cybergeisha

I swore I’d go to bed early tonight.

You can see how well THAT worked out - it’s 4:30AM. It started at 1:15AM when I looked at my site and thought “Wow. I haven’t updated my webcam picture in MONTHS!” So I did. And then I thought “Hmm, well, I don’t use The List anymore, I might as well take that out.” Which led to some updates and pruning of my external links.

And then I started writing a new profile for myself. And then, and then, and then. And then, it was 4:30AM.

Since I’m proud of my tenacity in bringing Cybergeisha up to date, I’m writing a post about the update, instead of going to bed. I figured that the 1.5 people who read this would be on the edge of their seats in anticipation of a new post, and a new post on the site.

So, here: new material. I’m going to try and write here more - I’ve got a lot going on here in San Francisco and I’m sure all 1.5 of you would love to know about it.

You may have noticed back in the beginning of December that I suddenly stopped posting here. I had been posting a travel journal of my and Erik’s November road trip to San Francisco, but abruptly stopped about halfway through with no explanation. Any work on my site or Internet presence sort of went silent.

Well, I have an explanation - but I couldn’t let everyone know at the time. It was actually a much bigger secret than my Internet absence of the past few weeks. A huge secret, over which I was giddy for months, but required to maintain confidentiality until the project was public.

And now, it is. I can finally share this incredible, unbelievable awesomeness with the whole world.

I was finishing the Official Information Society Website!

I’ve taken on duties as the site administrator, so I will be doing the updates and such, in addition to having done the visual design and layout of the site - but the meaty tasty code underneath was only possible once I brought Erik on board to help. So indeed, I had somewhere to be. ;)

The Whole Story

Since August, I’ve been in communication with Paul Robb, of Information Society. When InSoc played in Portland last summer, I was so there. The day after the show, I visited the Information Society MySpace and clicked over to the “Official Website” link. There wasn’t anything there except a “coming soon” type splash page.

So, being the type of person I am, I clicked “E-mail This Person!” on the MySpace profile and sent an e-mail to Information Society saying I noticed they didn’t have a site up, and that I’m a web designer and would love to help out, gave a link to my portfolio and my e-mail address, and sent it off into cyberspace, thinking I’d never hear anything.

Not more than a few days went by before I found an e-mail from Paul in my inbox saying he liked my work, and I’ve been in contact and working with him on the project ever since. Given the confidential nature of the project, I couldn’t tell anybody - except Erik, who came onboard the project in October to do the high-level coding and debugging to get the site to be what I’d envisioned.

An Excused Absence

So why did I disappear? Because in early December, Paul said “Okay, let’s do this thing,” and we said “You got it,” kicked it into high gear and said we’d have the site ready to go live by the first week of January - and on 07 January 2007, the Official Information Society Website is finally online, and Erik and I have never been more proud of something we’ve produced.

visit the site now!

Welcome to Peace and Love, Inc.

I’ve updated the site - there’s now a page for my webcam and two new links on the sidebar. You can now view my iTunes iMix and my iCal Agenda - or subscribe to my iCal if you want! Fun, right?

I’ve had the webcam online since 1999, before CyberGeisha even existed, so it seemed only appropriate to keep it on the site. Now you can watch me do boring stuff whenever I remember to turn the webcam on. Will the excitement never end?

I spent a bit of time working on cybergeisha.net this morning.

I added a new page to the site titled The List. It is a list of things about which I’ve said “I should…” or “I need to learn to…” or “Before I die, I want to…” Basically, it is an ongoing roadmap to things I have done and want to do, in an attempt to look at my life and see where I want to go and show people the same.

In a less “deep/meaningful” update, I’ve also added a graphical link to My Flickr Account, which updates with recent photos as I upload them to Flickr. I have also added a link to my bookmarks on del.icio.us. Additionally, I fixed a bunch of little things that were irritating me about the layout of the site, and I doubt that the average reader will notice but I feel a lot better about the design now. Oh, especially because the content area doesn’t look so lame and skinny anymore. The whole site is really coming together.

In the near future, I am planning to submit a few t-shirt designs on ThreadLess.com, so I have a Profile there - I already have a few slogans/text logos up for voting, so you should get an account and vote for me ;)

I’ve been running this site for five years, almost six, and I’m sick of manually maintaining something as complex as a blog - the tedious process of posting a new article to my site is the biggest deterrent from writing. And that’s when I remembered WordPress, which didn’t sound “fantastic” at the time, but I gave it a shot, anyhow.

So does it Rock, or Not?!

I really thought I’d hate WordPress. I honestly did. It looked like a combination of Blogger and LiveJournal. Now, I will own up to the fact that I’ve kept a LiveJournal for over five years, but I would also rather stick a fork in my eye than try and integrate LiveJournal with my site.

Okay, it rocks

I was WRONG. WordPress? It’s absolutely phenomenal. It validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict straight out of the box - no bull. You can make your own design OR use one of the tons of design templates available. And it’s FREE. No advertising whatsoever. I’m amazed.

OS X 10.4 Dashboard Widget Available

One of the biggest things I wanted to be able to do was post to my site without a hassle. WordPressDASH is a simple, easy-to-use dashboard widget that allows you to post from a small window in Dashboard. It’s already indespensible.

Mint-egration

It doesn’t stop there, either. I use Mint to monitor/analyze my web traffic, but it has a little trouble working with WordPress - I was going to be seriously bummed out, too, until I saw that someone had developed a WordPress Plugin Module that SPECIFICALLY is designed to integrate Wordpress and Mint - no hassle, no validation issues!

Seriously, it rocks

Really. WordPress really rocks hard. It’s free, you can’t beat that. It’s easy to install, easy to use, easy to set up and easy to customize. It’s standards compliant and fully functional. And fun! So expect to hear a lot more from me, I’m thrilled with how well this is working out!