Posts Tagged ‘site updates’

Well, appar­ently my busi­ness should be slowing down right about now as everyone runs off on summer hol­i­days, but it’s emu­lating a steamship more than any­thing else. (Which is nice, except that my house looks like it’s been hit by a hur­ri­cane.) I’ve been insanely busy but have been trying to keep bal­anced (rel­a­tively speaking): I’m still (sort of) taking Sat­ur­days off, I bought a pretty vin­tage bicycle that I’m riding around town, and I’ve learned how to go swim­ming with a cast (held over my head, of course), and I ran off a few weeks ago and glis­tened (ladies don’t sweat, of course) my way through the epic heatwave/monsoons that hit Ottawa and Mon­tréal. It doesn’t really count as trav­eling, which will need to happen in the near future, but I was able to catch up with all sorts of won­derful people I haven’t seen in ages, which is just as good—if not better—for the soul.

I’m glad I’ve finally fig­ured out how to keep things bal­anced, at least a little—I remember one summer when I was on an intern­ship, and I was so deep in worka­holi­cism I didn’t go out at all. Sum­mers here are so brief, it’s nice to be able to enjoy them! I actu­ally have a suntan (although very few people believe it—basically I’m just “less glow-in-the-dark white) and have been run­ning around doing sum­mery things in spite of having spent nearly the last three months with my arm in a fibre­glass cage. (It comes off in six days! I am keeping a count­down, written in Sharpies, on the cast itself.)
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When I was working on my new design for this web­site, I spent a lot of time eval­u­ating my options for image dis­play, as it’s one of the most vital ele­ments of the site. I had very spe­cific require­ments for what I wanted, both in terms of the look & feel of the gal­leries, and the ease of imple­men­ta­tion. I spent for­ever looking through all sorts of Word­Press plu­gins, hacks, and stand­alone solu­tions, and even­tu­ally set­tled (grudg­ingly) on a Flash-based option: WP-Simpleviewer, based on the Sim­ple­Viewer plugin.

Of course, after spending for­ever (I stopped counting some­where along the line) spent making it work pre­cisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my port­folio is now dis­playing with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth hap­pened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My con­tact form plugin had also deac­ti­vated itself without my noticing some­where along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the Sim­ple­Viewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and imple­menting the change, so things are going to look ter­rible between now and then.) I found an alter­na­tive that I think will be better, and sim­pler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every port­folio post and upload new gal­leries: Gal­lifrey, based on Gal­ler­iffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll rec­og­nize this as The Doctor‘s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with Word­Press’ built-in gallery func­tions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to imple­ment my triple-bordered image dis­play that I wanted ini­tially for this site. Sim­ple­viewer, you were fan­tastic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

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I seem to go through phases of rapid devel­op­ment, fol­lowed by periods of stasis. I just real­ized, after having worked 35 hours in the past 3 days, that I’m in a “rapid devel­op­ment” phase. Or I’m just working so much that I can’t help but pick up things faster.

Anyway, new projects!

• Word­Press theme for Jaye Wells
• menu design
• web­site for Mar­ilyn Hicks
• and I’ve updated Marilyn’s iden­tity page, finally (more…)

I’ve had the cra­ziest last-little-while: per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally, oth­er­wise. I took my first vaca­tion in years and dis­ap­peared into the Mayan jungle for a week, and I’ve just recently returned from just shy of a full month spent on-the-road, living out of suit­cases and back­packs and the trunk of my car. It’s been utterly fabulous–exhausting and refreshing simul­ta­ne­ously, and just what I needed to return to my life & busi­ness with a clean brain & slate.

I have many sto­ries and pho­tographs, which are forth­coming. For now, two new projects: the hol­iday cards I mean to do every year, and a redesign and rearchi­tec­turing of Fer­n­wood Pub­lishing.

but appar­ently I’m not. I’ve actu­ally had “update web­site” on my to-do list for the last three or four weeks. In the past week it’s actu­ally been upgraded to “update web­site PLEASE” and “for the love of EVERYTHING, UPDATE WEBSITE ALREADY”. I’m starting to sus­pect it might be easier to switch over from my custom-built Ruby on Rails pow­ered site to a cus­tomized Word­Press site, which could easily handle every­thing my RoR is doing with a much easier-to-use backend (not that man­u­ally editing data­base fields isn’t easy).

I’ve been using Word­Press for every­thing lately, and have totally fallen in love with it. I seem to always be a little behind the curve on web trends (as a side note, I’m now on Twitter, though I still don’t really under­stand the point entirely) due to my gen­eral dis­taste for trends (if everyone likes it, it can’t pos­sibly be any good, right?). But I really wish I’d dis­cov­ered the power and flex­i­bility of Word­Press ear­lier on—it’s bril­liant and I’m begin­ning to use it for more and more of my client projects.

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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. (more…)

So con­trary to what the local paper reported, I am not, in actu­ality, a firm made up of three people, one of whom is named “Dinah LeChaton”. Dinah has actu­ally been missing since November, and Marigold returned to Ottawa, where she may con­tinue doing some client rela­tions work. I decided it was high time to bring on new staff. So I picked up Kalliope, an eager new talent whose skills include get­ting her­self tan­gled in plastic bags, finding a lap to curl up on even when said lap is cov­ered in laptop, and elim­i­nating the evil mon­sters who live under­neath bedsheets.

I am, nat­u­rally, enam­oured. (more…)

It’s only taken me about half a year, but I’ve finally crossed an item off my peren­ni­ally growing “to-do” list: add flash to port­folio. I’ve always been fond of this mono­logue from Fear & Loathing, and not solely because it seems like a shop­ping list for debauchery. While I was at it, I added a t&s time cap­sule chron­i­cling some of the var­ious dif­ferent designs this site has under­gone (that’s another strikeout on my to-do list). And then for good mea­sure (I was on a roll at this point), I added screen­shots of the Bram­bles Antiques website—both the public site and the admin panel. These days, I’m working with COPAN Off­shore to develop a logo for their new busi­ness, and am painting my bed­room walls a bright gold.

Bram­bles Antiques is finally fin­ished, com­plete with a fully func­tional backend admin panel. (Screen­shots to follow!) I spent a good long time re-re-re-designing T&S, to what is at least a tem­po­rary sat­is­fac­tion, and I’ve learned that I’m infi­nitely my pick­iest, most annoying, and most demanding client. And I’m refusing to work for myself ever again.

I’ve finally set­tled into Lunen­burg and am in the process of repainting my whole apart­ment, which is growing in scope expo­nen­tially every time I find more paint chips in a hard­ware store. I’ve just fin­ished the Ide­al­bikes web­site, and I’m cur­rently breaking the ice with two new clients, both based in Lunen­burg. New web­site should be coming soon, com­plete with a better design and more stuff to look at!