About
Contents
About the Author
My name is Joe Ross. Constant & Endless is where I share my opinions on design, law, and technology. Learn how to follow along here. I live in Philadelphia, where I’m a paralegal, and I recently earned a law degree from Temple University.
About the Website
I use this site to share links and write articles about design, law, and technology because they’re topics I obsessively follow and truly care about. I called it “Constant & Endless” because Saleem Sinai, the main character in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, says at one point in the book that:
The process of revision should be constant and endless.
Midnight’s Children is a truly amazing book, and I won’t do it the injustice of a cursory summary here. I will say that the quote above inspired this site’s name because it’s a belief I strongly hold. Design, law, technology, our writing, and our own personalities are constantly changing. It means, to me, that you put stuff out there, debate it with smart people, and defend, amend, or abandon your positions as you continue to learn.
Projects
I like to make things, especially websites. Here are my favorites:
- Memeframes uses iframes to bring Techmeme and its sister sites together in one browser window.
- Lawyer Says is a collection of quotes by lawyers, updated intermittently but always full of links to interesting articles.
- Pet GIFs is a collection of animated photos of pets. It’s update even less frequently than Lawyer Says, but it’s perfect for a quick dose of happy when the going gets tough.
- Geekeries is my more “traditional” Tumblr, serving as a collection of images and links related to science, science fiction, literature, writing, technology, and gaming. To the extent that Constant & Endless is my more formal writing outlet, Geekeries is a personal blog.
- Temple Law Profs Feed uses a Yahoo Pipe to generate an RSS feed of all posts by Temple Law profs on the different blogs at which they write. Read more in my announcement post about it.
- KeyPulp is an arts and culture blog I started with some friends. It was a labor of love and busy lives and diverging schedules forced us to place it in hibernation in September 2012.
Colophon
Here’s a list of the tools I use to make this site:
- Tumblr: It’s my CMS of choice because it’s no-maintenance and supports Markdown, which brings me to…
- Markdown: John Gruber’s plaintext syntax generates immaculate HTML, and is readable even its raw form. That’s why I use it to write almost all my words, ever. It also plugs easily into writing apps, which brings me to…
- Byword: If you use Markdown to make words on a Mac and you’re not using Byword, either you’ve never heard of it or you’re a crazy person. It opens and edits any text file, even if Byword didn’t create that file, which brings me to…
- Dropbox: Your files, everywhere, all the time, with reliable conflict resolution and sharing options.
- MNML theme by Idraki Muhamad: I use this elegant, responsive theme as the starting point for what became the current iteration of my site.
- Yahoo! Pipes: It’s really geeky, but it’s how I made the custom literal, links, and articles feeds on my Subscribe page. I also used it to make my Temple Law Profs Feed.
- I use TypeKit to display text in decent fonts.
- Google Analytics: It’s how I’m tracking how you use my site… right now… Seriously, I am, but it’s anonymized so don’t be scared.
Comments
I have turned off comments here at Constant & Endless. Others have explained very well the benefits of publishing a comment-less blog, so I’ll share some links in lieu of repeating their reasoning.
iOS and Mac OS X developer Matt Gemmell wrote on his popular blog in November 2011 what I consider a bullet-proof reasoning for keeping comments out of most personal blogs (his follow-up is also indispensable).
MG Sielger, a general partner at CrunchFund, a columnist at TechCrunch, and purveyor of parislemon and Massive Greatness, chimed in on Gemmell’s posts with some thoughts of his own (as well as some more follow-up).
If you want to reply to anything on this site, use the Twitter and email icons at the bottom of every post (thanks to kaos.am for pointing out this convenient method for fostering discussion without the trouble of hosting comments), have a look at my Contact page, or write a blog post of your own.
I last revised this page on January 7, 2013.
