Things I Love (a short and selective list): Blogging, WordPress, Books, Penguin paperbacks, Typography.

I am, therefore, quite over the moon to announce the release of Marber, a theme for the WordPress blogging platform based on good typographic practices and Romek Marber’s classic 1961 grid for Penguin Books.

Marber is a real labour of love, and I’ve been working on it for some time. Despite setting up tens of WordPress installations, all with customs themes, this is my first publicly-available theme, and I look forward to seeing how it fares. You can find out a lot more about the theme in a longer introduction over at Times Emit.

→ Marber Demo
→ Marber Info, Download & Instructions

I’m blogging occasionally over at Cooking With Booze, still channeling the links, still popping up around the place. But I’m also setting up a couple of group blogs which I think will be more interesting, a wider perspective that doesn’t depend on one person’s continued contributions.

I think RSS is one of the main reasons for this (perceived) decline in blogging. We don’t visit each others’ sites, so it’s less obvious when the frequency declines. As more small social apps like Twitter, and larger ones like Facebook, increase their reach, we don’t need blogs as our home pages either.

It’s good to have a place to put these things, thoughts, articles &c. But I think it’s time, and I think it’s happening, that the delivery mechanism was stripped down. RSS might be the answer: people are starting to have ‘lifefeeds’ more and more, which aggregate everything they’re doing. Blogs are just one source for this.

That’s my excuse, anyway.

Probably the presentation that got me most excited at this week’s Future of Web Apps conference was QuotationsBook, launched at the conference by QB founder, Amit Kothari to, it must be said, a fairly muted reception – this was a pretty flashy audience who expect a lot of innovation and slickness.

QuotationsBook is a neat quotation source, with some (but far from all) of the features we’ve come to expect from the sort of Web 2.0 apps featured at FOWA – bookmarking, easy sharing, and external embedding. A quick comparison with other quote sources such as Wikiquote, The Quotations Page (#1 on Google) and Bartlett’s for the simple but probably not terribly common string ‘publishing’ reveals the following results:

• Wikiquote: 1202 mostly irrelevant results, which you have to click through to read.
• Quotations Page: 1 result.
• Bartlett’s: 1 (rubbish) result
• QuotationBook: 38, mostly great, results.

These differing results are clearly the product of QB’s advanced thinking on how people use Quotes, together with a more serious approach than most quotes sites – instead of just pilfering other sites or waiting for users to add quotes, they re-indexed Gutenberg, for example. They deserve to do well.

What’s more interesting to me about QB, however, is it’s the first site I’ve seen to apply the principles of the semantic web to text. We’re all aware of the websites and applications that are transforming the way we access and interact with photography, video, music and other art forms, but there’s been very little done to upgrade the experience of literature. Apps like QB are among the first to think about what we can do with plain text, and that’s what makes them particularly exciting. I hope we can bring you more from Amit and the team soon.