Legatissimo.info

CGL Group has merged with DemocracyInAction.com. Our little political baby is Wired for Change. This is exciting stuff. We're in a great spot to offer some extraordinarily innovative political technology and strategy in the coming weeks, months, and years.

I'm pretty excited. Gullible.info is getting the kind of sustained traffic to warrant the move from shared hosting, to dedicated hosting. So we ponied up and now as soon as it gets configured we'll have the new box up and running. Hopefully by the end of the month, we'll have the site fully migrated, and then we'll be able to add on some pretty rockin features. Stay tuned.

You can tell if I've got big deadlines looming if I somehow find the time to redesign Legatissimo.info. Sure enough, here's a whole new look, and true to form, I've got a whole lot to do.

• Interface design for a company I'm starting
• Big proposals and designs coming down the pipeline at work
• Second draft of my thesis and one pager are due in no time fast
• Client for a local Oregon race isn't sending me much needed imagery for their website :-(

Anyway, a little about this design. First and foremost, I must give huge amounts of credit to the tutorial in Computer Arts Projects - Illustration magazine. The treatment of the picture of me in the upper left corner is based very much on their tutorial, which inspired me greatly. Start to finish, it took about an hour. It was the first time I used the Firefox web developer's extension to just make live edits to the CSS the site was already using. That in hand, I set to work with a clear plan of attack.

As always, feel free to make comments.

Erratic Wisdom has a good article about ways to successfully leverage traffic from Digg links.

...most digg readers are at your site for a quick read, but you should try to keep as many as you can reading. A few ways to do this include adding a “Related Articles” list under the post in question. I have also found that a “Most Popular” list of articles can be very successful. Digg users are coming to (or making) a popular article and it is logical that they would want to see other successful posts from the author.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my thesis advisors, Peter Loge, about a press conference my friends and I were putting together. We had all sorts of answers to his questions, but he stumped us by asking, "what are you going to do the day after the event?" I'm glad I was tuned in to that important question early in my life/career. It's got a lot of application in all sorts of communication efforts, and gets you thinking in a long-term mindset.

What do you do after the press conference, and what do you do after the Digg link? Two questions that should be considered in advance.

I just launched a site for my friend's band. It's a pretty awesome group, so check them out.

They're called the Shark Spaceship, which meant I got to use a really awesome mix of space and sea imagery. The nav icons were my favorite, although I readily acknowledge that they have no bearing with the text they are associated with. But they are pretty fun.

I'm going to be quite slow getting back to people until I have my little darling back. But Mr. Portland is currently en route to California, where he will have his left hinge replaced -- after I carelessly broke apart the metal holding it together in a fit of rage-induced super-human strength.

Hopefully, I'll be up and running at full speed again on Saturday at the earliest, Monday at the latest. In the mean time, calling me on the phone would probably be your most fruitful course of action, should you desire to communicate with me.

Answers to inevitable questions:

1. It was bad
2. No, I don't know how it broke
3. A lot. :-(