A short trip

As a quasi-commemoration of my 41st birthday on Monday, I’ve been working on an “About Me” page for Random Fate. According to Jakob Nielsen, number one on his list of the Top Ten Design Mistakes for weblogs is “No Author Biographies” followed by number two, “No Author Photo.”

Gee, not even to number three and I’m batting 0.000 and have been for years… and let’s not even discuss how I don’t make the grade on post titles and link descriptions along with committing the sin of mixing topics.

So, I’m writing the darn “About Me” page and working on the least-bad photo I have to put up on the sidebar.

Somewhere in there I need to work in what is my biggest struggle, which is not making the short, easy trip from skeptic to contrarian to cynic.

Cynicism is unhelpful at best and more usually damaging. While I may be a curmudgeon, that is not the same as being a cynic, because a curmudgeon is curmudgeonly because he sees hope, a cynic is cynical because he sees no hope.

I definitely do not want to lose hope. I lost it once, and that sent me into the Black Pit of Despair. I crawled out, got the T-shirt, and have vowed to never go there again.

I may never be an optimist, nor even play one on TV, but I do strive to avoid the short trip from contrarian to cynic.

Archives

Weblogs I read

2 Comments so far

I disagree with him on the ‘no author photo’ thing. People don’t need to know what I look like. I’ve described myself. ‘Nuff said. If they want to envision some leggy 6 foot bodacious blonde, they can have at it. But I don’t see it as a mistake on my part that I don’t permanently post a picture. I view it as… security. I don’t use my name either.

It’s not to say I have not posted pictures such as the one in your above post, but there will never be one in the About Me of my blog. Imagination goes a long way. My readers can use it.

[...] Jack: As a quasi-commemoration of my 41st birthday on Monday, I’ve been working on an “About Me??? page for Random Fate. According to Jakob Nielsen, number one on his list of the Top Ten Design Mistakes for weblogs is “No Author Biographies??? followed by number two, “No Author Photo.??? [...]

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment
Please read the comment policy

All comments are screened for conformance to the comment policy

As an anti-spam measure, a link to activate display of your comment will be sent to you using the email address given, otherwise your comment will be reviewed and moderated by the post author

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>