Morisy dot com

One thing I've been mildly-yet-obsessively entranced with for a number of years is how nicely Gawker plays with thumbnails:

One of the minor irritations of modern web design is that, even you HTML the hell out a blog post to make it look perfect in terms of graphical layout, by the time you trim, sanitize and otherwise disembowel that HTML for your teaser text, at best you'll have something dull, at worst you'll have something that wreaks havoc on the rest of your page. Gawker, however, automatically crops and resizes a photo as needed to create interesting, all-purpose graphic work that can be popped in wherever it pleases.

I was so jealous of the effect that I began working on my own Drupal module to copy it until I realize that, not only does such a module exist, but it's one of Drupal's most popular: ImageCache.

I've been working on a (secret-ish!) side project recently that hopes to index a lot of profiles, and allow people to browse through and compare those profiles as convenient.

One thing I'm struggling with at this early stage is the taxonomy architecture. For example, one taxonomy will probably end up being based on geography. My first impulse was to structure the taxonomy like this:
USA
-Northeast
--New England
---Massachusetts
----Greater Boston Area
-----Somerville
-Southeast
--Etc, etc, etc.

I have since been informed that this is insane, or at least a moderately bad idea, particularly in Drupal. So my next idea might be equally insane: Just allow everything to be free tagged with vague prompts and a catch-all parent taxonomy, or perhaps assign some root taxonomies (location, genre, medium) with free tagging.

By day, I primarily wear the "journalist" hat, but lately I've gotten involved with Spare Change News as a volunteer on the Development Committee. I'm sure I'll be writing more about them in the future, but suffice to say Spare Change is a street newspaper that's designed to be an accessible form of self-employment for homeless or formerly homeless individuals.

I was asked to help re-design their website:

So I'm working on the re-design which is going swimmingly and forcing me to work a bit more on Instant Design, but while I've found an excellent Drupal drop-down menu tutorial, I can't get rid of the damn unordered list bullet stylings, despite using the style: blank; tag or whatever it is.

The result is not pretty:
Spot

And that's why you're getting this wonky design rant rather than a post on SEO for journalists, like I've been planning for weeks.

Updated: I removed some spelling errors and a few rather unnecessary snarky remarks.