New look/gadgets @ terryllee.com, & other web-related musings

I spent a little too much time yesterday (time which should’ve been spent on my presentation on “Mary Wollstonecraft: The Gender of Genres in Late Eighteenth-Century England” by Mary Poovey for Thursday evening’s ENG334 class) performing some much-needed upgrade work on terryllee.com. I changed up the header image, for starters, making a scissors-and-tape collage of photos and some highbrow littrachure. I also finally figured out how to embed a music player without having WordPress freak out (hint: think Vodpod) and put the mailing list thing directly onto the site.

I think the time was well-spent, even though it’s not what I really should’ve been doing. The band’s starting to build up a little bit of a following (between our email list, Facebook, and MySpace, we’re at almost 900 people in the greater NYC area), and we’ve been recording a full-length album. I’ve been looking at other artists’ websites and am constantly amazed at how easy it is to make a professional-looking site, and how important said site is for first impressions. MySpace is great for what it is, but if we’re gonna play with the big boys and girls, we need a legit site.

I’m going through a similar issue as the tech liaison/webmaster for the Connecticut Writing Project @ Fairfield. Since we’re a pretty big organization that actually, y’know, serves a purpose, we need a real web presence.  For the past two or so years, we’ve been going back and forth about the necessity of making our site into something more than just a series of static pages that are hard to update, the necessity of paying somewhere between US$0-10k to make that change, where to host it, etc.  So this morning, when Chris called me to talk about some final decisions/deadlines (ie, Presidents’ Day), I though we were good to go.  We’re still not (it’s all administrative stuff right now, like getting the old TL to reassign admin privileges to me so I can change the host, etc), but I think it might actually possibly happen.  Finally.  And then I can get on with my actual TL duties, which involve figuring out ways to support the CWP’s initiatives using technology, training our people, etc.

One other thing: I’m really impressed with the Blackboard Vista system that Professor Qi, who teaches the aforementioned ENG334 course, has us using.  It would be really nice if our school portal were as good; unfortunately, well…

Filed under: Matters Musical & Artistic, Matters Technological

Thing of the Day: Oliver Sacks

I just used my latest Amazon gift card (the only perk of spending a lot on tuition) to order three items: The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive, Byrne & Eno’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, and Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia.

I don’t really need to write a whole lot about either CD, do I?  Both made all the usual best-of-2008 lists, both are major releases from consistently awesome artists, etc.  But do you know about Oliver Sacks?  If you’ve read either of my prior posts about Radiolab, I bet you’ve heard his voice: he’s the reedy Englishman that Jad and Robert love to visit.  In the last episode of Radiolab’s latest season, “Yellow Fluff and Other Curious Encounters,” we visit Dr. Sacks’s house, where he talks about his use, as an awkward teenager, of the Periodic Table of the Elements as a hopeful analogue for his own lack of close peer relationships.

I think Dr. Sacks’s segments on Radiolab are my favorite parts of the show.  There’s something so, well, sciency about the guy that I always pay more attention to him than, dare I say it, to Jad and Robert.  I’m working on fleshing out an idea for a novel–finally–and I think Dr. Sacks’s work is going to play a large part in it.  It’s going to involve Alzheimer’s on one end and a character who uses a cell phone as a portable remembering/content remixing device (I know I read something about that recently, but I’ll be damned if I can find the link–a little help, anyone?).

It’s not just Sacks, obviously, but he is a wonderful example of how a brainy guy can also be entertaining.  I’ve been fascinated by science since I was a pre-schooler correcting my dad’s pronunciation of dinosaur names, and I’m always looking for new, readable works to rekindle my interest.

In other news, I’m feeling pretty crappy.  Maybe self-imposed downtime this vacation will actually help me get started on this new project.

Filed under: Matters Scientific, Thing of the Day