Brandon Harris

Brandon Harris’s blog (no relation) is very well put together. It’s an actively maintained site, kept current with regular updates. This makes it pretty unique on the net at the moment.

Unfortunately, his taste and my taste come from different places. I don’t like his blog’s front page at all. It is very much in fashion, admittedly. There’s lots and lots of images, one on top of another, using the full width of the window with no whitespace anywhere. It’s perfect for claustrophobic masochists, the kind of people who so hate being confined they get into an unreliable lift. It’s great for fat men whose fetish is squeezing into small wardrobes. It’s not for me.

Anyway, as it admits, it takes an age to load—and my connection is high speed.

But complaining about the front page is like complaining about an album cover. I didn’t buy LPs because of the pretty covers, no matter how bad they was, I bought them for their music. This site does have articles, it has well written articles that put across good points well.

Harris (no relation) has “had some whiskey, and [he’s] been thinkin’“ (so he says).

Let me quote the introduction to Designing for Evil: “I want to talk about software design. Specifically, I want to talk about how to design your products to resist the effects of evil. I need to open this entry with a trigger warning. It isn’t possible to talk about defending against harassment without being exposed to it.”

It’s an interesting article that goes through a list of how nastiness can be introduced to software, or a website, etc., and mitigation strategies for dealing with them. His arguments make good sense.

The weakness is his concept of evil. He’s uses online mysogyny as an example of evil, and I agree it’s an evil. All the same, I think he should have gone deeper into the concept of evil, explored the philosophy, rather than simply assuming today’s popular standards, as he seems to have done. Evil is never as simple as a checklist. However, having said that, what he says is valid, and worth considering.

Do explore this site. It’s far better than most home pages I’ve encountered so far.