Disorder: Necessary to Progress?
Ordem e Progresso.
I have always loved the pure modernism of the Brazilian bandeira nacional. Unlike the Sâo Paulo flag, which plagiarizes the Stars & Stripes, it speaks of something unprecedented and original.
The lema or slogan – order and progress – can assume a sinister tone at times, however, as when the progressive order of things is upset by tanks and generalíssimos or by a Paraguayan coup d’etat as it was this year.
Why not put progress first and then order will come easier?
In truth, Brazil is still a not terribly orderly place on the whole – Sambodia is far from a microcosm of the country as a whole – and progress has yet to reach many parts of it.
It ranks in 74th place in terms of Net penetration with a figure of 51.6% according to the Internet Society, and less than that according to another.
The Brazilian Net (The Usual Stats)
According to another measure Brazilhas 140 million users or 66.4% penetration, (I tend to doubt these figures, which seem to include LAN house usage Brazilian still only has 100 million voters and registration is mandatory).
It has, however pentrated the Brazilian urban middle class – a beleaguered and paranoid bunch like their counterparts in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Paraguay and others, though the category grew subtantially under Lula da Silva.
Smartphones for Minimum Wagers
I am always surprised to meet people who early one or two minimum salaries who nevertheless managed to wield a Samsung smartphone or the like. THey buy them parcelados or in tiny parcels of up to 36x – 36 vezes or installments
(Somewhere here in my blogs from 2006 to 2015 I have a very funny photo of a Brazilian using the fabulous Internet: He has an old B&W TV for a monitor and hard drive and a manual typewriter for a keyboard and iron – for pressing linen – as a mouse. Too bad I did not tag that post properly, with «humor», for instance.)
These have taken to the Internet and the smartphone like urubus to a boi moribundo. Remember Orkut? That wild and crazy Brazilian invasion?
Designing the Web for Tupi Eyeballs
One thing is for sure: there is a lot of work to be done serving up content and data structure to ravenously curious Tupi eyeballs. Although there are many agencies doing this work, and winning international prizes for it, there is little in the way of open source
So maybe I could be a part of that, to supplement my translation income. I could design for ONGs and OSCIPs – NGOs – and professional practices and artists and their ateliers.
Maybe Gigi and Sandra will let me do them a site on GitHub, where they could host under their own domain with a CNAME. Our friends are on Wordpress now and the solution is less than ideal.
I offered to dar um jeito in the Wix site of an acquaintance of mine as well, although his Wix site in plain and simple Bootstrap is really not so bad.
(I like his essay on the fetishism of the journalistic profession. In Brazil your are not a journalist until you have a subject-specific B.A. and a professional license.)
But I Digress!
But I digress!
Pathologically so sometimes.
A bad habit.
If I seriously pretend to progress as a Web designer in the coming year, I need order – a method in my static site generation and flat-file and Laravel madness.
And also, entia non multiplicanda sunt.
Do not multiply sites and blogs unnecessarily.
Starting With Tweaks
This blog, for example, I did not intend to use it much if at all. But I would like to work on making a couple of changes: the typography of <blockquote> for example.
More substantially, I want to make some tweaks to the auto-excerpt function. I would like to be able to select a point at which to implement a <!--more-->link. I suspect I can turn this feature off somewhere in the config file?
It is also possible to use a background image with a white font displayed against it. I have seen examples this. How to?
Cleaning the Home Directory
home/bretonio/Sitesis overflowing.
And so I have projects in mind to help me get organized and set priorities.
One is a development diary in Portuguese, made with Hugo and hosted on surge.
It has a project page where I have begun to hash out what I might do first.
I could probably learn a lot from working on simple Bootstrap theming for Yellow and something like MkDocs.
(A nice custom theme for MkDocs is pip install mkdocs-material … )
The latter I am using to produce a documentation site containing cheat sheets for various tools I plan to use.
I will write it in Portuguese to get better at the technical lingo and to encourage collaboration with brazucos(as).
But I will have to cull the list of platforms down to a usable few.
Jekyll and Hugo top the list, of course, but I am still testing some of the more obscure Node.js-based generators.
Be satisfied with what you have learned to date, ô Bretônio.
Get started with a simple hugo new theme samboja
A little order really is the key to progress, although we can still allow ourselves a moment of madness or risky business from time to time.
You cannot be afraid to push things until they break.
I did that with Linux for quite a long time! Debian and Ubuntu and SUSE and Fedora & variants of Arch.
Just make sure you back things up.