I was struck by two opposing thoughts during my letterpress class. The first was, if this was my job, to manually set type, I’d go crazy scheming for a more efficient solution—something not unlike the combination of word processing software and a laser printer. Thank you Xerox Parc for doing the heavy lifting.

But in the moment, I was completely enthralled by the process of setting type. It was almost soothing—a feeling I imagine may have been more widespread up until the time industrial presses and affordable computers sat everyone in front of a cathode ray tube instead of a California job case.

I keep thinking about the little sacrifices we accept with every technological advancement. What has concrete wrought on architecture, photography on painting, computers on writing, and now digital photography on chemical? Isn’t there something to gain by adding (rather than removing) constraints?

Surely the productivity and accessibility associated with new technologies far outweigh the idiosyncracies of the old, but how cognizant are we of what we lose when we upgrade?

The time and care involved in using a press suggests it may be put to better use in making art. The combination of beautiful, heavy paper, and the precise physical impression of type, handset text on handmade paper. This emphasis on handmade these days seems to fly in the face of everything we believe about progress. Why do we value handmade goods (usually made in other countries, objets more relevant in the context of other cultures), but spurn the manual labor required to make them?

Perhaps it’s a question of having the choice. At work I do everything I can to reduce the amount of work I have to. Not by dillydallying or procrastinating, but by finding more efficient, effective, consistent, streamlined ways of doing things. But when I’m not at work, the constraints are different. I want to have the time to savor what I’m doing. As Brian says, I want to slow down. I want to appreciate the process as much as the product. Handmade makes sense at home. And I think for a few lucky people, handmade can become a sustainable venture.

An addendum

There’s a curious thing that happens when you call something art. Or handmade. Or a thousand other adjectives like artisanal, gourmet, etc. It seems to escape that thing from the capitalist’s imperative of bigger, faster, cheaper. It seems to give people a greater freedom to explore and enjoy the process of making while somewhat releasing them from the slaughter of mass market prices.

And these days it seems that art is being invoked on incredibly personal levels (in addition to the incredibly industrial: think Apple’s iPod). With the internet (as Robin mentions in the comments), what might have been hobbies before now take on the mantle of art in the eyes of an expanded community. They still may number no more than a dozen, but a dozen unencumbered by geographical diversity.

In the blogosphere (and on the web) permalinks are sacred. Every broken link is like a demerit against your credibility. Even more so with syndication.

So I spent my day trying to figure out why Movable Type 3.2 occasionally appends an “_1” (an underscore followed by the number one) to the end of a published permalink (a basename in MT parlance) when there is no conceivable collision with any other basename, and without creating a duplicate entry.

We thought maybe Ecto was to blame. But I couldn’t recreate the problem with the latest versions on either Windows or Mac.

I talked to a few of our bloggers, and no one could point to a discernible pattern—other than that it only seemed to happen after an edit was made to an already published post. So I tried multiple combinations of setting a post from Published to Unpublished and then back again. But no game.

I reached out to the MT ProNet list and someone suggested that this may be a “known issue” in MT 3.2:

When an entry is saved from the Preview screen, the entry basename may be incremented or, if the title was changed, altered to fit the new title.

Turns out this was spot on. Here’s how to reproduce the bug:

1. Create a new entry and Save it (the Post Status is irrelevant)
2. Click the Preview button and click Save this entry
3. Notice that the Basename now has an “_1” appended to it
4. Click the Preview button again and click Save this entry
5. Notice that that the Basename no longer has an “_1” appended to it
6. …

I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I knew my blogging platform was producing unstable permalinks when users preview their posts and resave them. This is a problem on the scale of “our software is breaking the world wide web.” C’mon Six Apart, can I get a little more gumption than “this is a known issue”? This has been a known issue for five months!

Update: after my rabble-rousing on the ProNet list, Jay Allen posts a patch for fixing the “MT incrementing basename bug”. Thanks Jay!

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Another way to namespace an Atom feed, except that very few aggregators can handle it.

Aristotle Pagaltzis: Who knows an XML document from a hole in the ground?

XML is hard.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Dare Obasanjo on Microformats vs. XML: Was the XML Vision Wrong?:

I’ve always considered it a gross hack to think that instead of having an HTML web page for my blog and an Atom/RSS feed, instead I should have a single HTML page with <div class="rss:item"> or <h3 class="atom:title"> embedded in it instead. However given that one of the inventors of XML (Tim Bray) is now advocating this approach, I wonder if I’m simply clinging to old ways and have become the kind of intellectual dinosaur I bemoan.

I find the idea of feed metadata stored within the actual index page of blog (presumably as a microformat) VERY compelling.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Tim Bray on Don’t Invent XML Languages:

Here’s a radical idea: don’t even think of making your own language until you’re sure that you can’t do the job using one of the Big Five: XHTML, DocBook, ODF, UBL, and Atom.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.