Yes, you see correctly. I’ve starting developing a toolbar. This isn’t anything high tech. It looks bad right now. I’ll have Kaiser make the graphics better. We’ll come out with a beta or something soon. It’s integrated with Google and everything, so you can sync it up with your Gmail. I know there’s some diehard TCC fans out there wanting this. We’ll keep you posted!

On January 2, I accidentally spilled some juice in my bag – my laptop happened to be there as well. After cleaning it up (and shaking out the laptop), I get to work. Twenty minutes later, I hear clicking. A few minutes after that, it locks up. And doesn’t restart. The last time I backed up my work was two week before; the last time I backed up email, Quicken, and non-work files? Four months before. Because I continued to use it after the clicking, the data recovery specialists told me the drive was impossible to recover.

Fast-forward to yesterday morning, when I go into the babies’/office room and hear light clicking. Laptop not responsive. Restart, still not responsive. Last backups? See above paragraph. (Yeah, I’m dumb.)

This time there might be hope, though. I took it to the Apple store last night, and they couldn’t even get it to boot with an external drive. So there’s a chance nothing has happened to the hard drive. The laptop is currently at another Apple store (that’s certified to do repairs) – if they can just pull the data off the hard drive and save it to an external drive, I will be relieved.

I’m kind of…over the idea that the data is gone? I dunno. It’s upsetting, but it’s not. More than anything, I’m just thinking that I need to learn from my mistakes and get into the habit of backing up. Especially when a voice in the back of my head has been repeatedly telling me to backup.

I won’t get into whether or not this is Apple’s fault for having buggy hardware. The lesson to take away is to backup, and backup often. I’ve had 14 years of good luck with data (aside from a specific and lethal combo of my Sony Vaio laptop and any external drive that corrupted and vanished 30 gigs of my precious MP3s; the day music for me died). When I backed up, it was to wipe the hard drive clean and start fresh. Bad habit. Learn from my mistakes.

(Not only is this a public service announcement, but I post this because it directly affects my TCC work. Can’t really keep the site moving if you lose your newest work, right?)

So why the blog? We wanted a couple things. We’re a weekly publication, and we noticed people come to the site everyday. So why not have content that’s added daily? We didn’t want more interviews to publish. We already have a staff of 30 that research and interview the people we profile. We went out and sought out some bloggers. Now, we didn’t just want any blogger. All of our bloggers are more than well-equipped to write on the topics they’ve chosen. Something else we wanted from The DesiConnect Blog is a chance for you, the reader, to interact with our content. Feel free to comment on the posts and start a discussion. Someone’s gotta do it, so start!

We plan on sending out a dedicated email announcing The DesiConnect Blog. Right now, we have one post, but by the end of the week, you’ll see all our different bloggers. I’m really excited about this!

So the next question is…Why a blog only for The DesiConnect? We definitely plan on launching blogs for the other magazines. Right now, we have a full plate. Next month we plan on launching, as Sumaya mentioned in her post, The AfricanaConnect. We’re very excited about that! It’s been in the works for a long time, but we’ve been waiting to get the right people involved. We have a wonderful staff working on it. Also, next month we’re launching a news portal. I don’t want to get into much detail on it right now, but it’s going to be replacing the “news2know” section that you get on your weekly emails. I know a lot of you read it, but I promise you, you won’t be disappointed with what we have in store. Once that gets situated, I’ll be recruiting a staff of bloggers for the other magazines.

Okay, I know there’s more questions you have. It’s late though, and I’m tired. So, if you have questions, feel free to ask me.

While they work around the clock to redefine and bring more value to what we offer you at The CulturalConnect, I’ve been working with a newly created team (Elisha, Tunde, Bukola and Elizabeth) to prepare for the launch of The AfricanaConnect (will be our fifth e-magazine and website) in early April.

It’s been a little tiring to get all of this done in a short period of time - but fortunately for us - we love it so stay tuned, we promise a lot of new stuff we can’t wait to get your feedback on.

In preparation for something special this week, we’ve updated the look of the blog and added some new things on the side (recent posts and comments) and at the bottom of each post (links for Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, and Send Page to Friend).

Also, the common icons throughout the site have gotten a much-needed touch-up (might need to refresh on a non-blog page to see it). They make me happy now.

Farewell, old design…

For as long as I’ve been developing web apps, I’ve also been behind on trends and fads. It really isn’t a good thing for someone in my field, I know. Part of it is that I’ve come across too much badly written/organized code to trust apps written by anyone else. We’re using Wordpress as our blogging software mostly because it wasn’t a smart idea for me to put in the time to write our own blogging system. Wordpress is great for the end user, but while building the templates, I’ve found a ton of nuisances that make me wonder how they got the system working in the first place.

The other part is that I have a negative reaction to anything that’s hyped up so much. Take Ruby On Rails: I had a chance to experiment with at work a few months ago, and aside from the five frustrating days I spent trying to get it functioning correctly, I wasn’t at all impressed by it once I got into it. Yeah, it’s probably the best framework out there for anyone that doesn’t have much experience developing applications in an organized way. But guess what? I’ve written my own framework (which is what the site has been running on since the relaunch), and while it’s not as user-friendly as Rails is out the box, it does just as good a job, and has a few key features that Rails, for whatever reason, is sorely lacking.

Having said all that, I’ve been growing increasingly fond of Ajax. In a nutshell, Ajax makes pages more interactive by sending and receiving data in the background without reloading the page. You’ve probably come across it without realizing it: Gmail, Facebook, Flickr, and the new Yahoo! Mail make heavy use of it.

And now, TCC has it! If you’re logged in, just check out your preferences. (You’ll need to refresh to reload the new stylesheet.) I spent the last week working on a small Javascript library and tweaking the framework to be more Ajax-friendly (that wasn’t tricky or time-consuming, thanks in part to my foresight and skillz with coding).

It isn’t impressive, but now that the foundation is laid, it’s a good sign of newer and better things to come for the site.

Assuming I don’t get OCD with the details.

Speaking of events. Sumaya is attending the NASALSA Conference tomorrow. If you’re in the Bay Area, make sure to stop by attend some workshops. I understand there’s a registration fee, so take cash.