Deeply Upsetting Websites

Whilst reading through the bloggable section of the current ATPM issue that I mentioned, I came across to a deeply upsetting website created by Rui Carmo.

If you wander around on The Tao Of Mac for a while you’ll soon see why it is upsetting - it looks really nice (at least in Safari), there’s some good content, Rui seems like a frood who really knows where his towel is and the whole thing hangs together very well.

There’s a few other sites like this around, such as 0xdecafbad or code poetry. Spending time reading at any of them is a threat to your happiness and, perhaps, to your continued efforts at what passes for design on your home page. Bah, humbug.

I wondered if I might weave around my mostly non-existent artistic skills by paying a professional to work over my templates. A quick scan around revealed that Bryan Bell does a good job. He lists rates and they don’t seem ridiculous, but $225-$600 is more than I have to spend on it right now. Back to wandering the web looking for inspiration and bits to, well, steal (see earlier conversation about Planet Sun and Planet Debian).

Out-sourcing the content is a little trickier. A ghost writer for pages of random content seems plausible (hey, I could just deep-link a bunch of stuff from other places and apply my own style!), but I figure that I need to write the weblog entries myself. Then again, given that the entirety of the site is really a single Movable Type weblog, perhaps it’s not worth saving anyway…