infundibulum

When I can’t think of something to work on, sometimes I will try cloning the broad outlines of the designs of random websites (without looking at the css), just to see how quickly I can hackup n-column layouts, headers, blah blah blah.

In just such a mood the other night, I asked myself what the average width of left navigation bars is across a variety of sites. 100px? 15%? What?

So, by coincidence I happened to have recently read Dave Sifry’s latest State of the Blogosphere and he has a chart of some very popular websites. So, I decided to do a little survey.

Using my handly ruler bookmarklet from centricle.com, I went through all the sites (yes, I’m obsessive) on Sifry’s list and measured how wide their left sidebars were in pixels.

The results surprised me: about half of them didn’t have left sidebars at all.

Here’s my table. The rows with a light red background don’t have a left sidebar at all. As you can see, it’s about 50/50.

What seems to be the trend (especially among news sites) is to put the navigation stuff in a horizontal nav bar across the top, and a large feature story (often with an image) flush left. Perhaps this trend has to do with generally increasing screen width?

I spent a few hours tonight poking around in the American University library tonight, and as usual I headed for the “P” section… “PM,” as it happened.

That would be languages… Hyperborean, Indian and artificial languages, according to the ever-aleatoric Library of Congress classification. (Ugh, Shirky was right; ontology is overrated.)

The one I ended up reading was Dakota Grammar: With Texts and Ethnography. I didn’t dig too deeply but it looked like a nice, competent, descriptive piece of work. There a text of a related language (Omaha) at Project Gutenberg with the interlinear text and everything, from an edition recorded by the same anthropologist: Illustration Of The Method Of Recording Indian Languages by James Owen Dorsey.

Now, here’s an honest question, one to which I don’t know the answer: that book is listed as having been published in 2004. But it was actually first published by the Government Printing Office in 1893. Now, doesn’t that mean that the book is in the public domain? Could I go and scan the whole thing and put it on the web, or would that be (by some reasoning unbeknownst to me) a violation of the Minnesota Historical Society edition?

Also interesting: Tampa, Follow the Stories: Lakota Dictionary