5.11.08 @ 11:47 pm
If you have been to this site in the lately, you have most likely seen the cryptic banner on the top right signaling that something by the name of Franklin Street will be released in Winter 2008. Well, there is not too much winter left in this year, but now that sayhear.org has launched and a couple other projects have reached their conclusion, I can concentrate on this project once again. Yes, as it is almost certainly apparent, the blog redesign is what I am calling Franklin Street, but it is a whole lot more than just that. I am going to try something fairly ambitious, but it is going to take some time to get it right.
The new blog is coming along nicely and I have hopes that it will be completed before December. The total project however will take a tremendous amount of time to finalize correctly. I am curious, if anyone cares, how you would like to see this play out? Would you like to see a soft launch of Franklin Street in a month or two with progressive enhancements during the course of the following 2-3 months? Or would you find it better to launch everything finalized at once and wait another month or four? I am conflicted on this subject as I just want to get back to actually writing instead of building something to write.
I would be foolish and presumptuous to think anyone would ultimately care about this project - no matter how it launches. That being said, if anyone does have a thought they’d like to share on this subject, please leave your ideas/opinions in the comments.enhancements, franklin street, ideas opinions, launch some random dude
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5.11.08 @ 12:30 am
Not too long ago, Brendan Lee over at Ribbit got a hold of me to work with them to showcase their technology. We bounced around a bunch of different ideas, that we really liked, but it was a conversation I had with Gil Gershoni of the creative agency Gershoni where we came to the idea you see at sayhear.org. We both loved the idea of using Ribbit’s telephony technology to give a voice to the voter and create an open sounding board for people to put in their two cents on this election. What you see at sayhear.org is the culmination of real cooperative work between Gershoni, myself and Ribbit. This was not a top-down production but rather a equal collaboration between all partners. I really do believe it is that relationship which allowed us to launch the site that is up today.
Read the rest of this entry »brendan lee, budget, collaboration, cooperative work, creative agency, gershoni, halloween, ribbit, showcase, social discourse, sounding board, telephony technology viewpoints project
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1.11.08 @ 9:25 am
With 3 days left until the election, I am oh-so-proud to announce the launch of sayHear.org, a site intended to literally give voice to the voters of America. You participate by calling one of the numbers on the sayHear.org website based off of who you are voting for and leave a message explaining why you are. Your audio recording will then show up on the site for others to hear.
This site was a joint-collaboration between myself, Gershoni and Ribbit. Without Ribbit’s technology, there would be no way this could have been created - I cannot thank them enough for their time and generosity. In addition, working with the Gershoni crew was absolutely amazing and I am still amazing at how much we were able to accomplish in such little time.
Please, do take the time out to go to sayHear.org and leave a message. It will take less than a minute and in return you will help keep the political discussion going all the way until election day. You should also check out electionmyx.com for some really cool election 2008 video mashups. Big hat tip to Neil Voss for the great work on that site.
audio recording, barack obama, election 2008, election day, joe biden, john mccain, launch, presidential election, sarah palin, sayhear voting
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15.10.08 @ 10:31 pm
I have been talking about the blog redesign for a while. A long while. Considering the scope of the project I created for myself, I knew this process was going to take a while, but frankly, I vastly underestimated the effort is has taken so far. All that said, real and significant progress is being made. If I really wanted to push it and launch the site as soon as possible, I could probably get something ready in a week. However, that is not the goal.
I have mentioned many times that I truly want to finish this project in the correct manner and get everything in a place where I can just concentrate on generating content. I not written an article in what seems like forever. In the meantime, loads of work and ideas have piled up that I desperately want to show. All that said, once the new blog is up and if it delivers as I hope, creating content will take less effort and allow me to concentrate on the purpose of a blog - posting articles and media.
This whole redesign is not just a run-of-the-mill Wordpress theme. So far, with the help of some very generous friends, we have added on to at least 3 plugins and are creating a couple custom ones on top of it. A new icon set will be created for the design, custom javascript widgets have been created and a few other doodads here and there. All that said, it is not too impressive in and of itself. However, when working fulltime and trying to manage all other pieces of life, it becomes a significant effort.
All that said, big progress is being made and I truly cannot wait to get this thing launched. I hope the few readers that read this blog have more patience that I and hold on a little longer.blog, patience redesign
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13.08.08 @ 12:32 pm
It has been around a week since I wrote that this blog was going through a redesign. Unfortunately, until then, I was most likely be writing about the its progress. Still, I thought it may be interesting for some to read snippets of where it is in the process.
At this moment, wireframes are around 80% complete - which sounds good - however, because of the 80/20 rule, that means that I am still a long way off. I have tried to scatter my work around so as to diminish the potential for tunnel-vision on some aspects of the design, so I took some time to begin on some necessary icons. Up to this point, the vast majority of traffic to this site funnels through two icon sets I made a while back. Ironically, those sets took all but 2-3 hours to make whereas this set is taking much longer.
Here’s a preview of some icons:
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