website

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 :)

Since I can't figure out a way to sync my blog with this blog just visit the actual site if you're interested.

http://www.breakfastlun...

Okay....

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

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.

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.

today i talked with jason about the design and functionality of our website upgrade.

it's going to be a major improvement, but also, a lot of work. pretty much the whole website is going to be retooled while we move up from Drupal version 4.7 to Drupal version 5.0.

Once completed, it will be a lot easier to manage this project and allow everyone to participate more. it will also create a solid step toward the Collaboration Foundation, which is exciting.

uploading videos, photos, etc. will be much more powerful, as will the ability to join and organize groups. We will also be displaying project info on your profiles, so that they will be more functional tools for keeping up with the production. There are also a couple of fundamental changes designed to open this project up even more, while also keeping track of participation.

this weekend i finished putting together the first pass of functionality and features for the next version of our website. the next step is to budget the site and figure out how much it's going to cost to drupalize.

i'm gonna call it an early night. it's almost 2am, i've been pulling several late nighters this week- usually up til 4 or 5am. fueled by a stream of ideas that keep me up. i like this sort of stuff. it's a part of the process i really enjoy, where the idea gets refined and reveals new solutions to its own challenges.

also, we posted a couple of new videos. here is a moment from our Road Trip, part of a "perfect moment" series we are starting:

Hi everyone, there have been some dramatic changes going on behind the scenes.

i've been having what feel like major breakthroughs in the next steps of this project. alot of the epiphanies have been made whille redesigning our website. the main goals of this redesign are to increase the usability for the community features while breaking down barriers to entry. a lot of community features never got finished during our last big site updgrade; the previous update was really about automating the sign up system so we didn't have to keep entering names by hand, and introducing profiles so everyone could update bios, etc.

i've been having web based brainstorms.

in planning for the next web upgrade, as well as the development of the collaboration foundation site, i've been sketching out plans that simplify the entire flow for this site, add a lot of community features that will improve the ability for everyone to communicate and partiipate, etc.

the last 3 days i've been in intensive design mode: photoshoping mockups, and making notes on napkins about features and how the site should work. during this process, i've had a few new ideas that feel like breakthroughs for moving this project forward. i'm actually really excited about implementing them, which gets me excited about web development again, even though it's a time drag and a tedious process.