Constant & Endless

Should I merge Geekeries with this blog?

I originally posted this to one of my old blogs, The Rotten Word, in April 2009. I wanted to publish it here as well because I plan to write a follow-up soon, having graduated in January of this year. Many thanks to Philadelphia litigator Max Kennerly for his advice and kind words about this post when it first ran. Also, this post by my Temple law classmate and friend Kishwer Vikaas Barrica was humbling, so thanks to her too!

Read More

Now that Constant & Endless is up to a staggering 26 Tumblr followers, I’ve enabled the ability for signed-in Tumblr users to ask questions on this site. Just click the “?” in the links menu at the top of the page, or visit this link.

Introduction

I hesitated to change themes because, well, it’s one of those things people do instead of writing. But while my customized version of Quite Big by George Dunkley has treated me very well, I hate using Tumblr’s default mobile theme on phones, or seeing my desktop-optimized layout on a tablet. I also had modified Quite Big so much that it started to look a little off to me. I know enough HTML and CSS to avoid breaking sites altogether, but over time my changes had started to give the theme a clunky look. I decided that I needed to find the ultimate theme for me: minimal, useful, and responsive.

Read More

Those who subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/byjoeross only have a few more days to subscribe to the new feed. Please make the change so you can keep reading my priceless insights.

Do it for your friends. Do it for yourself.

The New Feed!

I wanted to post something brief to let you know I made a few small but (I think) useful additions to this site.

Read More

If you are subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/byjoeross you need to subscribe to http://joeross.me/rss instead. The /byjoeross feed will go away forever in about a month.

Click here to subscribe to the new feed.

It would mean a lot to me if you did that. Really. I would smile. Widely.

I’m changing a few things as I settle into my new theme and workflow here at Constant & Endless.

In no particular order, those things are:

• I have changed the title of the RSS feed for this site from “By Joe Ross” to “Constant & Endless.”
• I’m appending “↗” to all link posts to make clear what kind of post you’re looking at. If that’s confusing, let me know.
• Link posts will appear in this color and article titles will appear in bold black.

I’ve been making changes at this site for the past month, but I’ve settled on some things and I wanted to explain them to anyone who’s interested. Some of it may bore you if you’re not a blogger or a WordPress geek. So here’s a summary:

This new theme isn’t going anywhere, I’ll be sharing more links and posting articles more often, I’m happy you’re reading this, and I hope you keep reading this site in the future.

First, the site’s new name, “Constant & Endless,” is from a line in a wonderful book, and you can read more about why I picked it on my About page. “By Joe Ross” was really just a placeholder name —- it was factual, but also boring and meaningless.

The theme, Twenty Eleven, is designed by WordPress. I tried many different themes, some were starkly modern, like Blaskan (link points to a theme demo), and others were incredibly lightweight, like mnmlist (link points to a great blog about, what else, minimalism).

I’m using the common typeface Georgia right now, and if I don’t stick with it, I’ll choose another serif. They look classy to me if done well and presented at readable sizes. And that’s another thing: I’m setting the post font-size at 18px in an attempt to make it readable without leaning forward or squinting, whether on the desktop or the mobile web. Headlines are set in Helvetica/Arial right now, and even if I change the specific typeface, headlines will remain sans-serif.

More broadly, I’m using a version of Twenty Eleven customized by a fellow named YJ Soon. His version of the theme is built to work seamlessly with his link-posts plugin, DFLL. It allows for link posts like those on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, which lead directly to what you’re sharing.

Look at this post of mine to see what I mean. Note how the headline actually links right to the page I quoted. It works that way in my RSS feed, too, all thanks to Mr. Soon’s plugin. You can read more about the plugin and the other tools I use to maintain this site at my Colophon page.

My statistics show at least thirty people subscribed to the feed, so if you’re one of them, I hope you enjoy the new link posts, and the longer-form aritcles I plan to keep working on. If you only want articles, or only want links, I’ll soon be offering custom feeds for you. If you’re like me and you live in your email, you can subscribe that way, too. Use the form at the bottom of the site to sign up for a daily email containing my most recent posts.

I don’t use comments here (more about that in this post), but don’t hesitate to get in touch via my Contact page.

I have turned off comments here at Constant & Endless. I have had only one comment since I started writing here, from Mr. Scott Carpenter. He left a good link, and I certainly don’t want to alienate him or anyone else who wants to tell me something in response to what I’ve written.

Read More

This site is supposed to be me talking about the law and technology, but I have some shameless self promotion to do, so I’m deviating from the usual subject matter this week.

<shameless_self_promotion>

I recently started a new Tumblr called, creatively, Fiction by Joe Ross. I’m posting flash fiction there, because I love to write it and it’s the best I can do length-wise until I finish my JD in December (a semester early, if you’re counting, which I am … pats self on back). It’s going to be mostly but not all science fiction, so if you’re into that sort of thing, please check it out and tell me what you think.

Read More

This is a post I ran recently at my Posterous blog, announcing my move over here. I thought I’d put it here for reference while I finish drafting a proper post about how my personal take on blogging has evolved over the years.

Read More