Sometime after 2006 I was unable to balance my time between payroll-type work, design-work, blogging, and tending to the design of my site. Every year I would feel the itch to redesign my site, trying to get a great “look” for it while juggling other responsibilities. This year, I decided I would take a break and actually do what I want with the site.

Richmond is a redesign based on principles offered by the 960 Grid System, minus the crufty markup and non-sensical class names for positioning and sizing. I have always been a markup freak, and while my work is far from perfect (gotta love those clearing line breaks!), I strive for it with every project. Buckling a few trends on the post Web 2.0 aesthetic of drop shadows, 3-d layered affects, handwriting fonts and visual cues for the illiterate, I concentrated on a more abstract aesthetic. While grunginess has been associated with vintage effects and material distress, I used the same brushes to aim for a fiery afterglow.

As an avid photographer with a desire to once more share his photos with the world, I chose to use a dark background to help my shots jump out of the page. My photos are generally shot on a vivid setting, and the colors stand out against the background of the site itself. For those who are first-time visitors as of 14 June 2009, here’s a screenshot of what it used to look like:

Screenshot of former theme, Chroma

The greatest challenge I face as I prepare this site for some kind of relaunch has been the reorganizing of the blog posts’ entries. Years ago as I grew this blog I drew up all sorts of post categories, many of which I never really revisited. Such has been the scattershot nature of my writing, for which I have no regrets. However, it does make sifting through my content a little disappointing. It’s like showing a house buyer a massive mansion, all nice and shiny outside, only to be met with dusty, unused rooms.

Tagging posts has become de rigeur these days, too. It’s a practice with which I’m still uncomfortable. I prefer tagging photo posts, even the ones with narratives, but I find the frequency of tags in text posts to be counterintuitive. It also doesn’t help to have fifteen hundred posts over six years of writing.

I’ve spent most of this night switching category assignments for posts that date all the way back to the beginning. I’ve come across posts I regret, to an extent. Other posts are those that link to now-unavailable resources, blogs long gone to the aether, and news articles that have been filed away forever.

I’ve always had, and always will, have problems with the ephemerality of the online medium. I am working on a series of posts discussing this topic, but for now, as I sit at home going through my archives, I feel like I’m hanging out with an old friend, one whom I haven’t met in a very long time. It’s a strange sensation, like looking at a photo of myself from college.

I have spent the past week or so finishing a project for a client, and as such I have gone dark here on OFJ. As with every other project that I do for a client, it has given me a few ideas for a redesign of the site, and a reboot of the content. I’ve been busy as a bee.

I gave Gus Sentementes (@GusSent) a phone interview yesterday and I was quoted in his article on WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. (WC MidAtl site.) I’m particularly obscure by today’s standards but I like to think that the years I’ve spent online have given me a perspective worth sharing on Saturday. I really like how the quote makes me look excited about finally meeting some of the people with whom I’ve connected over the years.

From now till then I’ll be toiling away at redesigning and laying out a plan for content on a far more regular basis than I have been of late. Things to expect:

• Regular photography posts, at least twice a week. Many of these will be scheduled in advance.
• Political commentary will be banished from the front page. It will be accessible by a link at the top nav.
• A series of pages featuring my portfolio of work, including case studies.
• Frequent lancing of sacred cows, with less snark and more reason.

Since I’ve joined Twitter on March 19th of this year I’ve felt a great resurgence in what I call my Idea Machine. For the longest time, blogging into the aether felt more like blogging into the nether. Twitter has helped me connect to people instantly, and the conversations I have had the past month have stoked the same fires in my mind that have become embers, over the past few years.

I’ve been writing online since 2003. I have seen and participated in blogfights, championed causes, networked with others, made many friends and few enemies. I’ve spoken my mind and stayed quiet when I’ve had to. I’ve written on politics, posted pictures, shared tidbits of my life. Sometime in 2005, I chose to focus on a few other things other than the site; to this day it has never achieved the same level of exposure as it did before. Granted, there are far more sites out there now. The growth in the number of bloggers remains exponential, though the longevity of most blogs, I’m willing to guess, has shorted, but not at the same rate.

I was my biggest source of discouragement. I would sit down for a post and lose confidence in the value of my own ideas. The question that usually ended the posting activity was “hasn’t this been written before?” I realize now that the few who read my site, the few who stuble upon my domain, may not have read what I have. If the admission that a problem exists is the start of the problem’s solution, then my problem was that I had little confidence in my own work. I say was, because this is the day I start doing something about it.

I’ve spent the past year and few months going to the gym almost every night, gradually improving my health. It’s time I turn this site back into my mental gym. There will be a redesign, there will be a shift in topics and I may fork off any writing about national politics to a category not included in the front page, or to a separate site. (Following the 2008 election I set myself up on Red State, but I haven’t updated in a while, and I will write about my experience there soon enough.)

My mental gears haven’t felt this well-oiled in a very long time. There’s a yearning, a hunger that I know I’ve felt before, it’s frightening and familiar and exciting, and I want to bring all of you along for the ride.

A detail from my site's word cloud

It’s been an exciting year in politics, but now that we have a result and my commentary will move to a more activist tone, I’ve decided to do majority of my poli-blogging on RedState. I might write an occasional polemic at AIR if I get Misha’s blessing. I do this because I intend to make this site a portfolio for my design work. I also want it to showcase my photography. I want to write about the books that I have received from Eagle Publishing and books that I have bought myself.

I splinter my efforts not so much so to hide an aspect of mine as to meet the needs of an audience and to find an audience, too. Yeah, in general, this old school blogger is tehsuck, but this is MY online home. If I’m going to be obscure I could at least be happy doing so.

My life: a constant work in progress and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
- Set Your Goals: Work In Progress

In keeping with my goal of changing what I write about here, I’m working on a redesign for this site that’s basically built from the ground up. It’s not as quick and dirty as my old designs. I am taking my time and, ever the iconoclast, I plan to buck a few growing trends observed by Nick La.

I have a few personal style guidelines I have in mind whenever get to designing my own site. For one, I never use any sort of image replacement techniques where text presented in an image is concerned. I tend to browse with images turned off and I find it easier to style alt texts through CSS. Try it some time; you might like it. This year, I think minimalism is dead. And finally, I’m not a big fan of Web 2.0-style gradients, even though Anthem Of Our Dying Days uses something very, very close to them in the background.

I will probably place a few sketches on my site between now and the design release. I think it’s time I approach this project the way *ahem* real designers *ahem* do.

It started with Scott about four years ago, when I took the baby steps to design his site. I did it for a postcard and possible referral business. Over the years I’ve brought in quite a few design clients. Many have moved on, others have stayed with what I have done, while others I have failed in maintaining a good business relationship.

Times change. Schedules change. People grow in different directions. This is a fact of life. I’ve dropped out of the loop, but honestly I have been happier as a result. I am in the best health of my life. I have built the best friendships a person can have.

I am also beginning to feel the itch. My creativity needs channeling, and I would like to pick up design work again. There are plenty of free WordPress themes out there, and I’m not in the mood to add another drop to that bucket. I have between two and three hours a night, three nights a week to do some work for someone willing to pay. Turnaround time may not be as immediate as some. My price may be higher than reasonable for many. That’s all fine. I don’t mind any of these issues. It helps vet my customers, and it helps them vet me. One client, one project at a time. That’s how I’d like to do it.

And so here comes the problem that faces me. I would like to reinvent this site. I want to write about beautiful things. I want to post my photos. I want this site to be about what I want to share, design-wise, because this is the brand name I have built for my design work. It’s also the site on which I’m quite well known for my conservative views. I feel that my politics, though, especially in an election year, would detract from the theme of what I want to do here.

So the question becomes: what do I do? Do I keep my politics away from this site by blogging at Red State for example? Or do I just go balls to the wall and let my clients know me fully? My life, my politics, and my creative work, in one package, take it or leave it?

After keeping quiet for the better part of three or four months I’ve decided to redesign my site for the turn of the new year and try something different with it.

I’ve ducked out for the past year on political commentary because, well, because it sucks and it’s draining and after what I do on a daily basis and then some, reading the news is not only not cathartic, it’s aggravating. There’s more than enough political yakking out there and I’d like to help by cutting down on the noise so that people can find a little more signal.

The redesign, for all its simplicity, is one I like a lot. Why else would it be up there? The tagline is from a song by Story Of The Year called Anthem Of Our Dying Days. The photos on the upper right are randomized and clickable for a bigger view. I stopped worrying about how my new stylesheet would affect old posts that have classes that I no longer “support,” so it’s face-forward for the site starting this year.

Expect a lot more photography, slices of life, and pop culture to go around. Happy New Year, everyone.

I won’t be redesigning the site; I like the way my site looks right now, with just a few minor changes I have procrastinated on. I am, however, going to be upgrading to version 2.3 of Wordpress. However, I will be re-engineering the theme I use. I have used this same theme since before they had theme directories. I have functions here that are older than sense, and I need to clean some shite up.

So if this place looks a lot like the “classic” theme that we used to have, in the ever-lovely pea-green color—which won’t be around for long, trust me—just know that the minimalist theme I have will return.

Just give it a few days.

The screenshot of a post with images turned off.

This particular problem with firefox has bugged me from the very beginning: somehow the websites I make don’t play too nice with the images turned off, because the dimentions that I include are not honored by FF. If you go to Mark Jaquith’s site and and turn off images on his site, the image placeholders all hold the dimensions of the images that they hold. (He has the height and width attribute specified, just like in this and the last post where I turned images off and took a screenshot of.)

I would like to know if I’m doing something wrong with my HTML or CSS that is messing things up. Help? Anybody?

Ever get the feeling you walk into your relatively messed up home or bedroom and not have the energy to do anything else but fall into bed and sleep, thus gaining the blissful ignorance of one’s one surroundings? Such is the feeling I have towards the blog right now. I am working on a redesign for myself as well as a realignment of what content I do want on here. Goodbye current events blathering, for the most part. More photos. And more of me.

One Fine Jay: Photography, Culture & Consumerism.

Sounds good to me. I don’t care what anyone thinks at this point.

P.S. Hate Georgia? See ya later.

P.P.S. Here’s a preview of the colors and the header I’ve made so far:

I decided to revive the definitive color scheme that I kept for more than a year. It only gets better with time. This is Version 5 of Ark.

Something’s different about the site, yeh? It’s a far cry from what it looked like before, but I decided to simplfy my task and to keep the content familiar by keeping some of the old visual elements and document structure intact. Enjoy Shiva; it’s going to be a bit cold here at OFJ for another year…

As seen in my referral stats (replacing [bracketed] items with applicable info):

http://images.google.[country TLD]/imgres?imgurl=[the URI of an image on my site]

I already banned the Google Imagebot from my robots.txt; what’s this about?

So what does blogging as a team member at one of my favorite sites feel like? It’s quite refreshing, like a meeting at a bar with friends. Most of my political commentary will be seen there from now on; I think that I am ready, after posting less on my blog, to concentrate on things less serious here on my online home.

More pop culture, more photography, more slices of life and what not. Just less, much less politics. I know I haven’t posted much on politics over the past month; sometimes I feel like writing about minor political quibbles and honestly it feels quite trite. I’ll admit that my interests have changed ever since the year started and I am really quite happy of the way things have become.

I don’t intend to post on Resurrection Song on an overbearingly frequent basis. I consider my presence there a treat for myself, an activity of delight, ornament and ability, to quote that essayist. I think that both moderation of posting and diversification of the fora where I make a presence have been good for me; blogging has become less an obsession or perceived obligation. It has become much more fun, and I like the way things have gone so far.

Go check out my first post.

Ah yes, I’m decloaking for the moment to give a heads-up to all the dear friends who still drop by and wonder what’s been happening with me. I’ve been quite occupied with work, and also quality time with friends who matter more than blogging. The old design is back in its third iteration, with the three-picture montage that raises the curiosity of more than a few peeps.

What was that dictum on wisdom? Wise men have something to say; foolish men have to say something. I’m not going into one of those extended hiatuses that almost invariably leads to people breaking them, however, at this point I have little to say over the rest of the week and into the next. I’m organizing the photographs that I took thanks to my friend’s camera, and will be restarting the photoblogging when I get to it.

So, dear friends, I hope the winter, whether it is in balmy Florida or damned cold Wisconsin, brings more than just cabin fever and miserable commutes to work.

I’ve been away for a while, taking care of personal stuff and what not. I am not dead, but I have my priorities too. Besides, it’s January and everything political seems so… unimportant these days.

I’ll be back in about a week or so, possibly with a redesign bringing back the third iteration of one of my favorite themes, Ark. I’ll also be bringing in more photos from the Empire series, along with a new series featuring my sorties into the university system.

See you around, dear friends.