I felt like it was time to do some tweaking this morning, so I changed some stuff on my blog and on Collage.
Let me say this right off the bat: Subscribe to or bookmark Collage instead of this blog. Collage reads in EVERYTHING I do – not just blog posts. You’ll get all of my pictures from Flickr, any YouTube vids I post, and a ton more. More sources will be added soon-ish. Of course, if you read my posts through Facebook or something like that, it doesn’t really apply to you. I’d love to have you read or subscribe to Collage anyway!
In fact, here are the only links you need: Read Collage | Subscribe to Collage
I wanted to make Collage even more appealing. Two Cents and a Thousand Words has kind of gone by the wayside as far as usefulness is concerned, and I’ve pretty much used it only as an outlet to inject Collage with content that won’t fit anywhere else. You won’t miss a thing if you subscribe to Collage instead of this blog; everything here ends up there. I added a list of sources to each Collage section, and I also added a little description of what each page shows. I think I finally squashed the time bug, too, that’s been showing incorrect times since I moved my site to a different server (in California) this summer. I now understand why lots of Web apps use relative time instead of absolute time.
At the same time, I didn’t want to lose all faith in the blog. If you’re coming to comment on a post or if you just find the blog in a search engine, I’ve scaled down the number of categories I use to be more content-driven than topic-driven. In other words, if you want to see my “photoblog” (stories and events that revolve around the photos I take), check out the Photography category. For project updates, check My Work. I may go back and re-associate everything, but don’t hold your breath. You’re on your own for older posts. I almost have 700 blog posts, after all.
Questions or comments? Get in touch with me. More to come soon, of course.
I enjoy keeping my friends and family in the loop about up-and-coming technologies. In that spirit, learn about three in this week’s Edge tekk article, Groups, Tweets, and Avatars.
If you follow my Collage, you may have noticed that photos have been strangely absent from my work lately. Tonight I uploaded a few photos I took downtown today along the Kenduskeag Stream. It was hard to capture the magnitude of the water level in photos.
What the heck is del.icio.us and why should you use it?
Sounds like a great topic for an Edge tekk article to me.
By the way – if you enjoy reading what I write, I may have a new venue or two coming up soon. More details later, if they work out.
Up for a read on the future of mobile phones? You guessed it – it’s another column in The Maine Edge.
Do you remember the days before your cell phone? Do you remember the time before you had your first MP3 or CD player? Mobile technology advances at a quick pace, and it’s tough to keep up with the latest gadgets.
Read iEverything now (and get a free bonus pic of my pants!).
Business cards are a big thing for me. I’ve had many in my lifetime: Russell Recycling Center, Russell’s Shoppe, the JRHO Railroad, Justin’s Detective Agency, and the perennial favorite, Justin’s Library. (Have I mentioned my lifelong entrepreneurial spirit lately?)
Well, it’s time for me to create some (real) business cards. After BarCamp Manchester, I really found that business cards can be a good thing to have on hand. I felt as though handing out my Sephone ones alone wasn’t enough (especially because I wasn’t representing Sephone at BCM). I’ve always wanted to have a personal business card to cover my other interests – most notably my photography and my personal site. I also wanted a card that could lead people to find out all of the basics about me… and that’s what I believe that justinrussell.com now does.
BCM attendee Dave Seah detailed the creation of his personal business card on his blog. (I made a point to grab one from him at BarCamp.) I still contend that IANAD (I am not a designer), but I’ve created something that I think fits with the general motif of justinrussell.com:
Comments, as always, are welcome.
For those interested, the follow-up to my Your Media – Your Way article in The Maine Edge last week is now available. The title is (creatively) Your Media – Your Way, Part II. Go read it now or pick up a paper in the Bangor area this week.
I suggested podcasts that I believe everyone should see or hear at least once. In fact many of the ones I recommended are the ones from my Podcast Update entry in November. If you’d like more local (Maine) podcasts, fellow Maine Web dev guy Jason Clarke posted an entry to his blog listing some by-Mainer-for-Mainer podcasts – including one he does with another Maine Web dev, Lance Dutson.
Full disclosure: I love co-opetition. Mitch explains that a bit in a podcast interview (around 9:40).
So what was all of that Virginia schwag about, anyway? Well, last month I was contacted by the Virginia Tourism Corporation to ask for permission to use a few of my images from the Folk Festival last year. They’re doing a new project down there to promote the Crooked Road. You can go to the site and have a customized song delivered to your friends based on some options you select on the site.
And best of all, it’s performed by none other than No Speed Limit and sung by the wonderfully talented Amber Collins. The melody sounds strikingly familiar to the title track of their latest CD, Sweet Virginia. I really can’t say enough about both No Speed Limit and Amber herself; the band gave one of the best musical performances I’ve seen last year, and Amber has such power and range in her voice. There’s a reason why they’re one of my favorite bands.
So if you have a few spare minutes, check out the Build-a-Lyric Song Generator; Amber will sing a song for you. While you’re there, you can learn about one of the richest musical regions in the country. One of my favorite songs was first recorded down that way around 1923 about a now-famous Virginia train wreck.
Great job to everyone who worked on the site – I’m glad I could help with a small part of it.
Have you heard of podcasting but don’t really understand what it is? Do you want to find out where it might be heading in the future? Do you like… well, do you like reading my writing?
If you answered in the affirmative to any of those questions, you’ll probably want to read Your Media – Your Way, a “tekk” feature in this week’s The Maine Edge written by yours truly.
For those of you in the Bangor area, pick up a copy if you prefer. For those of you reading from afar, The Maine Edge is a new weekly paper in the Bangor area aimed at 18-44 year olds.
Oh, and if you’re interested, that Web site is the kind of thing I do at work. Just so you know.
I’ve spent the majority of today enjoying some long-overdue snow and redesigning justinrussell.com. It’s been just over two years since I did an overhaul of my home page, and a few things led me to expedite its modernization. I’d like to go into my thought process a little bit (if nothing else, it will serve as a debriefing for my very scattered mind).
I’d like to think that the justinrussell.com redesign is the first of my next generation of Web sites and services. I’d really love to have a lot of my ideas completed this year, but I decided to start out with something familiar to ease myself back into the whole dev-on-the-side thing. justinrussell.com has a much more prominent design focus than ever before, and it also combines a few concepts I’ve been contemplating over the last months and years.
I’ll be honest; I’m not a designer. I can make usable interfaces, but I become lost when it comes to the artistic side of design. I prefer minimal design, and I like being able to easily focus on the main sections of the page without being distracted.
As you’ll notice, I’ve reduced the number of pages on the site. In fact the justinrussell.com page is not much more than a simple splash page that acts as a gateway to each of my “personalities”. Someone concluded a reply to a comment I made on a Flickr photo with the following:
I really like the way you have bound together your online identities at www.justinrussell.com/
To be honest, I always thought I lacked that. The new design really drives the point home that I divide my time between my interests, and I enjoy each equally.
You’ll also notice that my contact information is much more prominent on this version. I’ve had a couple of comments recently that people were unable to find a phone number for me, and they actually called me at work because I guess it was the only phone number on the Web remotely linked to me in any way. My (206) 350-HI-JR is now on every page, and there’s a link to a new contact page where you can find all of my relevant contact information, social networking links, and even a new message form to make sure whatever you have to say gets past the dreaded spam filters.
But honestly, it all comes down to Collage. Collage is really the epitome of what I wanted ufeed to be, and I’ve been working on and off on it since I launched the site. Quite simply, it is a central place to find my work, favorites, comments, and recommendations. If you’d like to stay on top of what I’m doing, go to Collage. As of right now you’ll see posts from my blog, Flickr images, YouTube videos, del.icio.us links, and more. It’s also easy to add other sources as they arise. I really don’t want to make you check five different sites, so just head to Collage.
That’s about it for the new justinrussell.com. Check it out and let me know what you think. It will change over time, but the general focus will probably stay the same for some time to come. I’m excited for what’s coming.
(Oh, one last thing – I’ve installed a comment filter on my blog. Just answer the simple math question and you’ll be good to go when you post a comment. Sorry for the extra field, but I really don’t like five-digit comment spam counts.)
Well, we’re here. Best wishes to you and everyone you care about this year.
I’ve been doing some identity updating already this year, and I’ve decided to try some new stuff, too; I can now say that I’m officially a YouTuber. For the second year in a row, I went downtown to the ball drop. Last year I had photos. This year I have, well, photos again, of course… but there’s video, too!
Happy new year. I’m excited.
