Web N Print Design N Dippin’.

MANOVERBOARD. Fo’-fo’ desert eagle to your motherfuckin’ dome: Web n print design, accessible websites, logos, corporate identities, n brand’n. I started yo shit and I’ll end yo’ shit.
MANOVERBOARD
• develops accessible, elegant n powerful websites tizzle bring thugz togetha
• builds corporate identities n printed materials tizzy bring thugz bizzle
• provides website analysis n Web design steppin’ that bring thugz results

I’ve often thought that micropayments to bloggers would be a very helpful, and perhaps even lucrative, method to keep blogs afloat. I’m fascinated by a new payment system called IndieKarma that I learned about through Jason.
In a nutshell, IndieKarma allows website visitors to donate tiny amounts of money (well, one American cent) to a blog that accepts IndieKarma funds every time that visitor visits. It’s kind of a nice, simple, and elegant system in theory; you pay for content that you like, read and want to continue reading. Jason does the math:

Financially, if a reader visits a site 60 times a month (which is not that unusual for weblogs), that’s $0.60/mo. or $7.20/yr…the price of a couple lattes at Starbucks. If you’ve got 1000 people who read your site that are signed up through IndieKarma, that’s $7200 per year, a sizable chunk of change.

I’m tempted to try it or at least learn more about it. But there’s something about it that reminds me of the old, wild, West Web and the e-money that many companies tried to sell us poor suckers. Remember Whoopie Goldberg and Flooz? (In February of 2000, $27 million was invested in the company in second-round funding. How about Flooz’s competitor, the lovely Beenz? Boy, did they screw up.
I don’t mean, in any way, to put bad Karma on IndieKarma. The idea is sound, if not quite brilliant, and, if IndieKarma can gain enough subscribers and bloggers, many folks will benefit.

I read the recent post by Veen about the pathetic impossibility of visiting the new Banana Republic website on Apple’s Safari browser. Amazingly, some company got paid much money to make a broken website for a large multi-national. I wanted to comment on Veen’s post but he had, alas, turned comments off. Here was mine, for the (or my) record:

This all brings up something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Back in the baby days of the Web, some good soul kept track of which sites were designed by which companies, agencies, or individuals. It was a way to check in on the competition, look for good work and possibly good employers, and generally get a sense of what was being done (and how) on the Web. It would be great to know what boneheaded firm was paid good money to create a website that not only excludes paying visitors but makes claims to standards compliance and lies. This isn’t really a request for “outing” as it is to keep the Web development business open and transparent as possible.

It’s a few days very late but Amazon.com is 10 years old. That makes me feel about 40, which so happens to be almost how old I am.
The Web truly is a young thing. It lives everywhere and is reckless and dangerous and thrives among the best (e.g. Wikipedia) and worst (Total Information Awareness, e.g.) of us. The Web shows that it’s possible for any schmuck to design or write for ebooks and that commerce is possible among breathing people without exchanging breaths. The Web is both old and new, shaped by our perceptions of quickly passing time and even more quickly fleeing electrons, prepared to submit to our little whims, whether fetishistic, opportunistic, receptive, or attavistic.
In any case, I uncynically applaud Amazon.com for taking the pounding of millions of keystrokes and landing in the spotlight for its success, longevity, and profitability.

I found out today through Airbag that Design-in-Flight has shut its doors. This is truly a sad day for the Web, for Web designers, Web developers, and online folks everywhere. For a small fee, Andy Arikawa produced a beautiful PDF magazine that focused on Web standards, productivity, design tricks and tools and it was illustrated lusciously and elegantly. It was the first (and I guess only) PDF magazine that I had (very) hopes for. I still haven’t found the answer to the qustion “Why?” yet but when I do, I’ll try to post it.
I know what it’s like to start a publication and end it. The work that goes into producing a regular periodical is voluminous and never-ending. I edited a small zine called Soup Magazine back in the early 1990s when the desktop publishing revolution was alive. We took ads and I eventually had a small staff of friends to help produce the thing. It eventually sold in Tower Records throughout the U.S. and Europe and got picked up by Printed Matter as well as many other small print distributors. After leaving for a year to live in Poland, the zine couldn’t get rescusitated and it failed. [It’s hard to believe but Printed Matter still has some of these issues available!
I also found through Hicks that Joshua Ink is no longer writing. I don’t know his work well but there seems to be a big community of folks that are missing him.
These things always come in threes, right? I’m going to take it as a good sign that there’s no apparent three there.
[Note: The last DIF issue can be downloaded now (July 15, 2005). I have a small piece in it.]

Every once in a while, it’s good for me to purge some pent-up links that I’ve been keeping too close. [I know these last posts have been short, but so am I.]

• A new site called Tortured by Tyson by our friends at PETA. Warning: Very graphic imagery. Happy dinner!
• A kind of funny website that recreates the Windows desktop and is built entirely with XHTML/CSS. It makes me happy that this is not what I look at every day on my desktop.
• Happy Healthy Summer for kids and those who like kids.
• Amazon’s Google, A9 Beta. The beta is better because it’s cleaner. But I emailed them that they should change the light purple background color of the site because it’s acts like a soporofic.

Dear Readers:
My apologies for not writing to you earlier. I’ve been swamped trying to put the finishing touches on my latest project — a new stock photography website I’ve been developing with a few others over the past 8 months. We’re very close to launching, perhaps even a few days away.
The temporary site of The Art Bureau has been up for a while and you can sign up for launch information there, if you like.
I’ll be writing about websites, Larry Clark, Schiller’s Liquor Bar, and La Caverna shortly.
Thank you for your time, patience, and indulgence.
Sincerely,
Andrew.

I’m writing a post about the politics and social construction of websites. It’s taking a little while.
In the meantime, I thought I would mention a few sites that continue to astound me because of their intuitive design, organic information architecture, innovative interfaces, and unique use of typefaces. Many of these are using advanced CSS to push the boundaries of the experience. And these aren’t even in Flash, which I’m finding increasingly unnecessary for 98% of website projects at this point.
Enjoy…small to large:

• One of the most beautiful type treatments on an HTML site I’ve ever seen.
• A competitor but oh, what a good one.
• Okay, another competitor.
• Google’s Gmail: the interface is so insanely bright throughout.
• Amazon’s highly entertaining and customizable search engine. Check out its “Discover” section which recommends sites based on your interest

A dead website is the great unspoken on the Web and among Web audiences. Registerting domain names, getting hosting, designing a site, building a site, developing a site, redirecting a site, scaling a site, integrating a site, redesigning a site: these are all fun, pretty, happy terms. But the truth of the matter is that websites are very temporary objects on the fluid Web and have half-lives just like every combustible thing.
They are born, they grow, they are loved by a few, they communicate a few things, and then they go on to die. The death of a website generally goes unmarked, unnoticed, and unrecognized. A dead website is no longer a valuable enterprise but a historical record, a fiercely marked arena of time. A website that has died gets no funeral, no sendoff, no eulogy, and often gets no final words. Websites seem to die a strange death – they are both very public and very private organisms, created by a living few for a living audience and when they pass, the act of viewing them or reflecting on them is inherently solitary. I’ve yet to see a blog about dead sites, but I’m sure there could be one.
No, this is not farewell.
But I’ve noticed quite a few (quite good) blogs that I once read, which are no longer alive, including Dean Allen’s Textism, Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Mark, and Charles Hartmans’ eponymous weblog.
I suppose there’s at least one other interesting thing about website death, though, that differs from that of humans: they can be resurrected.

It was a weekend spent mostly inside, except for tonight when we ventured into the cold yonder to have dinner at a friends home about 18 blocks away. Boy, was it cold but it felt fine.
Being indoors and having time to explore new sites led me to the new PBS Kids Go! site which features a large section called Advertising Tricks. It’s pure media training for young kids, with interactive features like “Create Your Own Ads” and “Design a Cereal Box.” It’s impressive that, with the government now funding public relations for its political programming, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is funded by taxpayers, has seeded this smart educational enterprise. I hope it lasts and I say that not cynically but with real hope that the site has both legs and feet. Hey kids, the perfect burger for the camera lens is made with brown food coloring, Superglue, and glycerin!