Lazy Sundays

Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m determ­ined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two minutes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two minutes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rearranging.

Actu­ally, the most dra­matic upgrade has already happened, and that was my finally giving in to the whole “blog” phe­nomenon. It took years, but I finally buckled, and I’m sort of enjoying it. What sold me on Word­Press is how mon­strously simple it is—I actu­ally started using it the place of a word pro­cessor, and I find it much smarter: it auto-saves con­stantly (good for those of us prone to data loss), it’s totally un-bloaty, it’s faster than typing out my own html, and it auto-formats my smart quotes. God, I love smart quotes. I actu­ally spent an hour or so today format­ting a client’s novel to get rid of all the dumb quotes, hyphens, and “period” ellipses. I don’t know why these tiny details are so important to me–but I sus­pect that there’s a place where the grammar-fascist in me meets the typo­phile, and proper typo­graphy is born. Or maybe it’s just that I, embarass­ingly enough, didn’t know about smart quotes and such for so long that I now con­sider them to be some­thing of a litmus test for “quality” design?

Smart quotes aside, the news/blog sec­tion has all been redone, and I like it a lot, and may even get into the habit of using it more fre­quently. Word­Press is really great and easy to develop themes for (once you figure out what you’re doing), which I’ve been doing of late for Lilith Saintcrow, who writes novels about girls who kick ass and take names (all told, the best kind of lady). I’ve got a couple more weblog-based web­sites in the works, so I’m learning a lot these days.

On a side note, why is there always an ele­phant (in the room) on my to-do list? I’m a notorious list-maker, and I’ll some­times pri­or­itize my lists in order of import­ance, not that I follow my own order reli­giously. For example, today I’m at #12, but #3 is still sit­ting there patiently, un-crossed, with three exclam­a­tion marks fol­lowing it. It’s the most vital thing on my list, but I’m bet­ting it’ll be the one thing that’ll end up being neg­lected. Is this some kind of sub­con­scious self-mutilation wherein I’ll always sab­otage myself for the work that is most important? How do I trick myself into thinking “eat three tubs of chocolate fudge icing” is the Ele­phant Task, instead? I’ve read a few productivity-type tips that recom­mend things like offering to wash a friend’s car, or pay them $50, if you don’t com­plete the Ele­phant by the end of the day (the theory being that we’re all inher­ently lazy, and the only way to make us do some­thing is by threat­ening us with some­thing more unpleasant), but I feel like that’s somehow com­pounding the pres­sure of the situ­ation, thereby inflating the psychic block.

Anyone know how to take down an Ele­phant (or a run-on sentence)?

Tags: chocolate, design, diatribes, process, productivity, projects, resources, site updates, typography, websites