If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers
Filed Under Blog, Fun, Internet, The Funny, Web Standards & Design
I did freelance web design full time for almost two years, trying to support myself while I was unemployed. A lot of the time, the people would know they wanted a website, but not know how to give me any input about their needs or wants for the site. Often, I used this piece of writing (unfortunately, I do not know who originally wrote it) to explain how NOT to interact with your web development professional.
Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.
Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).
As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)
Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.
To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.
Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.
However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.
Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.
While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.
Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.
You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.
Sincerely,
John Q. Public
PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.
PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case..
Information Society Website
Filed Under Art, Blog, Fun, Information Society, Internet, Meta, News, Personal, Web Standards & Design, Work
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.
Welcome to Peace and Love, Inc.
A Few Updates
Filed Under Meta, Web Standards & Design
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?
Getting Used to Wordpress
Filed Under Blog, Meta, Web Standards & Design
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!
Testing… Testing.
Filed Under Blog, Meta, Web Standards & Design
Well, it seems as though I have made it through yet another site redesign without pulling my hair out, killing my roommates, or screwing up my server. What do y’all think of the new design?
