blog I have a bifurcated personality. Not a split personality, which implies a division, but a personality that has forked from a common point of origin. For a long time I lived in denial and lurched between one identity and the other, never quite inhabiting either, depressed by my inability to cohere. Now I embrace the bifurcation and glow with the enlightenment that comes from knowing that the idea of a personality is itself a sham.
The word personality derives from the Latin word persona, meaning mask. According to John Gray inStraw Dogs, it is only since the Renaissance (with the self-scrutiny epitomized by Montaigne and Shakespeare) that human beings have thought of themselves as have coherent personalities. Before then they were other-conscious, nature-conscious, and much less self-conscious.
Modern capitalism seeks easy, consumable narratives populated by coherent, two-dimensional personalities. After commodifying the material world, capitalism commodifies our ideas of ourselves. Those who define themselves and who fill a niche are rewarded, those who are awkward and difficult to categorize are neglected.
I tried and failed to swim against the tide. I tried egolessness and it left me withdrawn, despairing in a world full of brash morons. As a compromise, I decided to bifurcate my personality into the part of me that is socially and professionally acceptable, and the part of me that isn’t.
One side of my personality, Neil Scott, is a web designer, focused on producing elegant solutions to interesting problems. The other phantasm of my mind, Neil English, is a dandy dilettante writing and performing and playing, not caring what other people think. His most notable contribution to the world is this website and a weekly podcast, The Spirit of the Staircase, which he does with the comedian Antony Murray.
Neil English is liberated from the usual anxieties about what is appropriate. He has no parents, no wife, no kids, no relations at all. He is not responsible for anything, he doesn’t work, he doesn’t have to do the dishes. His life is all play.
Welcome.
26 Aug 2010
blog Taoism is a philosophy of freedom. The taoist exchanges rigidity and planning for mindfulness and creative idling, accepting that all we can really do is breathe, relax, and live in the moment. You can encourage yourself to adopt good habits, but habits can’t be forced.
Modern neuroscience shows us that the brain is plastic and is moulded every minute by the things you do. All you can hope is that you do more of the things that make your brain more interesting, rather than the things that destroy your ability to focus and pay attention.
So, as a reminder to myself, I thought it might be worth outlining my ideal productivity system. The act of creating a system may seem counter-productive, especially when you factor in the stress you get from neglected routines and relapsing into bad habits, but hopefully these guidelines are fluid enough to get you into the zone without making you guilty.
1. Be mindful
The foundation of my system is mindfulness, the ability to be in the moment and to focus on doing one thing at a time. Mindfulness and focus are the sharp edge that make your mental knife slice through the tasks of the day. Distraction leads to blunt thoughts and procrastination.
2. Do one thing at a time.
Distraction comes when you try to do more than one thing at a time. Close everything down except that one thing that you are working on. Set aside time for processing your inboxes, for thinking and planning and for following flights of fancy, don’t let these things interrupt your task.
3. Be realistic
Stress comes whe you try to achieve too much in too short a time. Do thing at a time, breathe, and make sure that your task list doesn’t overwhelm you.
4. Get things out of your head
If you have a thought, write it down and put it in a place where you can deal with it at a convenient point in the future.
5. Check inboxes once per day
To be mindful it helps if you don’t check your inboxes (email, facebook, twitter) more than once per day. For me, 4pm is perfect, just before you finish up work for the day. Any more than this and you get into the trap of constantly responded to other people’s requests, which leads to them expecting instant responses for urgent tasks rather than doing important tasks.
6. Know what done looks like
How can you do something if you don’t know what done looks like. Getting those projects defined, getting a good sense of completion, is the difference between success and failure. Visualize what completion looks like and the challenges that you’ll face.
7. Use the pomodoro technique
Make an agreement with yourself to focus on one task at a time for 25 minutes and then have a five minute break. This allows for significant work to be done and ensure that you relax.
8. Sense of Direction
The best way to clarify whether what you are doing is actually worth doing is to set goals of outlining where you want to be in the future. For instance, when I’m dead I want to be remembered as someone who was full of bright ideas, who got things done defeating resistance, producing elegant solutions, who was knowledgeable about design, generous with his gifts, got the best out of people, and who lived a good life. I want to be a freelance designer, doing elegant designs for the web and mobile devices by collaborating with other designers/developers, producing great little apps that make people’s lives better.
9. Healthy
Make sure that you eat well, exercise often, and don’t drink too much.
10. Set a daily goal
Make a decision about something you want to achieve that day and outline how it is going to be done, then do it.
13 Aug 2010
blog As a way of catching up with the Content Strategy bandwagon, I have been researching what it actually means and what are the implications for me and the people I work with. What follows are some serious and glib definitions with relevant links to the key texts on Content Strategy.
Content Strategy attempts to solve the problem of no one taking responsibility for content.
According to Rachel Lovinger Content Strategy aims to make content “relevant to people, useful to machines, efficient to produce and comprehensive”.
According to Kristina Halvorson, Content Strategy asks ‘”What’s the point?” and “Who cares?”‘ about content.
Content Strategy can be broken down into stages (see the Contentini.com lifecycle)
Content Strategy is the logical outcome of Google’s preference for websites that churn out content.
Content Strategy is what happens when businesses can no longer connect with the needs of their customers.
Content Strategy is Information Architecture defined by Editors rather than Librarians.
Content Strategy is cynicism towards web users, similar to the cynicism towards music fans shown by Simon Cowell and his ilk.
Content Strategy acknowledges that whilst the web isn’t 95% typography, it is 100% content.
Content Strategy defines what the hell the content is supposed to be doing.
Content Strategy creates a series of procedures that everyone quietly ignores.
Content Strategy incorporates thinking about the editorial strategy, the SEO strategy, and the CMS process.
Content Strategy is “the next big thing.”
Content Strategy rationalizes the horror companies feel when they look at Twitter and Facebook.
Content Strategy uses “words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences.” (Rachel Lovinger)
Content Strategy is “missing the point entirely. Nobody cares about content. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, hey, I should read some content today.” (37signals)
Content Strategy very occasionally, produces text that you actually want to read.
02 Aug 2010
blog In a world overflowing with opportunities and distractions to do nothing is a radical act.
Of course, it is impossible to do absolutely nothing and still be alive. Here are some of the things I do whilst doing nothing:
Breathing, eating, thinking, dreaming, walking, drinking, playing, watching, observing, reading, swimming, running, climbing, fucking, making tea, smelling, cooking, rambling, ambling, hurting, smiling, decaying, spitting, dancing, resting, planning, learning, sucking, losing, winning, dribbling, slurping, lying, rushing, sitting, slouching, stumbling, hiding, talking, touching, balancing, diving, hopping, laughing, shitting, pissing, fighting, crying, licking, kissing, holding, sleeping, speaking, crouching, frowning, worrying… I could go on.
Doing nothing is incredibly difficult. No matter how much you try to avoid it, something always comes to fill the empty space. Distractions loom large in the distance, like Sirens waiting for you to smash into the rocks of useless activity. Even when you are absolutely determined to do nothing at all and clear your mind of the incessant noise that is modern culture, you inevitably start wanting to reflect on the experience and write stuff like this.
Doing nothing, or at least aspiring towards doing nothing has been a revelatory experience. The more you do in life, the more you dilute your attention. The more distractions you have, the less engaged in life you can be. People are living diluted lives. Society is engaged in a war, a war against boredom.
Doing Nothing is a way of becoming mindful about the time you waste. It acknowledges the fact that it is better to do one thing well than a thousand things badly, whilst also avoiding the guilt you get when you focus on only one thing.
Mindfulness is the ability to be completely in the moment. To see and taste and smell and touch and feel with your whole being. Mindful people are egoless. They don’t get anxious because they don’t think beyond or below the present moment. Mindfulness isn’t for people who want to be brilliant, super high achievers, but it can help you do feel more together, more engaged, less impulsive, and less controlled by moods and negativity.
The corrolary to mindfulness is flow, or “being in the zone”. The miracle of flow is that it doesn’t feel like you are doing anything — when you are so involved in an activity that you lose yourself completely in it you ‘wake up’, as it were, you come to your senses and look back and realise that you’ve completed a lot of work. Doing nothing means doing nothing effortfully. It is very difficult to achieve this without going through the learning process.
I think about accumulation. For instance, did you know that if you spend five minutes per day doing something, anything, it is the equivalent of 30.4 hours per year. And two hours of television a day is the equivalent of 30 days solid a year. All these distractions add up.
Doing nothing shouldn’t be confused with being lazy. Being lazy is quite an active state, full of largesse of the man who knows that he has things to do but can’t be bothered to do them. It is the state of resigned inefficiency, full of negativity about the things that you are forced to do.
You can tell we are approaching the end of Western civilization by the way that information has replaced knowledge as a valued commodity. This can be seen most tragically in the proliferation of quiz shows on TV, pub quizzes and quiz machines. It is in such places that your education goes to die.
We have more opportunities than ever before, but those opportunities come with a price. We have lost the ability to concentrate for any period of time without moving onto the next distraction, the require more engagement. There is a lack of peace and quiet.
It’s almost as if doing stuff is a way of diluting consciousness. Life is too raw and painful and real to be met without a series of filters. News and gossip is our way of avoiding reality.
To do nothing is to change everything, it is to go from somebody who looks to somebody who sees. So what do you see? You see the limits of your existence (ie the things that you absolutely have to do, such as breathing, eating, drinking, and fucking) as if for the first time, unburdened from the distractions that usually dilute your conscious attention. When you eat a grape you apprehend its true grape nature: the sheen of the skin, viscous texture of the pith, the astringency of the pip. You can focus on the present, rather than ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. By doing nothing you come to understand the true undiluted weight of the things you do.
27 Jul 2010
blog The universe is entropic, life becomes chaos and disorder unless it is properly maintained. Life is like a garden that, left untended, becomes suffocated with weeds. Hair grows, brain cells die, teeth decay, ideas stagnate, clothes develop holes, stomachs rumble, throats becomes parched — body, mind, and soul all fall into disrepair without proper care.
Reducing entropy levels to a minimum is foundation of a happy life. And the best way of reducing entropy is to pay attention of all aspects of your existence and ensure they are kept in harmony.
It is a long-term project, life. The seeds you plant today may take weeks to germinate, months to blossom, and years to reach their full potential. For those who don’t plant and cultivate their seed, just letting it spill wherever it may, life is random and disappointing. Random, because you have no control over what is going to emerge. Disappointing, because whatever does emerge has been neglected at the stage when it needed most attention. Also, those things which flourish without attention become so ubiquitous that people start calling them weeds.
With all this in mind, I have put together an A to Z of Entropy, a guide to avoid common entropic problems.
A to Z of Entropy
Addiction
When we are hungry, we eat. When we are thirsty, we drink. When we are horny, we fuck. The mind is built to “enjoy its pleasures” via the neurochemicals dopamine and serotonin. Unfortunately our desires have been perverted by advertising, addicting us us to junk food, caffeine and pornography. We are slaves to a brain that still lives as though the world weren’t overwhelmed with temptation. To avoid entropy, avoid modern culture.
Alcohol
Although it is ideal for social bonding it also makes you lethargic so try to limit consumption to once a week.
Animality
Don’t deny it, but don’t become a slave to it either. Work with it, not against it.
Anxiety
So much of our energy is taken up in worrying about the future or mulling over the past. The future doesn’t exist and you can’t do anything about the past, so focus on the present moment. Be mindful and anxiety will fade away.
Appearance
Judging by appearances is sensible, it is a shortcut to understanding. Think of your appearance as a quick way of telling people about yourself.
Asceticism
Should be used as a palate cleanser, a way to appreciate pleasures without becoming jaded by them.
Balance
You don’t need to be a taoist to appreciate when things are in harmony. To incorporate balance in my own life, I have created a list of ten areas which I think are important: inluding friendship, focus, mindfulness, being organised, and health. I test myself against each one to make sure it is not being neglected.
Bath or Shower
Baths are contemplative, ruminatory, and far less violent than a shower. For this reason, they should be used sparingly.
Beards
They stop you having to shave everyday, which is useful. Avoid those stupid beards that require shaving to keep neat.
Blogging
Some people disdain blogging because it encourages sloppy, unedited writing, but as a way of connecting people with niche interests it is excellent.
Body
There is nothing without it. You are your body. Embrace it.
Breakfast
In Germany people have breakfast parties, a civilized way of enjoying company without the alcoholic entropy of an evening meal. And you have the rest of the day ahead of you.
Caffeine
It has been scientifically proven that heavy consumers of caffeine areinured to its effects, making them more tired and grouchy in the mornings. Save it for special occasions.
Capitalism
Capitalism is debauchery, abandoning all principles to satisfy desires. What we need is a regulated capitalism, ordered by government and society, just as the body works best when it is ruled by the mind. Feudalism is where principle overrides pleasure. It allows for narrow but intense satisfaction. Capitalism spreads pleasure until they are suitably bland.
Carbohydrates
Foods like pasta exhaust the body by filling it with sugar. Eat complex carbs like quinoa instead.
Change
Life is in the chase: it moves! Rules don’t move. Rules remain the same. Embrace change in order to embrace life.
Clarity
To gain clarity, first get yourself in the moment, then write down the problem you want to solve, use different perspectives, then make confident decisions.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is the key factor in much modern anxiety. Dissonance comes when an idea conflicts with your sense of self. There are two ways of dealing with dissonance: resolve it or ignore it, neither is perfect.
Confidence
Denial, delay, and procrastination are signs that you lack confidence in your decision making.
Decadence
When I’ve been ill, I’ve been thinking about dandyism and how the dandies – with their refinement – are the ones who understand that life needs to be constantly refreshed and attended to if it isn’t to decay.
Declutter
Every additional possession weighs you down by its presence. Remove the extraneous and the sentimental.
Diet
Dieting doesn’t work. Any system that requires you to adopt abnormal and irregular patterns of behaviour may provide short-term gains but ultimately results in reversion to the norm. Even if you suddenly became lithe and alive with your new routine, eudaemonologists tell us that happiness levels always return to the baseline. To be healthy, you have to work within the norms — tweaking your routines to remove a little of the bad and add more of the good.
Email
One thing that royal mail has over email is that it comes but once a day. Check email once a day to get the same thrill.
Entropy
Entropy is a measure of the energy loss in a closed system.
Escapism
The more you try to escape your problems, the more they will come to dominate you. Face up and move on.
Failure
There is no such thing as failure, just feedback.
Finances
Keep your finances in check, spend less than you earn, and have enough money so that you don’t have to think about money.
Fitness Faking
Fitness faking things. Mind desires tasty food and luscious bodies. The body gets fast food and pornography.
Food
Processing food is one of the most energy consuming activities that body has to do. Eat light foods wherever possible.
How to Live
The question of How to Live consumes an awful amount of psychical energy so don’t ruminate too much.
Junk Food
Abusing the body with junk food disrupts the digestive processes. The liver and kidneys become less efficient.
Kaizen
The Japanese idea of gradual improvement, based on the idea that it is better to improve a million small things than one big thing.
Loose Ends
The more loose ends you have, the less effective you will be. Finish projects, break them down into sub-projects if you have to, and make sure they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Then move on to the next project.
Meaning of Life
The meaning of life is something we confer on the world – not something that is conferred on us.
Meat
It doesn’t take much thought to see how eating dead things could be entropic. All the pain, confinement, and suffering of these animals may not show when wrapped up in clingfilm, but it is there for anyone who chooses to think.
Meditation
Only if we do nothing occasionally can we understand what doing something means.
Memory
Life’s trajectory is based on the internal narrative we tell ourselves. Change the story and you change the future. Forget about the past if it is holding you back.
Negativity
Focusing on entropy is inherently self-defeating. By focussing on the negative, how can you expect to find the positive?
News
Our brains are attuned to human suffering, but not 24 hours a day. Avoid.
Not Thinking
Superficially, it may seem obvious that not thinking is a good way to avoid the problems of entropy but this is a short-term solution. The key is not to do too much ruminating.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
The opposite of entropy is OCD, which attempts to put too much order on the world. Combat with Wabi Sabi.
Pleasure
Always a by-product of activity not an end in itself.
Possessions
Only a means to an end.
Present Moment
This is where everything happens, so ensure that you make the most of it. Focus your entire being on the moment.
Prohibitions
If American puritanism has taught us anything it is that prohibitions are not effective. Instead of creating rules of what you shouldn’t do, practice doing the things that you should do.
Quietude
Learn to enjoy being alone and in silence, quietening the chattering monkey brain.
Rock Bottom
The good thing about hitting rock bottom is that it gives you a foundation.
Routine
I like routines, they force me to do things that I wouldn’t ordinarily do (like learn Spanish whilst walking to work). Nevertheless they can cause a lot of cognitive dissonance, especially when you’re tired. Best to try not to do too much at once. What destroys routines? Tiredness, disillusion, laziness, distraction.
Self-Consciousness
The main difference between self-consciousness and mindfulness is that self-consciousness is obsessed with the inner workings of its own mind, whereas mindfulness is obsessed with the external world. They are antithetical.
Siesta
The extent to which sleep is neglected in the modern world is astonishing. The post-prandial nap is rarely granted to the modern worker and it shows. Siestas can be difficult to get right, but a good one sets you up to enjoy the rest of the day.
Sleep
Lack of sleep causes of much of the entropy that afflicts modern urban life. Albert Einstein is said to have taken eleven hours a night when working on a particularly difficult problem. Sleep, quality untroubled sleep, is where the unconscious most of its work. Without it we are like monkeys, chattering away about nothing.
Social Networking
Provide the drip drip of distraction, eroding your ability to think.
Tidiness
Tidiness is good when people deal with decay straight away rather than letting it fester.
Wabi Sabi
Allow decay to take place then it is in the name of beauty.
Why?
Ask why you want to do something. Then ask why again. And again. Keep asking it until you get to the kernel of your motivation.
26 Jul 2010
blog The Picture of Dorian Gray is a melodramatic gothic novel populated by flat characters with overheated emotions. It is then the perfect vehicle from which to deliver clever epigrams about to how to live. Through the author substitute, Lord Henry Wotton, and his errant Pygmalion, Dorian Gray, something approaching an archetype of dandyism emerges. It is all there: the experimental nature of the dandy’s existence, his mode of dressing, his individuality, his uselessness, his sang-froid, his attention to detail, and, most importantly, his devotion to the self.
Here I illustrate some choice quotes with some thoughts of my own.
Self-Development
The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.
The dandy is, above all, the man who cultivates himself. He treats mind and body like a walled garden in which to plant curious flowers in neat, weed-free patterns. To become wholly oneself without needing to impress anyone other than yourself or feeling hemmed in by society’s mores — this is the goal of the dandy.
Anti-conformism
Human nature is plastic, look at the cultures of the world, what incredible variety! It is absurd, which such possibilities, to seek conformity. This doesn’t mean that we should be selfish, it is rather conforming which is selfish, as Wilde explains in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type.
To develop the self is not, however, easy. You need to be prepared to think, to forego the distractions that entrance the masses and square who you are with who you want to be. It helps, of course, to be independently wealthy, like Dorian Gray, but don’t use lack of money as an excuse to neglect yourself.
Experimentation
He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
People who think too much about themselves tend to be awkward and self-conscious. They are incapable of being in the moment because they are too busy thinking about it. In order to live we need to train the senses to take everything in. We also have to experiment — to try new experiences and to receive new sensations. Never pass up the opportunity to taste a new dish or smell a new perfume. Undertake arbitrary experiments in living that show an entirely new aspect to existence. Above all, live in the moment and find pleasure wherever you may be — notice a new detail, see the riches of nature all around you:
Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.
Clothes
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The most common misconception about dandyism is that it is all about clothes, “a clothes-wearing philosophy”, as Carlyle calls it. No, the dandy’s manner of dressing is, as Lord Whimsy says “the tip of the iceberg” — it is the outward show of inner refinement. Dressing well is a silent display of one’s decision making processes — every sock shows a thought or a lack of thought. We are a compound of decisions, so make them well.
Ignorant people sometimes wonder if a system of thought which, like Dandyism, celebrates individuality doesn’t produce a kind of conformity of those that espouse it. This is like saying that using the same kind of fertilizer will produce the same plants. Individuality is in your DNA, literally, it is the process of dandyism that helps it to emerge from the safety of conformity.
Uselessness
I’m so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
How much more interesting the world would be if every artist manqué used their energies to develop their personalities rather than fill the world with dreary paintings and poetry! The dandy knows that their personality is more enduring and infinitely more interesting than most novels.
Sang-Froid
To become the spectator of one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life.
The paradox at the heart of dandyism is that it cultivates the self whilst dissociating from the ego. The ego is another outward sign of the inner refinement, it is the conscious mind shaped by a billion past decisions. The only way to escape from ego stagnation is to experiment and act. By more we act, the more we become who we are. The less you act, the more reduced your existence. Suffering comes from associating too deeply with the illusion of the ego, this prison you call a personality. Lose the ego and you escape the prison.
Attention to Detail
Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Inattentive people make poor valuations: they are the bourgeois fools who look at the label rather than the cut, they are the myopics for whom everything has to be new. By attending to the details, the dandy understands that existence is shaped by habit. If you can train yourself to be mindful when you make a pot of tea, it will be easier to be mindful elsewhere. To paraphrase Quentin Crisp: there is no point daydreaming about being a ballet dance if you’ve spent 20 years as pig farmer. By then, pigs are your style. So attend to the details now, not at some indeterminate point in the future.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the story of a man upon whom all the entropy of existence is suffered by a painting and not himself. It is the classic teenage novel, overflowing with the kind of deliciously paradoxical ideas that inflame the youthful imagination, filling it with possibilities. It legitimates the kind of self-experimentation and self-examination that the young love to indulge in. My own copy, read when I was seventeen, is full of biro underlinings and exclamation marks — attempts to etch in my mind the many exquisite (and generally sound) aphorisms of Lord Henry Wotton.
25 Jul 2010
blog The key concept of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s influential book, Nudge, is ‘libertarian paternalism’. This is the belief that while we may consider some choices are better than others it doesn’t mean you should impose them on everyone. We should instead become “choice architects” — using people’s inherent laziness to ensure they make socially beneficial decisions.
Take organ donation: no one should be forced to be organ donors, but you should have to opt out rather than opt in. By making opting in the default option, you save lives that would have been lost because of laziness.
These kind of ideas will be familiar to those who have read Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. By working with the mental model of your users, by being a ‘choice architect’ (that is understanding and working with the choices of your users), you make your user experience much more enjoyable.
For instance, a web designer should guide people through a journey without imposing one on them. They should use typography and content hierarchy to ensure that the most important messages/actions are done correctly. The opposite side of the equation is to make mistakes harder to make — the best example of this is making the cancel button less prominent than the submit button. This is great choice architecture.
Ideally, your web application will be familiar to the user immediately. They shouldn’t have to learn anything new unless it is absolutely necessary. There is nothing worse than forcing a user to learn a new navigation system every time they go to a website (see also DVD menu systems – who decided that that it would be a good idea to have to a different menu every time?). Use the best practice wherever possible and sensible.
Websites are often designed without any thought for the people actually using them. They are designed by developers and designers who have been working on them for months, they have a completely skewed perspective (similar to the Econs in Nudge). They have the spec and give the user options to make it work. Humans are biased and don’t always act rationally or make the best choice. To allow for this we need to do usability testing in order to show where people slip up. Or at least create personas to encourage designers and developers to think about what they are working on and for who.
24 Jul 2010
blog Each time I start a new WordPress project I find myself using the same set of plugins, so I decide to create a reference for myself and others.
Hyper Cache
Commonly considered the most effective caching plugin for WordPress.
Google XML Sitemaps
Creates an xml sitemap of all your posts and notifies search engines when you add a post.
WP DB Backup
All of your content is held in MySQL tables, so it is well worth automating the backup process. You can also backup images, themes, and plugins with WordPress Backup.
WP Minify
Crucial optimization to ensure Javascripts and CSS don’t waste bandwidth.
Improved Include Page
Super simple plugin to include a page anywhere you want it. Works well with one page sites, like my wedding site.
wp-Typography
Project to add intelligent character replacement to ensure that your site has the very best ampersands and guillemets.
Akismet
Faultless protection from spammy nasties.
Clean-Contact
Contact forms come and go on WordPress, breaking and suffering from vulnerabilities, but I’ve never had any problems with Clean-Contact.
Redirection
If you ever change your mind about your url or your url structure, this plugin is a lifesaver. It provides 301 links and statistics on the number of hits.
Exec-PHP
Sometimes you just have to write PHP in your posts, this plugin does the job.
Broken Link Checker
Helps prevent user frustration by testing your links to ensure that they all work.
23 Jul 2010
blog Definitions of dandyism have always seemed somehow inadequate. I used to think that this was because dandy’s individuality causes him to spurn anything that appears generic. However, having read Wikipedia’s article on the usage of the suffix -ism, it turns out there’s a more interesting explanation.
Apparently, the humble ism contains multitudes. It can be used to describe belief systems like socialism, an irrational bias for or against something, like racism, artistic movements like Cubism and Impressionism, or diseases like botulism. Dandyism refuses to fit into any of these neat pigeonholes; rather, each form of ism describes a different type of dandy.
Philosophical dandyism (comparable -ism: pacifism)
A philosophical dandy is someone who believes in dandyism as a principle by which to conduct their entire life. He is someone whose dandyist strictures permeate every aspect of his thought and action.
Baudelaire defined the dandy as one who elevates æsthetics to a living religion:
“These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking …. Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.”
Political dandyism (comparable -ism: socialism)
The political dandyist fights for the rights of the people to wear whatever they like, as long as it is at least seventy years out of date. We have seen this, ironically, in The Chap’s Children in Tweed campaign, which involved a gang of pseudo-Dandies visiting a council estate in order to hand out jackets and trilbies. Extrapolate this a little further and you are not far from a political movement, albeit one which would do little more than pun on the word ‘party’. Suffice to say that, as soon as dandyism becomes political, it has lost its way.
Artistico-Historical Dandyism (comparable -ism: cubism)
This is the most vulgar and disreputable form of dandyism. It is also, alas, the one which is most popular imagination. It views dandyism as a moment in time, as though it were a brief artistic movement. Typically the chosen time is either Wilde’s fin-de-siecle or Brummell’s Regency period, both of which were were of no small interest, to be sure, but of little use for modern dandies.
Dandyism is, in its Artistico-Historical mode, associated with monocles, fob-watches, top hats, starched collars, and other historically specific excrescences. It is dandyism without the dandy spirit.
Character Dandyism (comparable -ism: heroism)
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle teases out a lovely image of the golden mean to use as a template upon which to build your character. Far from being mediocre, the golden mean represents the pinnacle of behaviour. For instance, between rashness and cowardice comes heroism, which is as distant from rashness and cowardice as they are from each other. In this sense, dandyism is the golden mean between slovenliness and pedantry. The character dandy is at pains to avoid both.
Process Dandyism (comparable -ism: voyeurism)
In the same way as one can partake in a spot of voyeurism (a stolen glance across a park) without being a voyeur, perhaps one can also enjoy the delicate fruits of dandyism without being a dandy. Dandyism can be something that is done unconsciously without going through the effort of having had to think about it beforehand.
Conditional or State Dandyism (comparable -ism: pauperism)
The opposite of process dandyism is conditional or state dandyism. These are dandies who don’t make any effort whatsoever and yet are effortlessly dandiacal. For the conditioned dandy there is no question of not being a dandy, it is something that has been bred into them. Edward VII is perhaps the most obvious example.
Disease dandyism (comparable -ism: botulism)
The age of elegance emerged at a crucial point in British history — revolutionary democracy is abroad in France and bourgeois romanticism is spurning the enlightenment at home. Dandyism is thus an attempt at aristocracy in an age of democracy. Disease dandyism takes this rejection of the bourgeois a step further. It becomes necessary to shock the bourgeoisie: taking drugs and fucking whores like late Sebastian Horsley. The descent into an underworld sounds rather appealing, but it quickly degenerates for the following 3 reasons:
1) the bourgeois get jaded rather quickly.
2) by defining yourself in opposition to such people you become enslaved to their opinion.
3) it is too easy.
Religious Dandyism (comparable -ism: e.g. Mormonism)
The difference between religious dandyism and philosophical dandyism can be seen in the respect accorded to the past. Religious Dandies have a very strict notion of what is Dandyism. They come cloaked in the quotes by D’Auverailly and Brummell. They set up tenets by which they live and reject the idea of dandyism evolving. As such, it is possibly too restrictive for all but the most ascetic.
22 Jul 2010
blog It sometimes feels as if the entire purpose of all human endeavour is to have something interesting to say when people ask “what do you do”.
There are two basic responses: you can tell them exactly how you occupy yourself between waking up and going to bed or you can tell them what you aspire to do between waking and going to bed. Very few people are lucky enough to be able to do exactly what they aspire to do. Even philosopher kings often spend more time procrastinating than “living the dream”.
If you earn your living as a waiter and yet aspire to be a writer, what do you say?
If you are someone who writes all day everyday yet you’ve never had anything published, what do you say?
The problem is with human ego. We want to impress our interlocutors with our wit and panache, so it is galling when you tell the truth (and say you’re a web designer) only to find that people look start looking over your shoulder for someone more interesting to talk to.
It is at this point where you start to think about other responses, such as “I don’t know” or “As little as possible”, or “Nothing”, but unless the person you’re talking to is sympathetic to cute replies it probably won’t work.
Perhaps we should just avoid the question entirely.
11 Jul 2010