nirvan's blog

Lots of tedious progress this past week.

On Thursday I finally finished several core page layouts of the new site and sent them over to Jason. Jason is the Drupal web developer who did our last site. I spoke with him yesterday about some of the issues facing the new site, including the complexity of some of the functionality and the budget range. Today he is reviewing the job with his partner, and then tomorrow we are going to touch base again with more details.

Like many good Drupal developers, Jason has become extremely busy. He is booked until the middle of the summer, so even if our site is something we move forward on, it probably wouldn't get under way for another two months! Meanwhile, I will be getting some other quotes from other Drupal developers to compare. But I should get a better idea tomorrow of what we are looking at with Jason in terms of budget and time.

here is a close up of some pixel polishing action. lots of zooming in and making icons one pixel at a time...

good news is i feel like i'm finally through the boggy parts of the design swamp. still a bit more to go, but the path is clearer and the remaining pages should speed up; now that the new navigation and information architecture is in place, the remaining design challenges are relatively light.

So our production is in a slow moving swampy swamp stage. but things are still moving, with over 9,300 producers and counting :)

Wanted to thank our Swedish Producer William Johansson for making this cool video promo. (William made the music too!)

Hey everyone,

iJustine made this nice video about her recent visit to our office, with music by The Evangenitals!

I wanted to give a warm welcome all of our new producers who have joined our crew recently after watching this video, it's super cool to see this spreading and new people joining up from around the world. I really really appreciate it!

Political views aside, from a strictly grassroots marketing point of view, I'm really blown away by some of the creative innovation i'm seeing around the Barack Obama campaign. Probably most of you have seen the Yes We Can video remix of this Obama Speech. It was made independent of Barack's campaign by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas who felt inspired, got some people together, and made it happen.

Hey everyone, we put together a little video from iJustine and Brooke's visit, who came by our office a few weeks ago with Evan. Check it out:

big thanks to Marcin who has been volunteering and helped edit this.

before posting this video, i joined a really awesome (free) video publishing service called TubeMogul.com which allowed us to upload this video once and then distribute it to multiple video sharing sites like YouTube, blip.tv, myspae, yahoo, revver, etc. this is a HUGE timesaver, and motivated me to sign up to many different video sites that i haven't tried before. it will be interesting to experiment with web traffic.

Coolio is now Producer #9,131 of The 1 Second Film!

I was at a dinner party last night and Coolio was there helping to cook. Los Angeles is sort of absurd that way. It was at the house of a friend - and another of our producers :)

Coolio actually has a cooking show called "Cooking with Coolio" on MyDamnChannel. He is a really cool guy and a great story teller with tons of interesting tales to tell. Definitely a nice guest to have at a dinner party and a welcome producer to have on our little movie.

While designing the new site, I couldn't help but make a few changes to our current site. this was sparked after finding this cool new YouTube tool that lets you embed a video bar horizontally and vertically, like this:

So I started to redo our Video Page and then our Photos page. I also added more video on the home page; in exchange, i deleted text that can be found in other parts of the site.