Sticking my patita in the blogosphere
Life • Web Design • April 10th, 2006After much time spent as a lurker reading and enjoying other people’s blogs, this is the year in which I’ve finally decided to stick my patita in the pool and begin writing publicly. This is that embarrassing first (well, ok: 11th) post documenting the genesis of this web site, and my first attempt to join the intimidating world of blogging.
Intimidating, yes
Well… there are just so many people already blogging so well about important and interesting stuff, that it’s been hard for me to imagine adding much value. So, for a while, the constant question was: What would I write about?
With so many leading designers and experts writing smart, groundbreaking stuff related to my job, why bother? In fact, I guess I’m still learning from them. Write about myself? Besides my parents, who cares? I doubt that my writing could ever be as fresh and engaging as Dooce’s to keep strangers half as interested in my personal life as I am (and another million people are) in hers. PLUS, the really juicy, good-blog-material stuff happening in my life is actually the kind of thing that I’d rather keep private… I thought “Maybe I should write about something I’m really passionate about”, except, I’m passionate about many things, and yet, I don’t have the time to follow one of them close enough to be considered a true expert at it.
So this year, as I had usually done, I purposely skipped all panels regarding blogging at SXSW Interactive. All but one…
Partiendo el Jarron
While I was waiting for a Microformats panel to begin, I checked my guide and realized that Jeffrey Zeldman was going to be on the “Does your blog have a business?” session. This man happens to be my absolute favorite person, author, and superhero on the web, so, without much thinking, I changed my plans and went to hear him talk.
What I learned from Mr. Zeldman was that he started writing simply because he wanted to express himself, and if somebody else liked what he had to say, then, cool. Well, yeah, I suspect that’s the reason why everybody begins posting their thoughts to the Internet. But Zeldman went on… He said that it was only when he realized that he had an audience, that he thought he needed to add value.
So there it is! Here I’ve been over-thinking and attempting to plan what the value of my writing would be, or should be, when the truth is that I simply want to express myself and communicate my thoughts like every other mortal. AND: I don’t need to worry about the value I’m providing yet, because nobody is reading me. I can just do it for myself, shape it how I need it, and while I do it, if I can actually add value to somebody else, then great!
The panel I had attended in the previous hour discussed design playgrounds. I found it inspiring, and thought I would like to experiment with that concept, specially after hearing the quote that Curt Cloninger used to close the presentation:
“What is required in our field, more than anything else, is continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.”
– Milton Glaser, London AIGA talk, 2001.
The words talked straight to me… This year I came to Austin a little tired, feeling not completely proud of my latest work, not because it was bad; in fact, it was exactly the feeling of having “repeated success” that bothered me. And I realized that once again, I needed a new personal project in my life to fuel my passion. Once again, I needed to “partir el jarrón”.
A newbie in the crowded blogosphere
This blog begins around late March, 2006, with a post to remind myself of the reason why I changed careers and got here in the first place.
When I designed my first portfolio web site, I approached it treating myself as a client. I answered my own client survey and established the business goals and messages for my site. It took me a long time to get it “perfect” inside and out, and the finished product was extremely successful at meeting the goals I originally set for it. The same process and effort went when I redesigned the site late last year.
The creation of this web site has been a completely different process. I think of my new-born blog as the stereotypical second child: Less cautious, more fun, seemingly less successful (initially), and of course: a little bit insecure about himself.
Without much research but one very good reference, I downloaded and installed WordPress as my CMS. I then proceeded to design what turned out to be crap. Except, I didn’t come to that conclusion until AFTER I had coded 90% of the theme based on the poopoo design. This is the kind of stuff that I work HARD to avoid when working for clients. First, you set the goals and content (at least the type of content), then you design. But not in this case… When I began, I didn’t have clear goals or had thought enough about the content I wanted, and as a bad client, I did not take the time to plan them. Wrong! wrong! wrong!
So I thought things through a bit more and stole one hour of work to craft a new design. Obviously I couldn’t afford to spend much time in this phase, and I thought I really shouldn’t bottleneck the process with an agonizing search for award-winning design. By then, I had dealt enough with the WordPress scheme, that I knew better the kind of content and architecture I could have. I went for something simple, easy to read, and tried to incorporate a few elements that I could easily change later for variety. In the meantime I started writing, and playing.
As a second child, this blog should actually be more of an extrovert. I guess that’s the exception to my metaphor. While I learn more about anti-comment-spam tools, blog tagging, and search engine optimization for blogs, I intend to remain in controlled obscurity, still writing and tweaking things as I put it all together and get more comfortable with the process.
What’s the value I’m adding?
I still feel that this experiment needs to have a purpose. The important thing is: I enjoy reading myself. Excluding the embarrassing trash I wrote when I was 15 and had a crush on a bad boy, I actually get something out of reading old stuff I’ve written for myself. It gives me perspective, reminds me of important things, and sometimes it just entertains me and prompts me to contact old friends.
Besides that, I’m starting to enjoy the playground concept. It reminds me of gesture drawing exercises, and it’s beginning to make me more aware of visual stimuli around me. I feel it’s helping my creativity, and it’s the perfect break from focused work.
Why do it online? Because I am a web designer and this is my medium. Because there are a few things I know which a lot of people don’t, and some people find them interesting. Because I am all about creating tangible products that are meaningful to me… It’s the number ONE thing that drives me and gets me in flow.
First Technical Impressions
For anyone who’s just having breakfast:
I am really liking WordPress. I have been successful at customizing the output of some of the template functions, and the one issue I have run into turned out to be a documented bug, for which I found a patch, and without much assistance was able to fix it in my files. Needless to say, if my PHP skills were more robust, I probably could have fixed it myself.
I love the post preview functionality, the taxonomy system, and what I’m starting to realize I can do with custom fields (i.e. control custom meta data), and in the coming future, I intend to experiment more using WordPress as the CMS of non-blog client web sites.
