This morning I found Quicksand, a jQuery plugin for easy filtering of elements using really nice animations. Have a look, try it and say that it’s perfect for an archive page like the one tumblr uses. Sadly, you can’t change the template of the archive page on tumblr. (If I’m mistaken with this, please contact me!)
Well, let me tell you what archive page I would like to create (and maybe will create for another site in future): On top you have this tumblr-like selection of year, month and, as I would really like it, a tag cloud for a general filtering by subject/category. And, a search bar. Actually, I would like the search bar to be on the left, followed by the tag cloud in the middle and then the years and months. This area would have a fixed width so that you have to scroll vertically to reach the earliest years/months. And of course, you could combine these filters. Beneath that, I would like to see the articles put in little boxes similar to how they look on tumblr right now.
This is where Quicksand comes in. When you apply filters the new set of article boxes is instantly loaded via AJAX and replaces the currently visible ones using the effect Quicksand comes with. IMHO, this would be a pretty cool archive browsing experience!
I just had a crazy idea: I blog about why I started a blog about crazy ideas.
Mostly, it was not a philosophical but practical decision. I made several attempts to write a regular blog about my life and the things I do, but it almost always turned out to be quite boring—even when I had something to write about.
Recently I wanted to try out tumblr for a new blog with minimalistic design and this time with real content and a concept that helps me to find ideas for new articles easily (and hopefully regularly). Since I’m a guy who considers himself creative and since I almost every day am annoyed by something (yeah, I’m very easily annoyed) and instantly have ideas how to make it better, I started thinking about writing these ideas down. First on my iPhone as notes, but then I chose to publish my best ideas on the tumblr blog I wanted to create anyway.
But why just ideas? Ideas can inspire you. Ideas can make you think of something you would never have considered in the first place. And ideas do that quite clearly whereas products mostly do not intent to inspire that directly.
And ideas have another real advantage. You can think of ideas, you can have ideas and you can communicate ideas without having to do any actual work (that’s the part I like most). I have, e.g., no idea how to build a glue that breaks on specific radiation, but I can think of it and can have the idea that it would be quite neat to have that kind of glue.
You see, ideas by themselves are quite effective and it’s not that hard to convey them. Besides that, I believe in creativity, and thus in ideas, lays the future of mankind. I know, it may sound quite strange, but when you think about it, or, when you think optimistic about it: It could be possible for mankind to resolve economic problems, make great materialistic standards possible for everybody, but then—what are we left with? I believe it’s our creativity—and that’s why I started a blog about ideas.
