Poet Ponders the Digital

MarsEdit and Blogger are not cooperating, and I’m uncertain if I will use MarsEdit past the trail period. Currently, what the application offers me is a way to compose drafts outside of Apple Mail, but it isn’t offering me much more than that because I use Google’s blogging platform. Annoyances that require using a menu choice, instead of the Option pane: Date should be included with “Post Status” for scheduling purposes. Enclosure settings should be within the editor window, along with Title. Bullet lists should be a default formatting choice, as they are common. More serious annoyances: Paragraphs require two blank lines, even in Rich Text mode, or you must clean the code within Blogger. Images do not function properly, no matter how many experiments I have tried.  I’m not saving much time if I still need to carefully format a post in Blogger and insert images from within Google’s interface. MarsEdit prefers WordPress, without a doubt. For Blogger, MarsEdit ...

MarsEdit (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Mailing posts to blogs, a practice I adopted in 2005, allows a blogger like me to store copies of draft posts within email. If Blogger , WordPress, or the blogging platform of the moment crashes or for some other reason eats my posts, at least I have the original drafts of most entries. I find having such a nicely organized archive convenient — much easier than remembering to archive posts from Blogger or WordPress to my computer. With this post, I am testing MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software based on recent reviews, including an overview on 9to5Mac . Composing posts an email offers a fast way to prepare draft blogs, but the email does not always work well if you want to include basic formatting, images, and links to online resources. Submitting to Blogger via Apple Mail often produced complex HTML with unnecessary font and paragraph formatting styles. Problems with rich text led me to convert blog entries to plaintext in Apple Mail ...

The following timeline of typography milestones is part of the digital companion materials to Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms published by Parlor Press.

Lower case ‘a’ from Adobe Caslon Pro, superposed onto some guides. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Asked to summarize my research projects... Curiously, beyond the theses and dissertation, all my work is in economics of media and narrative. I ask what works and why when offering stories to audiences. What connects with an audience and can we model what audiences want from narratives? (Yes, you can model data on narratives and what "sells" and what wins awards and what nobody wants.) Yet, my degree research projects all relate to design of writing spaces, as knowing what works is also key to knowing what could be "sold" to users. MA: How poor LMS UI/UX design creates online spaces that hinder the writing process and teacher mentoring of students. Also: The cost of LMS design and compliance with legal mandates for usability. Ph.D: The experiences of special needs students in online settings, from commercial spaces to games to learning spaces and which space...

Original 1984 Macintosh desktop (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) You look at the screen. You wonder what is wrong. The program or app does what it should do, but for some reason you don't like to use the software. Something feels wrong  with the application.  I have been trying WriterDuet ( https://writerduet.com ) and for the longest time I couldn't pin down why I didn't like the application compared to Final Draft or Screenwriter. Technically, the program does what it should and has some excellent collaboration features. But I don't enjoy using it.  I used to love Screenwriter ( http://www.screenplay.com ) and eagerly await version 6.5 for the Macintosh. Version 6.x has felt like a partial port (it is) to OS X and macOS for some time. I know the problem is that the "widgets" used for the user interface are not Apple's widgets for the current operating systems. It's slightly annoying, but I still like Screenwriter. In my ideal world, 6.5 is ...

Specimen of the typeface Comic Sans. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Personally, I support everyone being able to type and read in whatever typefaces individuals prefer. If you like Comic Sans , then change the font while you type or read online content. If you like Helvetica , use that. The digital world is not print. You can change typefaces . You can change their sizes. You can change colors. There is no reason to argue over what you use to type or to read as long as I can use typefaces that I like. Now, as a design researcher? I'll tell you that type matters a lot to both the biological act of reading and the psychological act of constructing meaning. Statistically, there are "better" and "worse" type for conveying messages. There are also typefaces that are more legible and more readable. Sometimes, legibility does not help readability, either, as a type with overly distinct letters (legibility) can hinder word shapes and decoding (readability). ...