Clever marketing or a creative con?

I’ve found plenty of conversations recently on Moleskine-based blogs as well as general writing sites such as The Fountain Pen Network who instantly reference Chatwin or Hemingway whenever Moleskine is mentioned. Whilst true that the authors did use a book that resembled the Moleskine, both died a decade before Modo & Modo registered their Moleskine trademark in 1996. The Moleskine Modo & Modo produces is as much Chatwin’s Moleskine as any of the other Moleskine clones by papermakers such as the Spanish Miquelrius or British Paperchase.

In a 2004 IHT article, Modo & Modo marketing director Francesco Franceschi even admitted to the marketing con, saying that “[The Moleskine link to Chatwin and Hemingway is] an exaggeration. It’s marketing, not science. It’s not the absolute truth.” According to Wikipedia’s entry on Moleskine, Chatwin’s last supplier of his Moleskinesque notebooks was a stationer in Tours, France, hardly an Italian company that binds their millions of moleskin oilcloth notebooks in China before finishing them in Italy.

Finding authenticity in notebook-land

Recently disillusioned, I set out to find a superior notebook. I love the Moleskine’s overall form factor and hardcover format; I’m a rather clumsy fellow and softer notepads don’t make it very long being thrown around in my bag or lost in some nook of the office. A few months ago, I bought a set of notepads from French company Bloc Rhodia after having their 80-gsm paper recommended to me by other heavy fountain pen users. For writing, I was hooked: most of Socialuxe’s (awfully few) articles have been written on one of my A4 Rhodia pads before being transcribed to digital form.

Unlike Moleskine, Rhodia actually has a legacy: the stationer was founded in Lyon, France in 1934, giving the French stationer 62 years on Moleskine. Furthermore, all of Rhodia’s paper and pads are still made in France, making the price premium justifiable. If aspirational marketing is your thing, the still-living British fashion designer Paul Smith is a vocal fan of Rhodia’s products, even going so far as to design his own limited edition for the French stationery firm.

While my Rhodia pads served me well at home, the cardstock covers still felt flimsy and more useful for note-taking than anything archival. Writing with a hardcover Moleskine feels more journal-like and less like something to write fast notes in, and I wanted notebooks I could use for this purpose. A few days ago, I stumbled across Rhodia’s new high-end Boutique collection, offering cute imitation leather journals with Rhodia’s paper in classic Rhodia yellow-orange or black vaguely reminiscent of Hèrmes’s Ulysse notebook, which at $325 is most certainly the ultra-luxury of notebooks. After a bit more digging in the Boutique collection, however, I found Rhodia’s A5 Webnotebook, a completely French-made notebook made to the same specification as the Moleskine with far better paper quality and a soft imitation leather cover. For that extra snob appeal, I’d say that the Rhodia Webnotebook is far closer to the Chatwin specification than that of the Moleskine: at least it’s made in France, where Chatwin’s last Moleskinesque notebooks were created. I spent a day tracking one down in San Francisco, finally finding the black A5 Webnotebooks at The Container Store next to Westfield San Francisco Centre for $17.99, a price premium of approximately two dollars over Moleskine’s competing notebook. I was instantly in love. (Note: If anybody finds a place in San Francisco where I can purchase the orange variant, please let me know; I’d love to make an inverse version of my work Webnotebook for personal writing.)

Taking it to the next level

Recently, I’ve found myself unhappy with anything that isn’t modified in some way: I’ve been craving æsthetically unique pieces for my everyday carry, eventually culminating in designing a custom messenger bag that is currently in production and a complete rework of all of the things I carry every day to slightly modified or otherwise custom pieces. Given my Rhodia fandom, I decided it was time to modify the Webnotebook to rival the endless modifications to Moleskines (which, somewhat hypocritically, I’ve contributed to in the past.) With Webnotebook in tow, I headed to Utrecht Art Supplies on New Montgomery to purchase acrylic paint in Cadmium Orange Hue, a couple of Sharpie paint markers and a can of Krylon Matte Finish. Some hours later, I had a fully customised Webnotebook, with a hand-painted Rhodia orange stripe meant to evoke the rougher feeling of the abstract expressionists of the early sixties, an art group that I somehow find perpetually inspires me. As an ode to Smith’s collections, I then doodled a pattern on the inside covers using the paint markers.

In the end, I’ve found peace with my writing supplies. It’s good to know that I’ve found a product superior to the Moleskine from a company that doesn’t lie about its history or origins. I’ve a final note for Moleskine spl: I won’t be coming back. Bloc Rhodia has forever replaced you in my heart.

As far as I know, we’ve been the pioneer of using Twitter as a social gaming platform at this scale. With being a high-profile pioneer of an application of a social technology, it’s expected that you’re going to get both the wild support and the criticisms of your technology’s detractors. While the huge majority of the messages I have received about Spymaster have been insanely positive, with people explaining how much fun this little creation has given them, of course I’ve had my detractors. I’ve been called the man that ruined Twitter, a “social media f–ktard,” and some other, more profanity-ridden things from those who feel that the rest of the Spymaster team and I have completely destroyed the user experience of Twitter and everything they once found good about it. It all comes down to the notification system that tweets your given Spymaster actions, such as this one from ReadWriteWeb’s Jolie O’Dell. Some backlash is to be expected, and I’m not all that worried about it. Former Digg Architect Joe Stump was the first person to really start it amongst the digerati, which eventually led to MG Siegler’s backlash post on TechCrunch. Like Joe said, though, it was bound to happen. And Joe, if you’d like to hate anyone in particular for Spymaster’s notification system, you can hate me. I came up with the idea to incentivise people in-game. But please, if there’s one thing I could say right now to you and the Twittersphere at large: don’t shoot the messenger.

Uncovering a flaw in Twitter

As Joe very respectfully said — and I completely agree with him — Twitter is in dire need of a way to filter content from followers. Even in the complete absence of social games on Twitter, this is something I’ve been dying to do anyway, and it’s not an issue of spam: it’s that much of Twitter’s social hierarchy, no matter how asymmetric it is in practise, really isn’t in a real-world scenario. Follower reciprocity is basically psychologically required by Western culture in most of the cases where you actually know the person. At the risk of possibly outraging nearly everyone I follow, there are few people on my followers’ list that really just don’t say anything all that relevant to me. Having filters would also help with those issues where you still feel like you’re supposed to follow your ex on Twitter, but you don’t really want that real-time reminder of your breakup.

Previous to working with the iList guys, I was a Product Designer at Facebook, and Feed filters found their way into the product shortly after the launch of News Feed. Thankfully for me, they’ve saved plenty of frustration (or depression) from the psychologically-obligated reciprocity of people I haven’t talked to since middle school (or exes.) As Twitter matures as a platform, failwhales notwithstanding, we’re watching this happen as the demographic broaden. As much as many wish it still were, Twitter is no longer the playground of the digerati, something I’ve had to painfully recognise as former Twitter superpowers such as Kevin or Veronica fall to the likes of Diddy or Ashton Kutcher. With that, we’ve found Twitter’s trending topics go from news-junkie subjects and obscure technology releases to current network memes. It’s the byproduct of the growth of the network as both a messaging service and a platform.

Yes, we’ve found a flaw in Twitter’s user experience, and I fully trust the guys over there such as Doug and Vitor to fix it. Spymaster has caught Twitter by surprise, Stump by surprise, and probably myself by surprise most of all in how quickly it’s spread, but none of us mean any harm in it. The one thing I do take offense to, though, is being called out as being spammy because of the fault of an interface I have no control over.

I’m not trying to point fingers. I’m trying to explain my perspective: as an interaction designer, I am trying to maximise the user experience of those playing Spymaster. That’s what my job is and what I’m paid for, and it’s what I can control. I want to create a compelling social game, and with anything social you need to get your friends involved. Somewhere in the product process, I laid down a basically we-do-it-or-I-quit directive on what we checked by default and chose the three I thought were the most publicly relevant (and least noisy) of actions Spymaster can generate on the public timeline: assassinations, wiring money to users, and spymaster level increases. Why? Assassinations are something that people want to brag about anyway: other friends that are playing Spymaster find it funny if you’re ganging up on a friend in your social circle (and I’ve seen this happen firsthand quite a few times.) Wiring money rarely happens because it’s so hard to get a Swiss Bank account unless you’re at a really high level, and level increases happen rarely enough as you progress but give other Spymaster players (in the world at large) a good strategic count of how you’re progressing. These were things I thought I’d find the most strategically optimal to be able to know about in near real-time from other players in my spy ring (and my opponents’ spy rings, for that matter.)

Let’s talk about spam, baby

I watched Facebook explode from the inside during its days as a nascent platform, and I fully remember applications that were wildly spammy; no lecturing is required to make me remember things like Zombies/Vampires/SARS and their variants (which I still despise, because they have absolutely zero entertainment value internally.) At Facebook, we worked really hard to combat spam whilst still maintaining both a development environment that allows the platform to thrive at the creation level and people to have fun at gaming in the social environment. Of course, we ran into a lot of problems, and we learned a lot of things that I think Facebook still wishes they could take back: users were forced into the invite process. Users published tons of hidden notifications without their consent to their friends. In the end, a lot of Platform players felt completely violated. I’ve learned what players don’t like, and I’ve actively avoided those things in optimising for the player. If we want to talk about a real flaw Twitter is going to have when they move forward that Facebook dodged masterfully, it’s that their open platform has absolutely no way to police this type of behaviour. I’m sure someone else with a truly evil and enterprising intent will come along and do something like this and make Spymaster’s day of being a trending topic make what is currently the Sean Connery of Twitter games look like David Niven. I am a well-intentioned messenger of something that could really be bad. If I wanted to drop a viral nuclear weapon, I could have. I have no desire to do that, because such work is anathaema to my very existence as an interaction designer.

Furthermore, we are limiting Spymaster’s virality even further because we were afraid of it being wildly noisy. Things like tasks, which are rapid-fire actions in the game’s UI to progress quickly, we quickly found to dominate public streams. Spymaster public notifications are throttled internally, something which Siegler himself noticed on a Black Market shopping spree.

I agree with Joe that this was all inevitable, and honestly I’m trying to set in place best practices for that community before it gets bigger. If Spymaster can set the UX precedent, I’ll be happy. If I was worried about nothing but virality, I would force people through invite processes before I let them touch the game. I would send out tons of public notifications without a user’s consent. I would do all sorts of things that are remarkably self-serving to the application that I have explicitly chosen not to do on the grounds of integrity over popularity, and I am thankful that the application has become as powerful as it has without a coercive user experience. From those in-game, I haven’t heard a single complaint about Spymaster’s virality. I’ve done all of the things I know to make the virality of the application completely user-controlled. I learned one more thing from Facebook, which is granular control, and it’s something I took with me on Spymaster. Nothing on Spymaster is sent without a user’s direct consent. As far as I’m given the liberty to call the shots on Spymaster’s user experience, I won’t let that behaviour happen, either.

One last thing: let’s get something straight about Spymaster strategy

Also, one thing I need to clarify before it gets too large is that although Spymaster does incentivise you for your notifications (and it is an intentional in-game strategic move,) it is being seriously shortsighted about Spymaster’s models and gameplay to assume that is the only way you can excel at Spymaster. The 8% money increase you get from all of Spymaster’s notifications is a little over half you’d get from choosing to simply be American CIA out of the gate. It’s nothing compared to the increase you’ll get from even the cheapest Safe House or doing the lowest of tasks. There are so many ways to play Spymaster that the heavy notification route is one of them, your friends be damned. I was actually surprised at the psychological effect of this; some people have outwardly defended their notification-increasing actions as part of the game’s strategy. If that’s the way people want to play, I’m not going to stop them; they’re having fun and it’s the player’s user experience I am controlling. They can alienate themselves if they feel it is worth the reward.

I won’t make these decisions for Spymaster players. That’s a mission they choose to accept, self-destructive or not. As long as my players are happy, I’m doing my job.

Recently I caught a tweet by Ryan Kuder which referenced a TED talk titled Can design save the newspaper? There’s been much talk of this in the newspaper circles that I’m still closely connected to; perhaps a redesign of the classifieds will help generate revenue that papers have been lacking. Let’s move them to the section front pages. Let’s use colour and give people eBay-like microcustomisation of their classifieds. Maybe design is what can really save newspapers.

It’s a problem I have seen (and been really been guilty of) multiple times in the past, one which I’ve come to call the Designer complex. Even Jacek Utko admits in his TED talk above that his motives for his redesigns were “very egotistic;” what he really wanted to do was “create posters.” There’s something about the creative ego that gives us an inflated sense of self; perhaps it happens because design is still ill-regarded as a profession of overhyped, arrogant stylists instead of being noticed as contributing meaningfully to the overall execution of a product. We refer to ourselves as the one true way, dogmatic in our beliefs of style and structure. It’s akin to the monotheistic God: there are no gods; there is no “god.” God is to be revered. God is to be appreciated. So is Designer. Designer is what can save your flailing product. Nothing else is necessary. Just slap some hot typography on it and work on a killer user experience. Let the artistic vision free. Everything else will just fall into place. This idea of industry rescue is one the Designer fantasises about during late night Photoshop sessions. If design can save a company, then assuredly the Designer will gain the respect he or she deserves. Design becomes the panacea of a corporate America writhing in pain from foreclosure and unemployment.

I hate to break it to you, guys

Remember that whole bit above about how designers are often ill-reputed to be little more than trendy stylists? It’s ironic that a profession built upon the conveyance of communication has gathered such a reputation. If we are ever regarded as stylists by our teams and clients, we’ve done an unsatisfactory job of explaining how design adds value. Our Designer complexes perhaps make us think that what designers do is self-evident and needs no explanation. We’ve failed at the communication from the start by positioning ourselves as the masterminds of interactive bagatelles.

Remember that? Someone, somewhere has told nearly every half-reputable designer or design student that what separates art from design is that design is art meant to communicate a message. Design has an ulterior purpose. There is no corollary to ars gratia artis; in the real world, there is no design for design’s sake. As designers, we are auxiliary communicators first and artists second, a thought that might rattle the capital-D Designer ego. However, the end result of this logic will surely destroy the Designer: designers cannot save any industry. Designers can only communicate the core product. It is up to the rest of the team to aid in the design process.

If the product is the engine, design is the engine oil: an engine without oil will not run at all, just as a product without any design will too fail by default. But, as in the real world, some lubricants are better than others: a good interaction designer helps reduce friction in the product workflow for a user. A good graphic designer makes a message easier for a flighty human eye to perceive. Design amplifies and communicates the core product underneath. Design is part of the product. If design is the product, you’re calling the product something it isn’t. That product is more aptly named art.

The responsibilities of engine oil

The engine oil analogy is a prime example why the Designer fails and the designer succeeds in truly getting the message across: a Designer is too steeped in the bubble in which he or she is always right. There’s no way to build an engine out of engine oil anywhere but in one’s imagination.

There’s a flip side to this analogy as well: if the other parts of the team treat the engine oil as an unnecessary or otherwise trifling component, the end result will not be as seamless as they all have hoped. Just as an average automobile with bad oil will run poorly, a product with bad design will suffer the same fate. It’ll go somewhere. Unfortunately for most of the get-huge, make-it-big dreams of Silicon Valley, this strategy will end poorly for most hungry entrepreneurs.

To further kill the Designer ego, there are exceptions to the rule: plenty of products have wildly succeeded without any decent sense of design whatsoever. Craigslist is a notorious target of many interaction designers for being completely disastrous and devoid of really good design. Countless blog posts have criticised and proposed redesigns; a few years ago some A-list designers even had an entire SXSW panel around redesigning the site.

What Craigslist did was built a completely fantastic engine; in the car world, it’s one of those rare flukes you hear about, where your neighbour’s cousin’s great uncle’s Honda Accord went 500,000 miles without ever having an oil change. Of course, with any such fluke there is still a reasonable heap of good luck involved with such meteoric success, but at some point the usefulness of the product stood on its own and became successful anyway. Such things are a testament to the social and technical engineering in any such software product. Since I work in this space (and currently for a competitor of Craigslist) this is the first example that comes to mind and is probably the one I am most familiar with, but it is certainly not the only such example. MySpace is another example of a company that has largely been derided for its poor usability and obsolete design but has also been successful.

Yes, Designer. That means products can thrive without you if they’re awesome enough to stand solidly on their own merit. User experience be damned. The most damning fact toward the Designer complex is probably the fact that no single product lives or dies by the designer alone. A bad product can cover some of its deficiencies with the makeup involved in style by making the product more attractive, but more often than not the amplification factors involved in design also can work against a poor product by amplifying poor product positioning or the flailing of an obsolete model.

Back to design saving newspapers

Whenever I hear news designers talking about perhaps design can save the newspaper, part of me feels bad for my friends that are news designers. It’s a very strong case of the Designer complex. Dead-tree newspapers are an obsolete product. The cooler the newspaper attempts to identify itself as, the more the product looks like that old creepy guy that drives a Gallardo and listens to T-Pain in an attempt to not only feel younger and more hip himself but to desperately seek acceptance from the youthful group that thinks he only appears, well, as desperate as he is. To use the engine analogy, they already bought into the engine you were selling: print mattered to them. Unfortunately for American traditional media, largely stacked as a galaxy of slow-moving conglomerates and still lethargically adapting to the threats of an increasingly connected society, such an approach is like dumping Mobil 1 into an engine out of a Model T. It might make it run a little more smoothly, but the engine is still so laughably uncompetitive that not a whole lot of attention is paid to it anyway. This is what will happen in most cases in the newspaper industry.

In the newspaper case, the trick is to build a better engine and get the designers involved as communicators, not as egotistic Designers. This half-happened in Utko’s case. Drop the complexes and posturing. Work with your teams. Get your engineering and product teams into high gear and build a high-peformance engine that demands a high-performance oil. Many newspapers have embraced this to varying degrees of success. Some are just starting. The New York Times has been trying it with Khoi Vinh. A college friend of mine and interactive designer for USA Today William Couch has been working on the same problems for the national newspaper giant. Friends outside of design are working to transform newspaper companies into leaner, Web-friendly operations by helping to build better engines. Clearly, some really do get it. We’ll have to see if it’s too little too late, but in any case, design isn’t the wonder drug. Just because design can’t be the sole saviour of dying companies doesn’t mean that, like engine oil, it isn’t just as vital to the extreme success of a product as the quality of the other parts itself.

Revisiting the Designer complex

Jacek touched many aspects of what I’ve said above in the oil analogy in his own talk. Design helped profitability. Design made the product better. Design, when integrated into the product process, amplifies the initial message. Jacek’s team helped the reporters and businesspeople build a high-performance engine with the high-performance oil. With this process, with design, the product was better than ever before. But Jacek, it wasn’t just you. At 5:24, when you asked “who’s responsible?” The answer is not “designers,” as you said when you pointed to yourself with both hands. The answer is the whole engine. The reporters, the designers, the businesspeople, those who wanted the content to thrive and modified the entire workflow around the ability to thrive on the better design oil. Without the rest of it all, the design would be nothing but some coloured bricks on the page and a new typeface, the “style” that people expect from most designers.

We can all learn from these successes and failures before we dig ourselves into a deeper hole of being lambasted by non-creatives as arrogant know-it-alls. We can stop being Designers and be designers. We can realise our place and optimise it. We can move forward with, as Utko says at the end, inspiration and determination. As for now, however, I’m going to change my oil.

As I moved and struggled to figure out my role in the greater “real world” community, hyalineskies, my baby throughout most of college and the voice that got me my jobs at Organic and Facebook, began to suffer from an æsthetic and narrative schizophrenia. My once fully-sure voice wavered between an ode to luxury æsthetics in one month to a complete ridicule of the superficiality some later. As I ported the hyalineskies database to this new domain, I considered deleting these false starts; instead, I have decided to keep tham as a marque of my troubles as I struggled to become relevant in a new world.

Instead of relevance, hyalineskies became increasingly irrelevant. My code and writing wasted away under a layer of dust. Around 400 days or so ago now, I wrote my last hyalineskies post ridiculing the cultural insensitivity of a suburban demographic toward urban music. Some time in 2008, my beloved hyalineskies dropped into its persistent vegetative state, and this past autumn I decided it was finally time to say goodbye to my five-year-old. No resuscitation would be able to restart it.

From hyalineskies to socialuxe

hyalineskies was never really a domain I wanted to start a publication at; it was more a child of convenience than of deliberation. I had kept a public diary on the domain throughout high school and freshman year of college, and the domain was there and ready when I decided I wanted to use it as my personal voice on design, development and technology. It wasn’t until 2006 when I really realised how much I loved interaction design, and hyalineskies prospered as a member of the now-also-irrelevant 9rules Network. (Yeah, remember that?) I was so excited, I even invited over a bunch of college friends that watched me work away at the blog and threw a party in the classiest way I could on my means. I loved it.

When I decided to reboot, I needed to find something that I felt better matched my personality, even at the expense of it not really “fitting” my content aesthetically. It still seems odd to me to build your content around a brand and then try to act your brand. In the end, you’re still being insincere, and in a world where reputation, image and trust are everything, it seems you’d be better off building your content around your own personal brand and who you really are. I am still a curious boy obsessed with fashion models and luxury aesthetics. I still put the 6-series into nearly every mock I make at work. I still listen to all sorts of music, love academic research, study German and hack away on my MySpace profiles. I still shoot firearms all the time. I still tune Hondas. I still prefer drinking Hennessy and Sapphire. While I think I’ve certainly become jaded by a lot of Silicon Valley’s echo chamber, I haven’t really changed much. I’ve just realised how much I really like the stuff I do, and I will simply have to see where that takes me.

I decided to take a portmanteau of the two things I find myself always orbiting around: social media and social networking, which I am still convinced has made the largest impact on Western culture ever — props to you, Zuck, as well as everyone I’ve worked with at Facebook — and my perpetual love of luxury æsthetics. A quick whois search later and socialuxe was born. Another night and I’d crafted a logotype from House Industries’ Chalet. Another night, with my (ex) girlfriend asleep and Sia on the headphones, I found myself staying up nearly all night building the index page of the design you now see. Something new was beginning.

From Facebook to the greater world

The changes continued. I left my ultra-stable, crazy job at Facebook to go indie with a small startup, much to the shock of many of the people I worked with. I’ve had many people tell me that I’ve made a poor decision, but even today I am convinced that my departure from Facebook was the best decision I have made since I moved to San Francisco. As much as I love Facebook and everything it stands for, I found that for many reasons I had locked myself into an atmosphere where I didn’t feel I was maturing, both as a designer or as a person. I certainly honed my skills as an engineer there, but I had to make the personal decision to see more of the industry. I wasn’t going to really see that in a large company, and maybe one day my passion will lead me back to Facebook. I knew, however, that I needed to learn some hard lessons about corporate politics, decision-making and overall “experience”-related things before I could really make a difference from within an organisation like Facebook, and with that in mind, off I went. I’m now in the ultra-risky position of playing with startups as the Design Director at iList, but the risk and the crises I have to deal with there have made me a far stronger and more professional person. I am sure that will continue long into the future.

From structure to poststructuralism

I’ve long been a proponent of using the grid, ever since I basically found I had a massive man-crush on Khoi Vinh and his port of typographic grids to the Web. It made much sense to my modernist-loving mind, but I’ve never progressed by falling back on the rules that I know work creatively. When I went into the development of Socialuxe, I threw aside my usual tools and went to work on something completely different, simply estimating the proportion, size and colour of everything to get to where I wanted to go. In some ways, I feel I regressed creatively in the exercise: Socialuxe no longer felt meticulously planned. At the same time, it opened a new creative door and the freedom from the rules I had set for myself felt, well, liberating.

I played with interesting takes on my generally modernist toolkit. Instead of using classic typefaces like Helvetica or Avenir, both of which I have used in previous iterations of hyalineskies, I went for different variants of Chalet, which you see in one of its lighter variants in this title and in a heavier one for the feature post. If I could somehow get away with using a different typeface for body copy on the Web, I’d probably do that, too. For now, I’m stuck with Helvetica there. Oh, and those subheadings? Set in Hoefler+Frere-Jones’s beautiful Gotham, a face I’ve wanted to use in a project since 2007 but could never really find the right one.

In my opinion, the end result is surprisingly unified. I’ve also realised how much I feel I am getting close to perfecting the blog IA for my sites; there is very little in the architecture of Socialuxe that I did not do in 2006 with hyalineskies 7 “ærial.” The theme does currently have its shortcomings, such as no way to search or get to the archives, although this was a deliberate decision made when I first began the design of this (as a magazine-like format, I wanted to place extreme emphasis upon the current content as opposed to existing content.) I’m sure that will change as I evolve this and realise what is working and what isn’t. Design is very much an evolutionary process. I am confident that what currently exists will be fit enough at present.

From me to the community

Most importantly, Socialuxe is my gift to the community again. It’s not only a place where I can express my own voice on matters of social media, culture and consumerism; it’s a place where I can also write code, experiment and improve as both a designer and engineer. That’s why I’ve extrapolated my old “WordPress” section into Socialuxe Labs, where I’ve not only posted my past WordPress work but also the Mélange Lifestream Engine that powers estonbond.com. To further base my code around the community, I’ve hosted the direct, in-progress source on GitHub for you to fork and modify at will. I actively want people to learn and branch these codebases into things that work well for their own projects. That’s why I release them in the first place.

The content does not end here on the main site; I have also created (and have been regularly posting to!) Socialuxe &c, my Tumblr-based blog of pretty things and interesting links. I’ve always things to put here, so if my written posting frequency appears a little low, I’ll still be there and on Twitter.

Enough of my verbosity at this point. Welcome to Socialuxe. Enjoy your stay and grab the new RSS feed. There are still a few bugs here and there that I’m working out; feel free to report any that you may see. I can safely say that — finally — my role has been reborn.