back in the day when blogging was so huge, or when it was getting huge, it seemed everyone and their mother had to have their own blog. tools like blogger, greymatter and livejournal helped that. the problem, or at least the problem as i saw is was that not everyone who decided that they needed to write endless blurbs of nothingness linking to more endless nothingness actually had any coherent concepts of design and readability.

everyone knows what i'm talking about. bright red backgrounds with yellow text. exact copies of other people's blog posts, with the same links. the "i went and got coffee today, and it was good" posts. the blogs where the text was in all caps, no paragraph breaks, and the headlines actually using multiple imbedded <big> tags to make the font bigger.

it got to be a fashion statement. now, people owned quirky urls, went to "web geek" conferences like s.x.s.w. (south by southwest), and spent all their time posting blurbs to their website. everyone had weblog: www.quirkyurl.org in thier email signatures. you'd hear people chatting about their weblogs and the number of hits they got on their site sitting outside of trendy cafes. then... everyone who was at that trendy cafe would write about their little pow-wow on their weblog, linking to all the people's blogs of who was there. it got to a point where people (myself included, for a short while) created entire web-based personalities around their weblog.

i got into the whole scene. so much so that i used to spend alot of time at work and otherwise browsing people's blogs and journals. links here, links there... i just jumped around.

on one of my older machines, i used to have a favorites list of sites that i liked to read. the list was bigger than i care to admit. but, the funny thing was that i was a whore about it. if i didn't like your design, i wouldn't go to your page. i might even close the window or hit the back button if it was too hideous to look at.

it was the journals and blogs that had good designs that i went back to. especially the people who had something clever to say, storytellers with a bit of wit in them. i especially liked the ones where the owner of the site redesigned (as i did) every few weeks. it was fun to go back and see what they had come up with. i would get emails from people saying that they did the same for my site, and it made me happy to know that i wasn't the only one as psychotic as me.

in some cases, like tonight, i would get someone asking me if i liked their new design. now, i'm not totally sure why they did this, but they did. and because i'm a straight-forward motherfcuker, i always feel the need to be nitpicky about something that is just their form pure expression, and i tend to go into long diatribes about what is or is not wrong or right about the particular site.

when i critique a site for someone, i get totally into it. i point out the most miniscule little details that most people wouldn't even notice. like two links that are a little close together. a form that has all different sized form fields. dates that are too big, and headlines too small. a pixel or two of too much or to little space here or there. font spacing. hard to read fonts.

sometimes it's like a little power trip. i feel like the blog-editor-god or something. sometimes the people take the things i say are wrong or not perfect a little bit too much to heart. maybe i'm putting back into the world what a few good friends did for me when i was getting started, or designed something that just didn't work, and they felt the need to tell me so.

is it wrong to say that something someone did it wrong? or that it shouldn't be a certain way? sometimes, in the middle of saying all kinds of things that i probably shouldn't, i sometimes realize that i'm being a bitch, and the fact that they aren't responding to my instant messages or emails might mean that i've gone a little to far.

or maybe, like me, they're too busy fixing the code to respond. who knows?

i guess it's just a personality trait. it's just a cracked out form of perfectionism. back when i was actually doing the designs every month or so, posting daily to multiple sites, i know that i was never satisfied. i'd finish a design, and no less than a week later, i was unhappy with it for some reason, and had to do something else. or, i had to force myself to leave a design up for more than a week, just so that i wasn't spending all my time designing.

then, alot of things fell apart at once. my life, for one, the blogging community for another. ever so frequently, you'd see the "i can't do this anymore" or "i don't like the online persona that i've developed" posts, and a site would die. i, myself tried to do this more than once but never was able to go through with it. shit. i own a domain. (that's a lie. so many that the renew emails almost outweigh the junk mail in my inbox). i can't give up just yet.

so, to all of you still striving for that perfect design, still writing that wit, still posting that endless babble...

this nitpicky little whore is still here.