This blog while originally setup as a demonstration of CSS/HTML skills and knowledge of blogging and CMS platforms has been attracting an increasing number of random visitors. One reason for this is that wordpress has automatic optimization of your blog posts for keyword and blogsearch hits (titles as fixed urls etc). For a business this is important for me I’m a bit indifferent to the casual visitor. So far I’ve mostly been getting visitors interested in biking around brooklyn, or curious as to why the MTA has weird kerning/fonts on some subway signs. One thing that has formed a pattern is that my blog posts achieve the most views the day they are posted and trail off afterwards. This might have something to do with the nature in which google ranks the relevance and importance of a blog post compared to a conventional web page.  Wikirecording.org a site that I setup with a friend a few years ago that while now inactive (with a lack of an admin or participatory user base) achieves increased hits/viewers every month (20k+ uniques).

Maybe now that my blog has the following sentence I’ll get visitors to the blog wanting to employ me. ”A NYU graduate, active and interested in new media marketing, venture capital, urban planning, economic development, entrepreneurial pursuits, graphic design, and web development.”

My friend Laura of Unheard.tv is managing the artist Matt Jones. As part of her press kit she wanted a downloadable album that was password protected. I looked at the mailform script I recently used for the better ventures site and turned it into a simple password check using the “ereg” property. I also laid out  a one sheet site for her. Check it out here: http://unheard.tv/mattjones.html.

Not one but two websites i’ve been working on are nearing completion. Both (You can now see the Better Ventures in its new home) are still living on my testing server but are being moved over to their new domains shortly. The first is for a nonprofit called Ace NC that is working on setting up a new fundraising program selling these university fan covers. I set them up with a wordpress install so that they could edit the content easily for it. The second is for some friends of mine in Asheville that have a fairly new company called Better Ventures. The logo/identity was already done by Josh from Music Allies but I’ve been working on setting up a website for them. I got to do a bit of coding in php for the email list. It’s a lot easier than I anticipated and it’s the first time i’ve used my php coding for something real, and not just my own testing purposes.

Fan Fashions Logo

The Mailing List PHP app

I saw this video courtesy of the Design Observer. More than the engaging video it made me think about how in a few years the narrator, (an archivist librarian of sorts) job will be gone. Already most of these images/requests can be found via a simple google search. Time Magazine has put tens of thousands of their archived images into the google image search and more from other huge libraries/archives are soon to follow. I wrote a few days ago about the Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines being scanned and placed online. We have a convergence of not only ubiquitous access to these previously closed off or private images and video with a complete inability to preserve the digital data. While it is easy to copy and paste and send out 10 or even a million digital versions of the file, attempting to preserve it is a monstrously difficult undertaking. Digital movies cost far more to backup and preserve than their older film cousins because of the rate of hard drive failure and the rapid rate of technology platforms becoming outdated.

P.S. I think this video appealed to me because I still have a soft spot for animation having gotten into it back in middle/high school. (both flash and stop motion) I recently got to do some stop motion with my TEFL class of 11-13 yr olds in Spain. Because of time constraints they came out more like stop motion comic strips but the kids really seemed to enjoy it. iStopmotion + a digital camera is cheap and a great stop motion app, back in the 90’s to do this with an analog lunchbox cost $$$$ or digital required an expensive copy of Adobe Premiere. Here is one students video.

Update 12/31/08: I hadn’t heard of the flickr commons until today. It looks like another instance of institutions beginning to digitize and allow the public access to their archives. via Wired