Hair

Kibo points out that, contrary to resemblances noted elsewhere, my face is actually not very similar to that of Chris Elliott. This is true. However, I've noticed that many consider people to resemble one another mostly on the basis of hairstyles and hair and skin color, and that's clearly what's involved here-- and probably also with the comparisons to Ricky Schroeder, Larry Bird, and even Gary Busey that I got in earlier years. I think the Busey was primarily on the basis of a haircut that I had happened to get right before a bunch of us saw Lethal Weapon, in which Busey played the Psychotic Henchman Who Is Immune To Pain. It was Busey's exact haircut in the movie.

The most hardcore HTML geek post ever

I bet you never heard of these features of HTML. Yes, in every version of HTML up to 4.01,

<UL>
     <LI>foo
     <>bar
     <>baz</>
</>

was valid syntax accepted by the W3C's validator!

Don't bother using these tricks. As far as I know, no browser has ever supported all of them (some support one or two), and one of the major purposes of XHTML was to remove them all from the markup specification by switching from SGML to XML as a basis.

My initial introduction to these murky SGML-spawned corners of the language was an old, deadpan-funny rant called "The Dark Side of the HTML", but unfortunately it seems to have gone off to 404-land long ago.

Update: Here it is in Google's cache. I should stress that, given improvements in the standards situation over the past several years, the author's practical conclusions are no longer as applicable as they were.

lj-cut considered harmful

Well, not exactly. But Patrick Nielsen Hayden doesn't like it when he has to click a link to read the rest of an article.

He has some other thoughts about the design of group blogs there, too. LiveJournal is an oddball case in that it's a system of individual blogs that are also loosely bunched together through the friends-page mechanism, which is sort of halfway between a group blog and a syndication aggregator.

Anyway, because of friends pages, there's a certain amount of social pressure on LJ to put really big things behind the lj-cut tag, thereby causing the annoyance that is bothering Nielsen Hayden. But it occurs to me that people don't tend to get really mad unless you inline such things as big photographs or elaborate quiz doodads; there's much less resistance to just posting long text pieces without the lj-cut. And it also occurs to me that I tend to get more comments on longer pieces when they're not hidden behind that "Read more..." link.

Any thoughts on your own personal usage guidelines?