This is where I rant, ramble, or report the goings-on in my life, profession, or the world at large. Travel, photography, kitsch, and design -- just about any topic is likely to make an appearance. So while I'm chewing the cud, why don't you chime in with a thought or two of your own. I'd love to hear what you've got to say.
Near Pier 1 in San Francisco there is a nice art installation of images on marble slabs in a Ben-day dots style, similar to Pointillism. Using the macro setting on my camera, I took some extreme closeups to capture the graphical patterns.
Lee LeFever of CommonCraft does a great job explaining the value of Twitter using paper cut-outs in this two-minute video. Being new to Twitter myself, I initially didn’t get what it was all about and then when I tried converting a friend recently, I found it all the more difficult to explain it’s value. The video simplifies the message just as the tagline suggests, “in plain English.”
(Source: CommonCraft on YouTube.)
Taking my daily stroll through the World Wide Web, I came across the website for Schematic, an interactive agency (via Communication Arts). Using Flex and Flash, the whole of the website is featured as one big page, which you can navigate using a traditional menu or by using controls to zoom in and out of the site’s content. It reminds me of the project by Jeff Raskin wherein you can, theoretically, zoom infinitely into the website’s content in order to view the minute details of a map or image while still remaining within the original spatial context of the web page. Similarly, this past summer at the TED conference, Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft Live Labs demonstrated Photosynth, which, putting it simply, reconstructs three-dimensional space by compiling images into a highly mutable, scalable, and navigable visual representation of a physical location. These technologies seem to be breaking away from conventional hierarchies and silos of information. Instead, by flattening the virtual landscape and creating new interactions and relationships between documents and data, users can begin to experience more personalization and control in how they choose to navigate a website or system.
Phew! Without further adieu, I am finally pleased to announce the launch of my newly updated website.
One of the primary factors for redesigning the website was to migrate it to a content management system (CMS). Since it’s a relatively small site, I chose to go with the open source platform of WordPress. Using a CMS should, in theory, make it far easier to maintain.
It’s been a lot of fun (and sometimes frustrating) working with WordPress and the various plugins and if fun is a factor then you can always count on being more involved. Any time I had to update the previous website design, which was entirely static, it was so arduous, that I just kept putting it off. Now I’m even planning new projects and topics just so I have an excuse to add content to the site.
I thought I’d take a few moments to summarize all the tools I used or incorporated into the website. This being my first endeavor into a full blown, customized WordPress website, I often knew how I wanted the website to behave but didn’t know how to achieve it. Through trial and error and slowly refined search terms, I eventually found all the tools that helped me achieve my goals. Hopefully, the list below will help you bypass some of the frustration I experienced being a newbie.
Bender would be so envious. Japanese toymaker Take-G, has an amazing set of wooden robots that would put their metal counterparts to shame.
[Take G via Gizmodo via Crib Candy via Boing Boing]
