some history here

Outsideleft was founded by Alarcon and Lamont over more than a few rounds of drinks at Alarcon's local, the Olde Ship public house in Fullerton, California during the fall of '04. Lamont had the foresight (before the whiskey set in) to come up with the url outsideleft.com.

What does "outsideleft" mean? Most here in the office were perplexed too until Lamont explained during a staff-wide meetinga few days later... It's a football – or what you Americans call soccer – metaphor," Lamont said. "The outside-left is a glamorous position in the offense usually filled by a highly skilled player with great speed and technique who runs with the ball – runs around other players. A very attacking role on the field. What you might call an offensive role. And that's our apothegm too, Offense, Always. And there is the left-coast thing too."

Everyone was still confused.

It wasn't until Lamont reminded us that George Best played outside-left for the Manchester United Football Club that we were sold on the idea and had an intern register the url the same day, before some radical democrat thought of it.

Every element of outsideleft.com is given a unique catalog number, this website is out002. Our 2004 reader's poll (also known as The Golden Bootlace Awards), written well before there were readers, is out001. out003 was a semantics meeting at the aforementioned Olde Ship in Fullerton. It ended badly.

this design style
It is important to know that this website, in some respects and in our imagination, finds its antecendents in the sometimes loathed, sometimes loved International Style of architectural design. There are lots of clean lines here, lots of functional boxes, for every object an objective, little decoration and nothing without utility. We have an interest in the minimal and we believe the content to be the key.

technically speaking
When we started this, our goal was to build a site that would be available and appear identical across all web browsers. We don't necessarily pander to everyone anymore. If you are reading this and it looks weird or convoluted or all over the place, try a different web browser. Currently we spend most of our time on the web using Chrome, but newer IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari and others should work well. Also our current design lends itself reasonably well to mobile platforms too. Although we continue to think about a super stripped version utilizing more html5 than we currently do now.

We're onto only our third design iteration, with this one we have really tried to eschew anything that impacts the writing here. At some point we might have to figure out how to add some ads or something to generate some revenue, to pay our writers and our bills. Any ideas?