Typological Websites .:. grubbykid.com

Typological Websites

Interesting conversation in the comments on my Twitter outing post regarding Twitter itself and social software in general.

What I wanted to focus on was an aside by JW on sloth and blogging:

Even if your preference is to create shorter posts and provide lots of links, like grubbykid.com tends to, at least here there are options here, and there seems to be some concern on the part of the designer to allow himself the ability to have short posts and long posts alike.

Here I segue into a favorite topic of mine: tectonics and typology; in this case, on websites. Lately I have been evaluating and understanding objects on two scales: the tectonics - the thisness or (in the context of the web) content - and on the second scale the typology, or classification of the objects. Often I think of these on an X-Y scale, visualizing

Typology

Typology is the study or observation of types. Some examples of typologies are that:

Houses, skyscrapers and churches are building typologies
Chapels, Basilicas and Cathedrals are church or religious typologies
Spires, stained glass and doors are building ornament typologies

Typologies are great because they operate across scales and can stack one inside the other like Russian dolls and often begin to reveal objects as
Monads (which is for another post).

I tend to think of grubbykid.com as an assemblage of disparate interests which are collected, in public, for my and others viewing. So, I have been operating on the paradigm that photos, links, words, audio & video are all typologically independent, which exhibit monadic qualities; which operate individually, and have different internal structures and typologies; hence, links are link like consisting of a html link, link title and often commentary; photos are photo like containing a photo, photo data and often commentary; each other data type has similar (if different) internal structure. Also note the different display of each type according to its internal structure.

Below are three of the posts which begin to form a typology:

Each respective type have comparatively different internal structure - structures which as a whole are irreducible. A link to express linkness must contain these parts (I admit that commentary could be excized from the structure) or the object will lose its linkness and cease to exist as a link. Similar typological hurdles must be meat for Photoness and Textness, or the objects become unrecognizable. (an aside: this unrecognizability and the very power of typology can be used in both a positive and negative manner; that is, typology can be used to subvert the established meanings; see Derrida, or Eisenman, Peter)

So What?

OK, you say, What does it matter that my blog is full of typologies (and perhps monads)? Glad you asked! By recognizing this and deciding on positive or negative (as in subversion) use of typology you can better express yourself and organize your website. Your links, text, photos, audio, etc. should not exist as islands, but rather interconnected objects.

Unfortunately, current blog software doesn't allow for granular display of your items. In other words, software such as Tumblr, Movable Type, Wordpress et al all operate under the paradigm that you are entering text, with titles, and you want people to comment on them. When using a hammer, you end up trying to hammer everything.

In future posts, I will outline how software can better accommodate postings as typological data.

Comments

Jw says:

Question- would it be more "monadic" if the shape, color, and size of your text differed depending on what type of post (picture, text, link) post it was? Or more so, depending on nothing at all? Is having a standard title style typological? Is having all links be blue creating a causal relationship?

Perhaps a script that could randomize the style of any given element once, as it is submitted, would be appropriate? Am I looking at monads the wrong way?

Posted by: Jw at March 23, 2007 10:21 AM #

the grubbykid says:

Good question. Monads are simple structures which are irreducible, and each monad must be different than any other monad. It is unclear if the structure of each object needs to be different or the merely the textual content for the object to be monadic.

Is color a structural element or is it a linguistic signifier? I lean toward structure due to color's inherent tectonic nature, but I could be swayed.

It seems to me that perhaps the monad is not the post type, but rather the items such as the photo of itself, the post title, the metadata, etc. While Leibniz does describe simple and advance compounds being composed of monads, I have to revisit the text on this matter.

On a tangent, I like the idea of a script randomizing elements every time you load. I am reminded of a blog who's archive pages slowly "faded" to white text on white background as the post became farther removed from the present day.

Posted by: the grubbykid at March 23, 2007 12:41 PM #

Arno says:

Sometimes, when I use a hammer it is to extract something, such as a nail, which I installed in the wrong place or miss hit and compromised the integrity of. My point is, that a hammer has more than one use so, when using a hammer one does not inevitably end up trying to hammer everything. Hammer is a funny word if you think about it.