Monthly Archives: April 2007

Moving rapidly towards Joomla !

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Well, as the titles says, I have outgrown the WordPress blog application in faily short order and now I am on to WordPress.

Joomla allows for a certain amount of robustness in content production and uploading capabilities, and as of late I have pitched a few new clients and the response has been faily overwhelming.

There is an aspect of ‘Interactive Design’ which has really determined how people interact with websites that has grown over the years that has taken on new meaning in the way I see the overall direction of website design.

Being a huge fan of Myst in the early days of CDRom’s I can safely say that I an not immune to the appeal of a certain amount of intrigue and discovery in the process of ‘walking’ through’ an new and wondrous ‘Virtual World’.  That being said the web has changed into a world where being grounded in the familiar has taken on an appeal all it’s own.  I guess this sounds like it is coming from the ‘if ya can’t beat em, join ‘em’ camp, but as a sales tool for engaging people in the notion of ‘website salvage’ becomes an attractive option.

Enter Joomla, a robust and powerful open source driven CMS which allows handing off of content and website management to the client.  I am very excited by the response I have had so far and look forward to really getting a handle on how to use this powerful new application.

Search Engine Marketing for the Berkshires and beyond !

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Interesting Day, On the phone with a high end recruiter from a company called GroupM which I think translates into an acronym for a company called MindShare. A winding 90 minute conversation centered around my understanding of marketing in the NSO space and well as some of the highs and lows of being interviewed by recruiters for jobs in both the natural and paid search space.

In my conversation I realized how passionate I am about the changing space of marketing on the web and the irony of how corporate is getting to grips with the fact that it needs to create a new business model if it is going to be able to compete in the online sphere.

It is intriguing to me how things have come almost full circle and I hope to have a new opportunity to work in the realm of Search for some of the key corporate players in the field.

Later this afternoon I met with a possible client and walked him through the ins and outs of his website, which sorely needed a redesign. The end result, he in now my newest client and will be sending me a deposit to start work on redoing his website.

The Internet is a wonderful thing.

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Spent the day orienting different clients as to the use of the Internet.  I have been migrating a bunch of friends over to G-Mail.  The issue here is the idea that people can access their email and their Content Management  backend from any browser, but the assumption that I have had that  people understand what it is that I am teaching them has been ill founded.

It is a tough thing to educate as well as manage expectations relative to web use at the same time.

I have stumbled upon Joomla now as a full and robust CMS (content management system) that is PHP as well as open source.  I have given the thought to migrating this WordPress blog to a Joomla platform.  The idea that I can build a fully functioning CMS website from scratch using Joomla with the type of power and control is a very attractive thing. I resurrected SturmunDrang.com from a holding pattern and brought the domain name over to BlueHost from Network Solutions and now I have Joomla ! loading and up and running is an exciting thing.

I am not entirely clear on where my knowledge of HyperText / HTML  took off, but I understand now that I have a very fundamental understanding of how things work on the web.  I have been delving into the guts of the Joomla tutorial and really starting to see how powerful and clean the CSS code in Joomla ! is a clear indicator of the depth and complexity that open source has become.

Learning about Outsider Art

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It is a vague concept. What is outsider art. Outsider art in the recent past was more about artists who created work in circumstances removed from the influence of the mainstream of society, much like the people found in Appalachia who has been cut off from society by the geography of rugged mountains and inaccessible box valleys (Hollows).

I remember hearing songs from these isolated peoples, the old English speech inflections preserved in purer form that could be found in England.

Micheal Ulick, the one of the gallery owners of ChurchStreetArt in Lenox Massachusetts, commented to me the other day how finding ‘true’ outsider artists was maybe no longer possible, due the the intense influence that the current media saturation was having on the American Culture.

He put forth the notion that searching for ‘true’ outsider artists was perhaps a quest where geography might have to be the starting point, opening a map and beginning the search with geographically isolated locations. Either that, or locations where the artists where isolated in the mind. Psychologically isolated people, perhaps the mentally ill or chronically depressed.

Hhhmmmm

Jesus in the land of Goth…

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Posted here on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157600037961694/page2/#comment72157600040245196

Haiti, Tunisia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Lebanon …

I don’t think I need to go any further with this list, you get the picture. We are not what we seem to be on the Internet, and I did many things before I ever picked up a camera.

The drive to find beauty in this life has it’s source in many places in the heart. Often it comes from seeing too many terrible things and a desire to create a visual gratitude list as a reminder of things that are now, not things that were then.

I think you misunderstand me Steve, and for that I must apologize. There are many different worlds in this ‘reality’ of ours, most of the time created in the minds of those that see.

I am not defending child and/or sexual abuse. I only hope in that some day in the future there can be a special Hell on earth that we can send the perpetrators of this type of crime.

This issue is not unfamiliar to me. When I first got out of the service I found work helping a special group within law enforcement to study the issue, and what I learned was far more disconcerting than I would have expected.

AS too ‘DP’ and her “April Fools Day’ mom’s quest for ‘justice’ on Flickr I think we can all agree we have been sucked in to a joke in bad taste at our own expense.

For a lighter subject, check out Google’s new product launch: