Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

State of the Blog

For those who have enough spare time to be inter­ested, what fol­lows is a sum­mery of where this site “is” and where it is going:

Since its incep­tion, Super­flu­ous­Ban­ter has excelled in just that: mind­less dri­vel about one thing or another. I’ve never been one to keep a jour­nal, or even write post­cards for that mat­ter. I’m a heavy thinker, but I can never bring myself to com­mit those thoughts to paper or key­board. One of my hopes when I started SB was to force myself to change that pat­tern of non-committal thought (as I like to call it), and from time to time I have been brave enough to do so.

There were a lot of things I thought I wanted to do with this site when I first pre­pared to release it from the womb, and most of those (for many var­ied rea­sons, mostly lazi­ness on my part, but still…) have not been brought to fruition, and are ready to be dropped from the menu, or com­mit­ted to. Either way, it is time for change.

Per­son­ally, my life is filled with many won­der­ful peo­ple, activ­i­ties and expe­ri­ences. Pro­fes­sion­ally, I can’t say I’m as lucky, but I know I could always be worse off than my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. For those who don’t know (since I’ve never really said much about it, for what­ever rea­son), Web­graph is a two-man oper­a­tion. My part­ner in crime is a guy named Alex Rubin, my ter­ri­bly tal­ented younger brother. Those of you who know me through the Bar­ber­shop singing world know that Alex and I sing together in Auto­graph and we share the respon­si­bil­i­ties of Musi­cal and Artis­tic Direc­tors for the Fort Laud­erdale Sun­shine Chords­men cho­rus. We dump too much time into both groups, and con­se­quently less time is invested into Web­graph. We are start­ing to change this, but we’ve taken on so much respon­si­bil­ity with our musi­cal groups that it is turn­ing into a bat­tle between the non-profit orga­ni­za­tions we sing with/Direct, and the cur­rently non-profit busi­ness (it’s sup­posed to make us money, but…) that we hope will pay our bills, and allow us to make some sort of dif­fer­ence in the stan­dards of design and pro­duc­tion we find to be lack­ing so often in the world.

So I will be mak­ing some changes, both to the design (those of you who love the cur­rent design, don’t worry: I will ask for your input and opin­ions dur­ing the redesign process, and I’ll actu­ally lis­ten to what you have to say ;-) and to the con­tent, and I’ll try to make it more worth the time you spend reading.

Let me know what you think, what you would like to see. Con­sider this a chance to affect every­thing about the new direc­tion of this site: design, struc­ture, con­tent, even the fre­quency of posts, what­ever you want!

Before I turned SB into a blog, my orig­i­nal idea was to pro­duce some sort of col­lab­o­ra­tive web site which would some­how facil­i­tate com­mu­ni­ca­tion between indi­vid­u­als on a global scale. As you can see, this was a rather vague con­cept, and since I didn’t have the time to devote to prop­erly flesh­ing out the idea, I gave up and went with a blog. Now I want to revisit my orig­i­nal con­cept, and what bet­ter way to begin than to make the rebirth of SB a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort.

This is not lim­ited to ideas, com­ments, cri­tiques and the like, but comps, graph­ics, music, what­ever you feel like con­tribut­ing to this exper­i­ment, please go right ahead. Every­thing will see the light of day one way or another, that I promise. I will also do my best to keep my con­tri­bu­tions uncen­sored (really, I can be quite the potty-mouth around the right sort of folk) and hon­est (we’ve already estab­lished my unwill­ing­ness to part with my thoughts in the past).

Tell your friends, your neigh­bors, even your fam­ily. Link to SB and encour­age oth­ers to con­tribute (mini-banners are forth­com­ing; watch this space). This will be a fluid site, and I’ll find some way to archive snap­shots of its progress (sug­ges­tions?) so the evo­lu­tion of the con­cept will be recorded for future perusal by any inter­ested parties.

Thanks for con­sid­er­ing the idea — let’s see where it takes us!

Thanks again to all who read.

–D

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Wednesday, February 5th, 2003.

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• Design

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