Most recently, a person called Cleo, who also goes by the misnomer “sexy1980″, stole both words and pictures from a heartfelt entry I wrote after a particularly hard day. Word-for-word. You see that car on her site? That’s my car.

If you dare to look at this abortion of a web page, do so at your own risk. I warn you, the animations and colours are not for the feint of heart.

I wasn’t happy when someone started copying entire entries of mine, word-for-word, or when another person stole my design of Version 10 (his attempted redesign in an effort to cover up his actions isn’t that far off either). Sure, I also get people hotlinking my images too, but I take simple pleasure in replacing the images with pictures of a lemon party, because I get to laugh at things like this.

But when someone steals both my words and hotlinks my pictures I get really pissed off.

After my Perishable Press interview, and having Version 10 featured in a Crestock article titled “13 Minimalist Designs You Really Should See”, this site has seen a surge in design-related traffic. But increased exposure is a double-edged sword. Higher profile sites make you a bigger target for security issues, spam, and design robbery.

Such as the case with eric-akmal.com.

Does this look familiar?

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10.0 is currently being featured at Perishable Press, the first in a series of articles exploring minimalism in modern web design. From the article:

Equivocality’s new minimalist design is very impressive. The site appears clean, bright and refreshing and navigates with natural simplicity. Jeff has eliminated clutter to focus on content, which is strongly unified within the site’s sharp, spacious design. Attentive visitors will revel in the site’s exquisitely restrained details, such as the subtle texture provided by the bleached background grid, or the dynamic interplay between complementary typefaces, Arial and Avenir. Overall, the design’s thematic neutrality and universal approach inspire visitors to relax, focus, and enjoy.

In addition to a detailed site review, Jeff Starr did a mini interview with me. I’ve come across Perishable Press several times through my Wordpress wanderings and it was great to work with someone I’ve always known but never met.

Introducing the tenth version of equivocality.com.

Surgical Style

When approaching 10.0, I knew I wanted a notebook feel, so I used a grid background to give the hint of paper. The idea was minimalism. Single column, no more icons, and super stripped-down meta data.

It’s still based on the good old 480 pixel-wide column, although it’s broken down into a grid with two main columns, which is used for the footer and other varying pages. The dates on the left side are bullets that break out of the grid to help visually separate entries, and for a bit of style. Otherwise, it can be a little boring.

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equivocality 8.0 has arrived. Though arriving with little fanfare, I felt this design update was important enough to have it’s own entry.

8.0 is an evolution in the design of this blog. I wanted a layout where the information was presented with less clutter, while maintaining the minimalist feel. There’s a reason behind every margin, every line, every shade.

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A little while ago I put up an up-to-the-minute script that would tell me how many people were viewing this page, out of curiosity. It’s always interesting to find out that someone is visiting at the same time that I am. This week I noticed that I had 3 visitors online while I was updating. I was pretty surprised, since most internet surfers spend much less than a minute at a page before leaving (most will leave the page if it doesn’t load within eight seconds, a useful fact to know for web designers).

I checked my stats and found out that I’m still getting more than 100 visits daily, which is something that I don’t understand. I haven’t done much to advertise my site aside from a few Canadian blog listings, and only a handful of the people I personally know check on a regular basis. I don’t think I talk about controversial issues that really generate any discussion, or anything that’s very interesting for that matter. I don’t pander to potential visitors, I don’t censor myself, I don’t address an audience, and half the time I’m just venting about this or that. I first made this site over a year ago as an outlet for personal expression, and the purpose hasn’t changed one bit ever since. I wonder if people come here by mistake or looking for something specific. I personally have my daily reads (most of them female authors, since there seems to be a shortage of male bloggers) of people who have lives that are very different from mine. Most are just plain interesting, and some give me a few alternate perspectives.

I wish I knew what people came here for.

Access to my control panel, my database, and my scripts has been temporarily disabled. Apparently, a representative of a musical group has contacted my host in regards to an mp3 I have stored. Instead of contacting me first, the representative decided to bring the issue up with my host. I would have been fine with removing the mp3 from my site if I was simply asked. I realized that it was a violation of my terms of service, but I didn’t think that anyone ever visited this site, so I had the song for archival purposes. Now, I have no way of updating my content, in what has become my main healing medium. I cannot be slowed by this, and even though it feels as though I have no means of expression or communication, I still feel the need to write.

I finally finished transferring and categorizing all my old entries into my new Movable Type layout and it took more than 10 grueling hours. Reading back on some of the entries was quite enjoyable, to see how I’ve progressed since last summer. The current layout has only a single table (for the calendar) and the rest is done with div tags and CSS, which I had to learn. I’m fairly pleased with the layout though, as Trolley and Aaron helped me check cross-browser compatibility. I now know to never use verbose font sizes, only numerical ones if I ever want browsers to display a page in the same way.

John drove up over the weekend in order to attend my convocation. The ceremony wasn’t nearly as painful as I expected, although it did last over three hours, not including the painful picture taking afterwards. I shook hands with a very graceful chancellor on stage. Pat bought me an aluminum clipboard with dual paper compartments as a graduation gift, which is great.

The new layout is taking much longer than expected, even though the installation of Movable Type was much faster than expected. I’m only now learning about div tags and their benefits. I’m finding it fairly difficult to shape one of the default templates to a layout I would be satisfied with. It’s amazing what MT can do with its flexibility.