A good ending to a productive weekend.  I’ll need to experiement with this blog when I have more time; maybe in the New Year.

Hopefully I’ll be able to upgrade the back end today, and work on the design later.

El Jardin de la Nina Maria and Serra Boston are due for upgrades too.

Upgrades upgrades everywhere…

UPDATE 8/23: Upgraded the blog; thanks again to Bluehost the upgrade went smoothly and is now running on SimpleScripts.

So how’d I do? Not particularly well.

The first 5 months started well enough. 1 blog post a day – even if I didn’t have something to write I put up a link or a photo.  After that I kept it up a bit, using this blog’s archive to make sure every blog post had a different number.  There were a few good posts, but in general I think I generated more noises than signals.

I also think that blogging can be a sign of idleness, rather than activity.  This year I’ve been more active than ever: Ireland, Austin, the Eucharistic Congress, Serra Boston.  Working extra hours and coming into my own on the job.

This year, it’s more about the content.   Less frequent posts, but what posts there are should be more substantial.

1. Upload photos from last week’s Ireland trip to Flickr
2. Fix the home page of www.jobriga.com – it disappeared one day, probably due to mistaken uploads/downloads on my part.  Due for a redesign anyway.
3. Recover from head cold picked up on the last day of Ireland trip
4. Blog more often
5. Finish cooking class
6. Finish the amazing new translation of War & Peace that I started in Ireland
7. Keep an eye on the Boston Eucharistic Congress site which I released before leaving for Ireland
8. Bulk up web site – more portfolio items, more journal entries, more individual sections and pages

Lots of ideas; little time to execute them.

My little experiment in customized publishing channels wasn’t really worth it – I don’t blog often enough to justify the feeds, and I think they’re cluttering up the category listing on the right.  It’s also a bit of a pain to check off “Facebook” whenever I want to send a note to my Facebook account.

From now on, all blog posts go to Facebook, and the category list should look way cleaner.

Various plugins stopped working; I got errors about post categories and found this post from WordPress.  I deactivated and deleted some plugins and now it works like a charm.

Some fixes may not come up till I get to play with the site a bit more, but overall it looks like the upgrade went smoothly.

Still not one hundred percent there.  The center column of content is pretty much where I want it to be (much more scannable than the old version) but the sidebar on the right seems out of place, and the header on top should be blue, not black.

Getting further into this requires some PHP work and CSS which I fear is beyond me at 1am late on a Friday, after a productive week of work.  Off to bed, and maybe some additional work tomorrow.

Followup from a previous post on cleaning out the blog categories.

I’m trying to tie the categories into the front page of my site – the basic idea being that the top-level pages of www.jobriga.com have compact high-level information, with links to more dense, updated information lower down in the site’s hierarchy.

It’s official. The age of the static brand is coming to an end. Organisations, companies, institutions, even charities are realizing that having identity schemes that ‘flex’ and adapt to circumstances are more appropriate in the multi-channel, multi-lingual world that brands now inhabit.

Over-controlled brands are starting to look stiff and old-fashioned, but not all clients (and certainly not all design companies) have yet woken up to this latest shift.

…the benefits of developing fluid, flexible systems to encompass everything from fonts, to colours, to words, to images, to logos are enormous – with a bit of hard work and a good idea an organization stops being about just a logo and gains a complete visual and verbal language.

More here.

Johnson Banks has a pretty sweet web site of their own showing how to minimize the logo while showcasing their ability.

Interesting to me, as I rethink this web site (yet again). How best to communicate the “Jobriga” identity on a blog, a wiki, a portfolio, and an about page? The icon I’ve used for Flickr and other online resources actually seems to translate well – it’s not reducible to business card size but I like the play of black and white on the left and color on the right. Not sure if it’ll translate to a full visual identity for this web site, but could be a useful starting point.

Where will you be in 10 years?

Joe Gallagher: In the prime of my life.

Too true, too true.

Here’s to the next decade!