Binary Bonsai

Alright, listen up. Binary Bonsai has been powered by WordPress literally since its very first release. And as a consequence, I’ve been pretty involved with the WordPress community over time, especially these last few years with K2 (which is still in production I might add). But, while it has served me well for all of that time, to kick the carcase of the dead horse that is the girlfriend metaphor; we’ve grown apart. And today, I’m moving out of the apartment. So it’s goodbye WordPress and…

Hello Habari.

Mmm. Sweet, sensual, built Habari. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a pitch for you to do the same (though, please, take it for a spin; you never know). It’s simply me celebrating that I’ve finally gotten on with my online life, and getting even more involved with a project that has so far been both incredibly rewarding and ditto challenging.

And it wasn’t that WordPress and I were in a painful relationship; at least not in last year or so. It was more one of those courteous ones where we had both made peace with the fact that we weren’t meant for each other. That over time, we had grown apart. And… Alright, alright; enough of this blasted girlfriend metaphor; it’s creeping me out!

Seriously though, I’m really happy to finally move in with Habari. I’ve long had a keen interest in interface design and blogging tools, and my involvement with Habari has allowed me to follow up on both of those, and hopefully in the process creating a blogging tool that others will find exciting as well.

As a writer, if anyone would stoop so low as to call me that (thank you), what happens behind the scenes doesn’t really interest me. I do most of my writing in Textmate and then copy/paste it anyway. And after I’ve turned off comments, I don’t even see the whole admin section that often. But just because you only use the car to go down to the supermarket, why shouldn’t you be driving a black Countach?

I thought so too.

But please, have some patience with the design (which is new, and very much in progress), the archives and the feed (new permanent address, I’ll try and do some clever rewriting to get the old links to work). I’m working on getting all my ducks in a neat little row, and hopefully everything will settle down within a few days.

Well, except for the design.

I’m calling it Kalamari.

Largely thanks to Steve’s hard work, you can now pick up release 6 of K2.

The second in the series, this time considerably shorter at a mere 12 minutes (felt like 2 when I was recording; man brevity is hard!) about the Write Page in WordPress.

You can comment on the Viddler page or download the fullsize quicktime, if you’re so inclined.

Spent half an hour recording the first in an impromptu series of screencasts about interface design. This episode takes a look at the WordPress dashboard and why it ought to be discarded immediately. There’s also a short look at the WordPress widget system and why that isn’t entirely up to snuff either.

You can comment on the Viddler page or download the fullsize 374mb quicktime file, if you’re so inclined.

PS: With a face for radio and a voice for TV, I should’ve probably just written it; but hey…

When in the future, bound to the wheelchair by an injury sustained in the Chrome Wars, I look back at 2007, I will see Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.

It’s not that I consider my other endeavors insignificant. I’m very happy with K2, even if we didn’t ship a 1.0 as I’d hoped. And I’m already very proud of the little work I’ve been able to contribute to Habari so far. Furthermore, both Rikke and I were able to chalk off Paris and New York from the ‘must travel to before impending death’-list.

But Kane & Lynch definitively marks the end of me wanting to make computer games for a living, and me having made making computer games for a living. And dammit, I’ll wear that chip on my shoulder and parade it around town like nobody’s business. It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to!… Look what you made me do.

2007 will also go down as the year I spent an excessive amount of money on a whole range of (fantastic) new Star Wars books, it being after all the 30th anniversary and all. And yes, I’m still a sucker for that stuff; you wanna start a fight or something? You a trekkie? Huh? Huh?!

Furthermore, this will be the last year Binary Bonsai will be brandishing WordPress. I’m a-shippin’ out and a-joinin’ Habari. It was fun, smell you later.

The Future

2008 will be the year where I leave the quantity of content to Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr and the seemingly never ending onslaught of something-r, and instead turn my focus on quality for this here site.

Proper writing, or at least, more attentive writing. Which is to say, if you enjoy reading about Russ Meyer and thinking about whether or not Chris Foss planted the seed for the Star Destroyers, then gosh darnit, you’re in luck Lucy, cuz that just about sets the style.

And proper writing, unlike this whole piece and this segue in particular, is exactly what 2008 will be tagged, bagged and sold as.

I love film. I work with games, but honestly, I can’t deny that my love is with film. And sure enough, the ‘I could do that better blindfolded!’-bravado is abound, but the actual product? It has yet to be manifested.

I’ve pseudo-dabbled in creative writing, and even half seriously discussed with Rikke the option of moving to New York for a stint, leading a bohemian life as a writer, living off of the wonderful New York deli’s and churning out socially subversive, but mostly un-produced scripts (that last part is a lie; it would be pulp sci-fi; you know that).

So this is the year where I, creatively, bend down to check whether I have a pair or not. And if I do, great, who knows what it might lead to? If I don’t? Well, shit.

So that’s it for 2008; you can go home now.

PS: This entry by the way, is the last entry to brandish comments. The spammers are too clever, they’ve won. But they can’t cross the bridge, if there is no bridge, so… Boom.

Catch me on twitter if you need me.