Alex

I'm a beardy PhD student at Leeds Uni.Isn't the rest of this stuff supposed to be explaining who I am?On a side note: I get a bit annoyed by poorly designed websites like mySpace. First principle of Engineering: K.I.S.S - Keep It Simple, Stupid. This is why I haven't filled my profile with thousands of lines of badly written HTML. I will attempt to understand the design process for creating a typical MySpace profile...OK, let's start by creating almost invisible decorative cursors and fonts designed by five-year-olds... preferably as many different typefaces as possible, in as many different colours as possible. If you're particularly good, you'll specify the sizes directly, so that people with a different screen resolution from you either have to squint at the screen through a magnifier or need to scroll faster than the speed of sound to read ANYTHING. Now, we choose our favourite emo fashion-core background, preferable either a 20x20 thumbnail of a band of twat-haired wankers which we'll have tiled all over the page, or a huge image of something extremely intricate and multicoloured, that's too large to fit in a browser window and has the sides cropped, and is at least 4MB in size so people can wait with baited breath as it loads line by agonizing line... oh and preferably a background that's almost the same colour as the foreground text... and possibly contains text itself... and now why not make your foreground text semi-transparent... AND FLASHING!!! EXCELLENT! Now we've made it completely unreadable, what else can we do? OooOOOOh I know, let's fuck up this web shizzle fo' sho'... Time for some scripting! Why? Fuck knows! Do you even know what a script is? No! But it sounds like it'll make the profile AWESOME! Yeaaaaah! Now first of all, a useful check for whether your script is working: If there's a little yellow triangle in the status bar of the browser, you're on a winner. Keep up the good work! Now, go to your favourite teenage-angst forum and write a message like "OMGZ lol im makn my myspace rpofile n i wanna make it luk da bom can sum1 send me sum scripts n that luvs y'all x lolz rofl." Before you know it, you'll have enough scripts to make every frame rotate, move randomly about the screen... and BOUNCE off the sides!!! Also, whatever you do, please make sure you have a couple of lines in your script such as while(true){alert("lol")}; Now finally, our MySpace profile is almost complete. Enter some extremely boring facts about yourself, some shout-outs to people no one knows, list the frontman from My Chemical Romance as your only hero, carve his name into your arse (note that I do not know or care what his butt-fucking name is) and put the photo up in some crazy rotating and flashing, semi-transparent cube that blocks most of the text, add one of their songs, get a couple of youTube clips of their gigs, write your first suicidal blog entry, preferably in l33t, and now you have a mighty profile ROFLMAO LOL cunt