Essays by Danielle Fong

I have been inspired by great writers. Many who came before me have powerfully influenced my heart, mind and action. For too long I’ve held idle intention, to somehow cast my thoughts into the written word. I demanded too much of myself immediately: my thoughts too sacred for the words I could produce, the challenge of writing them too frightening. A pen too sacred wicks neither ink nor ideas.

The best writing is rewriting. I must be less afraid to tear down what I have built, and I must be far less afraid to expose it. The best writing, as the best code is, has withstood a thousand piercing eyes, and bettered for it. Most importantly, I must produce! I will strive to look dispassionately in the cold light of morning.

I will refrain from releasing works to the public rashly. I will strive to write at my kindest and wisest. And I will not fade from discussing what has affected me strongly, from wisdom I have needed most, and what I have fought hardest to learn.

Technical Notes:

This site runs on wordpress.com, and not my own servers. The relative lack of control hurts me somewhat (as I’m not allowed to embed javascript), but I make do by using RSS feeders and paying for the advanced CSS options. These disadvantages are far outweighed by the fact that I don’t have to run a separate server. This allows me to deftly avoid a particular kind of dirty work that I don’t enjoy, and concentrate on the things that I do.

The text is justified with a simple CSS statement (text-align: justify). I noticed a few typography blogs had justified text, and I was thoroughly impressed. It took embarrassingly long for me to figure out just how they did it. I noticed a bunch of unicode within the main text, and assumed they were compiled spacers. In fact, it’s been a feature around since Netscape/IE 4.