My longtime web host, pair.com, shut down Panopticist for two hours yesterday afternoon because of the burst of traffic I’ve gotten in the week since I relaunched the site. That wasn’t cool, so I’ve ported everything over to a different web host, Media Temple. If you notice anything wonky, please let me know in the comments or via email (hearst@nyc.rr.com). Thanks…

Hello. As of yesterday there have been some major changes around here. I’ve spent the last two weeks adding a search engine, tweaking the layout and typography, putting in place a robust tagging scheme, creating a big master archive page, and adding lots of other little bits of functionality.

Apart from the tags and the search engine, which allow the slicing and dicing of Panopticist content in all kinds of new ways, the biggest change is to the layout itself. Inspired by the brilliant work of Khoi Vinh and the people behind the Blueprint CSS framework (which itself was inspired by people like Khoi), I’ve killed the cluttery left sidebar and added some code that allows me to run much wider graphics and videos by pulling them out to the left using negative margins. Videos like the one featured in “High-Def Backyard Shootout” can now run almost 600 pixels wide, when previously they were limited to the 380-pixel width of the center column. This opens up some great new possibilities, like the ability to run the magazine covers much larger than I could before:

Underlying everything is a nine-column grid that has been subdivided into one or two smaller grids.

One genius aspect of Khoi’s approach is that it solves a great web-specific design conundrum: When a column is wide enough to accommodate large graphics, the type size often has to be scaled up so it matches the proportions of the column width—and this can throw off the balance of the whole layout. In print, big graphics don’t have to mean big type, but on the web they often do. By keeping the type in a relatively thin column and pulling graphics out into the whitespace (er, brownspace) at left, these two priorities no longer clash—and it also results in a much more dynamic and exciting layout, because visual elements can burst through the boundaries of the columns. Imprisoned no more!

There have been some other major changes here too. Inspired by the fun all the cool kids are having with their Tumblrs, I’ve tweaked Movable Type to allow me to post some new kinds of content quickly: first, a linked, styled quote I’ve dubbed a Callout; second, embedded mp3s, which I can now post with a few clicks; and third, Five-Word Links, which used to be a separate element but are now integrated into the larger blog, with their own archive page and everything.

That’s it for now. If you notice anything awry, I hope you’ll email me at hearst@nyc.rr.com and let me know.

Hello. You may notice that I’ve made some subtle changes to Panopticist over the last month or two. I’ve widened the layout, locked many page elements to a grid (thanks partly to the awesome Blueprint CSS framework), and upgraded Movable Type to version 4, among other things. If anything seems horribly awry, you might email me at hearst [at] nyc.rr.com and let me know.

I’ve also turned comments on, starting with this post, so chime in if you feel like it.

And now, a post:

After a couple of years of occasional YouTube searches, I recently found one of my favorite old Sesame Street songs. It’s called “Lower-case N,” and it’s a melancholy but ultimately redemptive ballad about a lonely letterform.

About two months ago I did a minor overhaul of this site’s design. I called it a redesign, but it didn’t really involve much more than moving some elements from one place to another.

But this, this, my friends, is a redesign. I’ll still be tweaking some things, but it’s mostly done. Everything appears to be working fine on my end. If you notice anything that seems to be broken, you might drop me a line: hearst [at] nyc.rr.com.

More soon. If you recognize the quote that’s currently running underneath the main header, you are cool and I like you.

UPDATE, 10:15 a.m.: Everything looked fine when I tested the redesign in four or five browsers in Mac OS X last night. I’m now at work and looking at the site in Mozilla for Mac OS 9, and a handful of elements are off by a few pixels. Not sure if I’ll bother to try to figure out how to fix these minor issues so the layout completely works in Mozilla/Netscape. It looks fine in Internet Explorer 5.1 for OS 9. For those of you keeping score at home.

Your browser isn’t playing tricks on you: I’ve juggled some page elements, added a few new graphics, and tweaked some other things to make the site’s design a little more attractive and versatile. I had been feeling limited by the original design, in which the main column was flanked by two thinner sidebars. This new format, with the main column on the left and the two thinner columns on the right, will free up some page space for me to highlight older posts and call attention to various other things. The old design also wasn’t very conducive to quick, short posts; now, in the right-hand column, there’s a box called “Five Quick Links” that I’ll update regularly with one-line links to cool stuff I find.

I’m not totally done with the overhaul; I’ll still be adding a few little features here and there. But most of the elements are in place. If anything seems totally out of whack, you might drop me a line—I’ve checked everything in Safari, Explorer, Firefox, and Omniweb (all for the Mac), and everything seems groovy…

A little shameless self-promotion: My Us Weekly-as-Harper’s cover from February is featured today in The New York Post’s weekly Hot List, coming in at number five. (The cover graphic appears in the paper’s print edition but not the online edition.) Also on this week’s Hot List, which is compiled and written by Maureen Callahan: The Daily Show: Indecision 2004, the first-ever DVD from that great show, and Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin, the latest book by Freaks and Geeks co-creator Paul Feig.

This is hilarious: The fake Parents magazine cover I created for this website a couple of months ago has propagated itself all over the web, and now it’s earned its own page on Snopes.com, the excellent website that debunks or confirms urban legends. The cover’s distribution gained significant momentum last week when one of the friendly guys at Boing Boing posted it without realizing it was a joke (and without knowing where it came from). He quickly posted a clarification, but the ball was already rolling: The cover has been pulled out of context and posted in all sorts of places (32,615 hits on i-am-bored.com!), almost always by people who had no idea where it came from. Lots of people have thought the cover is real, so Snopes stepped in to debunk it.

In the post where I originally published the cover, I didn’t pretend it was real. I just meant for it to be an amusing (if juvenile) riff on a growing trend in magazine-cover design. So it’s bizarre to see the cover get taken out of context, and to watch credulous people actually wonder if it’s real.

A totally inadvertent hoax! Huzzah!

By the way: If you’re wondering what the name of this site means, or what the word’s origins are, you might be interested in reading the first item I ever posted, way back in mid-January…

In case you’re wondering, some giant media conglomerate beat me to the domain name hearst.com, so that wasn’t a possibility.

The name of this site is derived from panopticon, a word the British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) used for the name of an ingenious new kind of prison he spent years devising in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The word comes from the Greek words for “all” and “sight.” As Bentham conceived it, the panopticon would be a kind of ultimate surveillance machine: Prison cells would be arrayed around the inside of a huge circular space, and a hidden sentry would observe from inside a single tower in the center of the space. The sentry would be able to see all the prisoners without being seen himself; the prisoners would never know if or when they were being monitored. Thus the prisoners would have to be on their best behavior at all times. The prisoners would be forced to internalize their own subjugation, and the sentry would be rendered more or less unnecessary. Bentham tried to get a panopticon built, but he was never quite successful. His ideas eventually influenced the design of prisons such as Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, which was built in 1829. The concepts behind the panopticon also influenced the architecture of other kinds of institutional buildings, including some hospitals, which obviously have a similar need for efficient ways to monitor large numbers of people simultaneously.

Bentham conceived of the panopticon as a benign system that would result in prisons that were more humane, but of course its implications are hugely disturbing. Today the panopticon is famous mainly because of its analysis by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who saw it as an utterly diabolical concept and a metaphor for “the oppressive use of information in a modern disciplinary society,” as David Engberg puts it on a website called The Virtual Panopticon. For Foucault, whose analysis appears in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the panopticon concept also signaled a historical shift from “punishment” that targeted the body to “discipline” that targeted the mind and soul. I’ve oversimplified things here; you can read more about these ideas and their influence on this page.

Anyway, I’m interested in all these ideas, but they aren’t going to be the focus of this site. In the 19th century the word panopticon also came to be used as the name for a kind of hands-on museum where a wide variety of objects were on display, and that’s a suitably vague description of what this site will be. I’m very interested in the media in general and magazines in particular, so there will be a lot about that sort of thing here. I’m kind of a pack rat when it comes to magazines, so I’ll regularly be sharing things from my collection, including a number of inadvertently hilarious guitar magazines from the hair-metal era. Yngwie!