Your resume looks fantastic! One of the best I’ve ever seen!

So, if you find yourself facing unemployment (I’m not going to use the “R” word, or even the “D” word, but do feel free to ruminate on the current economic climate in whatever manner you’d prefer), you should invest in a custom-designed resume! It’s cheap, it’s fun, and it may even get you a job. And I get that warm-and-fuzzy feeling that comes from helping someone out.

Anyway, new projects!

• Wordpress theme for Jaye Wells
• menu design
• website for Marilyn Hicks
• and I’ve updated Marilyn’s identity page, finally

Jaye Wells

I’m working on a number more, too, that hopefully will see light soon. It is definitely time to rework this website, but of course that’s way on the bottom of my list. And I need business cards beforehand–I think I have less than ten left. It is seriously time to start buying myself a pair of new shoes every time I do work for myself.

Speaking of shoes, I wrote a guest post over at East Coast by Choice. So if you’re looking for tips on how to wear stilettos in crazy weather, you should go read it!

It’s amazing. News stories break on Twitter before the newspapers even have an idea what’s going on. You can see real-time photos of Stephen Fry stuck in an elevator. If you complain about a product, its manufacturers will help you out. But most fascinating are the conversations: it’s like what I imagine The Crysalids was like. Someone makes a comment about the colour of the sky, and people respond; threads of conversation begin spidering off in different tangents. Anyone can jump in at any point and drop out just as easily, and nobody dominates because every response is limited to 140 characters. It’s the digital representation of the collective unconsciousness. And it’s searchable!

Social media, I’m sure you’ve heard, is changing our world. If you’re late to the party, like me, it’s time to get involved! Rather than give you a bunch of information that may or may not be true, I’m going to point the way to some resources from more credible experts than I.

Please note that I’m only addressing here the aspects of social networking that I use myself or find most useful… there are a great many other tools that people are using, and there are a great many tools that will rise to the forefront as the internet changes & progresses.

General Information

• a long, but excellent overview of the merits & business implications of social media
• another great overview in pdf/eBook format

Write a blog

Everyone and their goldfish has one. Why don’t you? Blogging will generate more hits to your website, will provide your users with valuable content, and will allow you to interact with your visitors.

• why have one
• getting started
• RSS feeds

I can help you set up a blog and develop a custom template for it (you don’t want to look like everyone else now, do you?), along with a whole range of customization options! I like Wordpress myself, but I’ve also used Moveable Type, Livejournal, Blogger, and other platforms.

Twitter: not just for twits

Twitter is the most-used “microblogging” platform; ie, blogging for the lazy. It takes 20 seconds to post a microblog post, and that’s only if you’re really thinking about it.

• beginner’s guide
  
• sign up
• follow me!
• etiquette

Facebook: the workplace productivity vampire

In a business context, you probably want to avoid posting photos of yourself doing jello shots, but otherwise I’d advocate being as open as possible. Any time I receive an email from a prospective client, I look them up on Facebook to get a feel of who they are.

• reasons to use it
• ways to use it
• sign up
• add me!
• become my fan!

LinkedIn: Facebook without the poking

LinkedIn is sort of like the professional version of Facebook.

• video overview
• sign up
• add me!

Monitoring Tools

Find out what people are saying about you. If they’re not saying anything, find people who are talking about the things you can help them with, or the companies with whom you compete.

• technorati
• twitter search
• & more

Remember!

• Keep trying! You will see an ROI, but it may not be immediately measurable. Social media is about forming relationships, first and foremost.
• Help out other people as much as you can to be seen as an expert and a valuable asset to the community.
• Be authentic and open.
• Upload your photograph to your profile if you do nothing else… people will trust you about 100x more if they see a face. We react personally to a face in a way that we don’t react to words. (Same goes for your website.)
• Interact with others–if you’re communicating in a void, you aren’t communicating.
• Respond to negative feedback instead of suppressing it.
• Find your audience & join them.

If you’ve any resources to suggest, or comments, please feel free to leave them!

I have many stories and photographs, which are forthcoming. For now, two new projects: the holiday cards I mean to do every year, and a redesign and rearchitecturing of Fernwood Publishing.

The Bad: No more Digby. I’m trying hard not to think about it because it makes me sad. Why aren’t there more beautiful & clever, highly saturated things around? (I am happiest in technicolour). I don’t understand why “reality” is so interesting. There’s enough reality right outside my door; I’d rather the fantasy when I’m looking to get out of my head.

and the Ridiculous: Minggl thinks “b3k 4w5″ isn’t a valid postal code. It took me three tries to figure out they wanted me to capitalize it. Seriously? Canada Post will deliver my mail if I forget the majority of the address and scrawl it upside down with a six-inch-wide marker, but some web app that isn’t ever going to send me mail can’t validate a lowercase postal code?

Also, why are all web apps named by dyslexic five year olds now? I miss real words.

I’ve been using Wordpress for everything lately, and have totally fallen in love with it. I seem to always be a little behind the curve on web trends (as a side note, I’m now on Twitter, though I still don’t really understand the point entirely) due to my general distaste for trends (if everyone likes it, it can’t possibly be any good, right?). But I really wish I’d discovered the power and flexibility of Wordpress earlier on—it’s brilliant and I’m beginning to use it for more and more of my client projects.

I was first introduced to it earlier in the summer when I did a website and serial novel page for Lilith Saintcrow. I used it for another Orbit Books author website, Brent Weeks. Most recently, I’ve used a highly customized version for a community website for Maplewood on the Lakes. I’m developing a few more sites using it, and have discovered that, generally speaking, it’s actually much faster, simpler, and more powerful that creating my own customized administration panel (though I’m still doing this for more complex database-driven websites).

In non-Wordpress related news, I’ve also added the design work I did for Sebastien’s Bistro, and the identity materials developed for the Walker Inn.

And that’s all the updates for now! I’m going to keep trying to make my updates happen on a regular basis, but I’m like the chef who comes home and eats frozen dinners (and I’ve met a few) in this case.

Anyway. Two things I’ve learned:

• Gmail doesn’t care about your CSS text-formatting. That’s right, that means you’ll need to use <FONT> tags. Gross. I haven’t used those in at least five years!
• Outlook 2007 will make things look ugliest. Apparently, this is because it uses the MS Word rendering engine. Now, seriously? Why? If you’ve ever tried to design anything in Word, well, you know how impossible it is. They do, however, provide this handy little “validator” to check to see how/if your code is going to work, which is nice for those of us who get the shakes just opening Outlook. And it’ll plug into Dreamweaver!

On a vaguely related, but mostly unrelated, note: remember to vote, kids! This is the first year in a while I haven’t been directly involved in doing design work for a campaign, and as a result I’m less jazzed about the election than I usually am, but it’s starting to get to me as the day goes on. Go! Vote! (Or at least spoil your ballot (though it’s illegal to do so). Or vote Libertarian, if you can! Efficiency 2008! Down with Busy-Work! Alright, now I’m excited.)

Anyway, back to my jQuery-induced headache: this very helpful thing to the rescue! If I can stop being distracted by the gorgeous site design, I might be able to figure this stuff out, after all, without having to spend all day teaching my brain new methods of programming. I do so love programming tutorials written for designers. Thank you, pretty colourful website!

Hi Sarah,

So sorry to hear that you lost a considerable amount of work when water spilled on your computer. While chocolate zucchini muffins (no nuts–in case you’re allergic) won’t bring the material back (wouldn’t that be great), perhaps they can fuel the recreation process. Just want to let you know that we can be patient for an ultimately high-quality product.

Cheers!

ACT

How utterly sweet & lovely is that? I am an incredibly lucky girl to get to work with such fabulous clients.

and a “new” website (that was completed months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m determined that it’s about time to do it, especially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the website will be even more wrong than it is currently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two minutes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two minutes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rearranging.

Actually, the most dramatic upgrade has already happened, and that was my finally giving in to the whole “blog” phenomenon. It took years, but I finally buckled, and I’m sort of enjoying it. What sold me on Wordpress is how monstrously simple it is—I actually started using it the place of a word processor, and I find it much smarter: it auto-saves constantly (good for those of us prone to data loss), it’s totally un-bloaty, it’s faster than typing out my own html, and it auto-formats my smart quotes. God, I love smart quotes. I actually spent an hour or so today formatting a client’s novel to get rid of all the dumb quotes, hyphens, and “period” ellipses. I don’t know why these tiny details are so important to me–but I suspect that there’s a place where the grammar-fascist in me meets the typophile, and proper typography is born. Or maybe it’s just that I, embarassingly enough, didn’t know about smart quotes and such for so long that I now consider them to be something of a litmus test for “quality” design?

Smart quotes aside, the news/blog section has all been redone, and I like it a lot, and may even get into the habit of using it more frequently. Wordpress is really great and easy to develop themes for (once you figure out what you’re doing), which I’ve been doing of late for Lilith Saintcrow, who writes novels about girls who kick ass and take names (all told, the best kind of lady). I’ve got a couple more weblog-based websites in the works, so I’m learning a lot these days.

On a side note, why is there always an elephant (in the room) on my to-do list? I’m a notorious list-maker, and I’ll sometimes prioritize my lists in order of importance, not that I follow my own order religiously. For example, today I’m at #12, but #3 is still sitting there patiently, un-crossed, with three exclamation marks following it. It’s the most vital thing on my list, but I’m betting it’ll be the one thing that’ll end up being neglected. Is this some kind of subconscious self-mutilation wherein I’ll always sabotage myself for the work that is most important? How do I trick myself into thinking “eat three tubs of chocolate fudge icing” is the Elephant Task, instead? I’ve read a few productivity-type tips that recommend things like offering to wash a friend’s car, or pay them $50, if you don’t complete the Elephant by the end of the day (the theory being that we’re all inherently lazy, and the only way to make us do something is by threatening us with something more unpleasant), but I feel like that’s somehow compounding the pressure of the situation, thereby inflating the psychic block.

Anyone know how to take down an Elephant (or a run-on sentence)?