You know, sometimes I come to my own site actually expecting to see something new. And then I actually get disappointed when it’s the same old posts. It’s like I forget that I’m the one who has to do the work here. What does that say about me?

Tim Parkin has come up with an interesting idea, csschallenge.com. He sees it as a place for CSS doubters and <table> advocates to post designs that they figure can’t be done with CSS positioning. It will then be up to the CSS gurus to try to prove them wrong, and upload their own CSS-P verions of the designs.

This could be fun to watch, if he has the time to follow through with it.

Craig Saila’s met the challenge, although he still uses tables that meet WAI guidelines.

Tom Gilder has done it without tables.

Latest commercial project: Virginia Highlands Fire Safe Plan. Part of the RCI website, I started with a Word 2000 document (uck) and turned it into nice smooth XHTML.

A while ago I wrote about Larry Lessig’s Creative Commons, and how necessary public domain and open content are to our culture. Today I finally decided to implement the ideas, so I picked out a couple of terms for a custom license, stuck them in my footer, and wrote up a page on my site’s new license. It probably won’t make a dent in the big scheme of things, but there it is.

Also on the subject of history, I just finished reading Dr. Seuss Goes to War. A fascinating look at Dr. Seuss’ early life as a WWII political cartoonist, it includes drawings of some very familiar Seussian flora and fauna going up against the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. And, on a web-related note (you know there’s always one), there is a companion website of sorts, hosted by UC San Diego’s Mandeville Library, who holds the originals of all these cartoons (they also host his advertising cartoons). The website is actually pretty well-done, for a photo gallery, showing every single cartoon in the wartime collection – something the dead-trees edition was unable to do. The website, however, doesn’t include the text, by historian Richard H. Minear, that actually puts the cartoons in context. So, the book and website, perhaps unwittingly, complement each other pretty well.

The Internet Archive got a heap of (well-deserved) publicity last year when they launched their Wayback Machine interface to their Web Collections. If you go there, you can find yet another place on the web that has absolutely no idea that this site exists.

But, long before the Wayback Machine, I discovered the Internet Archive and a completely different collection of theirs: The Movie Collection. This collection has over a thousand short films — the kind that bring up waves of nostalgia about the America That Used To Be. These are WWII propaganda films, 1950’s etiquette films, corporate training films from the 60’s, and more. Make sure you have a fast connection if you go there, though, since these movies are in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 format, at anywhere from 4MB to 25MB per minute. A fascinating glimpse in the past.

New CSS experiment online: FunkyMenu.

Textbased.com is starting up the Minimalist Web project. It’s not so much a project as just a list of sites that subscribe to the idea of less glitter and more meat, the Minimalist school of thought. It’s a good design principle, one I try to follow here, and maybe getting all of these sites listed together like this will help spread the word and give some inspiration to the world.

My web host seems to be a little twitchy today, so if you’re having problems reaching any pages here, kindly reload until you get it.

I feel like this is becoming the “Fire Blog”. They finally got the Lake Tahoe fire put out that I wrote about, and also the fire in Walker California. They just sent the fire crews home, when lightning came by and brought its fury back to us. Now Coleville is on fire, about five miles from the place that just burned.

Add to that the lightning fire that’s about five miles from my house, and half the sky is solid brown right now. I can only hope that the fact I live in the middle of a large neighborhood provides enough of a firebreak to keep the flames up in the hills.