Musings
An “Everything is Miscellaneous” approach to Web Design
I’ve been anxious to put together a website for sometime now, but I was stumped by the design of it. I wanted to put my work into neat categories- paintings, videos, design etc. and subcategories- digital life, blocks etc. but some videos were of paintings, and works about blocks were done in both painting and photography. The tidy buckets I’d hoped to build were broken even before I’d made them. In frustration I went to my friend Jon Sorenson, a genius Computer Science professor at Butler University, and within ten minutes he’d solved my problem. He immediately advised me to use a category system whereby items could easily reside in more than one category. This multivalent approach really helped to break the narrower view I was trying to impose on the work. The suggestion I most valued was where he pointed out that for future work, I shouldn’t have to worry about which category the work would fall in. Under the approach he suggested the new work could find its own categories organically and without predetermination.
This conversation jogged something in my memory, I remembered David Weinberger’s book, “Everything is Miscellaneous” and I read it immediately. I loved it, and his discussion of tagging led to the tag cloud on the landing page of this site, and the tag collection in the sidebar. I love his discussion of the three orders of order, and have been fascinated by his ideas. I’m intrigued to think of the impact category-atomization might have on academia.
Anyway, that’s the story of how the current organization scheme of this website came into being. It will be interesting to see how long this system works for this site.
Creative Commons Licensing of Paintings and Other Works
As the saga of getting this website up and running continues, I’ve added another element to the design. I’ve decided to release my work under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. I did a good amount of research about this “some rights reserved” approach and feel that it’s appropriate for my work. I hope others can share and benefit from the work I’ve done. The only works that this does not apply to are those for which I’m not the copyright holder, eg. the logos and other commercial work I’ve done.
I’ve used CC licensed audio tracks for videos I’ve done and I’m excited to see if people find ways to use my work. I’m a fan of Jonathan Coulton and Becky Stern, and both of them use CC licenses for their work. Larry Lessig is such a compelling speaker and advocate for Creative Commons and videos of his talks played a role in the decision. (by default the WordPress theme I’m using (deFusion) adds a “Copyright ©” line to the footer). My CC attribution label is in the footer of this site, so share, remix and otherwise enjoy my work!
