An earlier site layout
Man Out of Time began in September 1998, shortly after I discovered the online journal phenomenon. My first discovery and primary inspiration was Sara Astruc's Fauvegrrl pages; through her and others, I soon found and began to read Shelley's shelleyness, Kim Rollins's Sugar and Preserve, and several others, and it didn't take long for me to catch the bug.
I had trouble thinking of a title at first, so the first incarnation of the journal was called simply Journal of Bill. After a while, I changed the name, and then a little later came up with a design that looked much like the thumbnail to the right.
Eventually, I got sick of editing my pages by hand, and I wasn't really satisfied with the WYSIWYG HTML tools I'd tried. I wound up rebuilding the entire site using the excellent Movable Type software built for just such things. I updated the design a bit, learned some PHP and customized the way the site worked, and lived with that setup quite happily for a year or so.
From late 1998 through mid 2003, the journal served as a place to write about useless trivia or personal issues with varying degrees of candidness. I wrote about changing jobs, replacing my car (twice), losing my girlfriend, getting a new one, selling a house, buying a condo, getting engaged, getting married.
In mid-2003, my wife and I went through some difficult stuff (which we're still working on), and the journal became both a tremendous release valve and a major connection to some of the people from whom I drew a lot of support. But in February 2004, I came to feel less comfortable about having a lot of that stuff online in public, and decided to shut the site down for a bit and consider my next move. In mid-March, I began rebuilding the site using Geeklog, and started over with a mostly clean slate: same domain, same title, new design, and none of the old journal archives. Some film and music reviews carried over, but none of the journal material.
The title itself comes from the Elvis Costello song by the same name. In part, it suits the kind of retro-future aesthetic I like so much. In part, it reflects my fascination with the delicate causalities that get us from "then" to "now," and the futile but common desire to be able to step outside them and see where other choices and events could lead.
The airship-and-globe logo was the major factor in my first major redesign. The idea came to me when Susan, my girlfriend at the time, came home from an estate sale with a very old box of airmail stationery. I loved the art on the box cover, so I scanned it and started playing with some ideas.
I showed my favorite idea to my friend Rob F, and he approved in principle but agreed that the scan wasn’t nearly good enough to work with. We searched for suitable clip art, but none was to be found. Fortunately, Rob's got a talent for 3-D modeling. He whipped up the globe, and after I waved a few snapshots of the old US Naval airship Akron at him, he churned out an airship even faster. I tweaked the final rendering with photoshop to get the colors I wanted, and with my housemate Dominic’s help, added the airship’s orbit trail. Voila: new logo.
The latest layout includes a new airship arranged and rendered by Rob, and is otherwise my own work. Because this is my own personal site, and not any kind of paid work, I'm rather more interested in having it look the way I want than I am in making sure it works in every browser. If you're using Safari, a Mozilla-based browser, or IE6 for Windows, it should look pretty good. If you're using IE5 for Windows or Mac, there are a few little problems (IE5/Mac, for instance, totally chokes on the simple floated divs used for the images included on this very page). If you're using anything older than that, you're hopeless, and I cannot help you.
Special thanks go always to Sara Astruc for support and feedback, not only on the site but in all things. To Rob F for his time and skill in creating graphics for me. To sele and Elphaba for their browser testing and helpful layout suggestions. And to my wife Nicole, for more reasons than I can list here.
Man Out of Time
http://www.manoutoftime.org/staticpages/index.php/about