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I finally got the Froyo (Android 2.2) update pushed to my Nexus One today, and I noticed digital zoom as an option in the new Camera app. I ran an experiment by placing this ad down on the counter, and standing in the same place taking photos at 2x, 1.5x, and 1x digital zoom.
I finally got tired of the hassle and hours it took me to update my WordPress.org-powered self-hosted versions of two different blogs–danielgreene.com and smithersgreene.net. Trying to upgrade my blogs to WordPress 3.0 was the last straw.
I’m a guy who started writing his own HTML and CSS in 1996; in fact, I was one of the first handful of brave ones on the Internet to style valid HTML with CSS knowing that most browsers couldn’t handle it. After all, what did I have to lose? Little old me with his personal website.
This was a decade before Flickr and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter allowed you to post content with ease and let them take care of the code, and years before every major website was written in structural HTML and styled with CSS. This was back when you had to either have a self-hosted website or something like AOL Hometown Web pages. This was when “Web Designers” would charge you an arm-and-a-leg for a page and a couple of links. I was okay with the idea that, if I wanted a site that used proper HTML (without proprietary structural markup) and CSS, I had to get an ISP to host my own website. And I had to write all my own HTML & CSS.
Things have changed in the past few years. Even with WordPress.org, I had more freedom to blog without worrying about the coding. When I didn’t have to worry about updating WordPress and editing .htaccess pages and PHP files, it worked great. But I hated it when I would break my site when trying unsuccessfully to upload new versions of the blogging platform software. I thought, “Why can’t it be more like posting content to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or YouTube? I can’t break those sites. There must be an easier way.”
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It’s been such a headache for me to manage my WordPress.org-powered blog that I’m thinking of moving it over to WordPress.com. I didn’t realize until recently that I could even have it all on danielgreene.com. I read this article called WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org tonight, and I realized that, on WordPress.org, none of the Pros are helping me and all of the Cons are hurting me, whereas on WordPress.com, none of the Cons would hurt me and all of the Pros would help me. I’m not a PHP programmer nor do I really want to hire one to manage my site for me. I freak every time I have to update from one WordPress software version to another. Automatic updates always hang. Manual updates are a pain. With WordPress.com it’s all taken care of, and I could focus solely on what I really love to do, which is write and share media. The terms of service for WordPress.com forbid ads, but I don’t earn more than maybe $100 a year in Google AdSense ad revenue on danielgreene.com anyway. With the money I’d lose, I’d gain time— and peace of mind! And the few “legacy” pages I have, such as my Style Sheets Demo Page, while pioneering in its day, hardly seems relevant anymore. I could probably even put some of that CSS into a WordPress page anyway.
What do you think? Any reason why I shouldn’t turn danielgreene.wordpress.com into danielgreene.com and move my blog over here?
I ordered the Nexus One Car Dock the day after it was released, and it arrived today by FedEx Ground. I put it in my car tonight to see how the car dock, Car Home, speakerphone, etc. worked. I’m happy I got the Car Dock, though I do wish the other Android apps like Phone and Contacts would go into landscape mode, because that’s the way I like to view my Google Maps GPS navigation.
I learned from the movie Helvetica that the reason Arial is nearly identical to Helvetica is that Microsoft didn’t want to pay license fees to distribute the Helvetica font so they hired Monotype to modify Linotype’s Helvetica slightly. They just made sure to keep the same font metrics so that a document written in Helvetica would have the same layout and pagination in Arial and vice versa.
But I don’t always understand why there are other fonts that are nearly identical but with different font metrics and/or line spacing; for instance, why are Monotype Corsiva and Apple Chancery so similar? Is it because Apple wanted their own copyright on a font similar to Monotype Corsiva? And why are Bordeaux Roman Bold LET and Monotype Onyx so similar? Is it because Microsoft commissioned Monotype to create Onyx in 1992 after LET created Bordeaux Roman Bold in 1990? Or is there just a “me too” factor involved, in which each foundry wants a product to fulfill similar demands?
I’ve spent some time looking at the differences and similarities, and I’ve noticed that Bordeaux Roman Bold has ligatures and a more extended character repertoire than Onyx, though Onyx is a bit bolder and easier on the eyes. Also, I like the tighter line spacing of Onyx. So it’s a hard to choose a favorite between Bordeaux Roman Bold and Onyx. It’s easy to pick Apple Chancery over Monotype Corsiva because Apple Chancery has a beautiful set of of both common and rare ligatures, more calligraphic letters (especially the slashed dot on the lowercase i), and a much larger character repertoire than Corsiva. When it comes to extended characters, Times New Roman beats Times, but I’ll choose Times almost every time because of its pretty ligatures. If I needed to format a text with rarer characters, though, I would choose Times New Roman. As with the choice between any two similar fonts, it comes down to the application— how many extended characters do you need for what you want to write?
And speaking of fonts whose names have “new” (or “neue”) in them, I’ve found that a “new” version of a font doesn’t always have more characters than the original. While Times New Roman and Courier New have more characters than Times and Courier, Helvetica Neue has a much smaller repertoire of characters than Helvetica. But then Helvetica Neue has all those lovely weights and widths, so it all depends…
Do you know more about the history behind fonts that are nearly identical? If so, please leave a comment and share the knowledge. Thanks!
Daniel Greene 