It's time to get back to the mosaics

I've not been doing much work on the mosaic this month. I needed to redesign my website montagaelmay.com  and apply the design elements to this blog. It still surprises me some when I come back to the blog and see the new design - I sort of forget that I did the update already.

I also just now - like 10 minutes ago - uploaded the newly redesigned Winona Arts Center website - winonaarts.org. Hopefully I've found all the issues with it. I'm using JotForms for the forms as an experiment. I've beefed up the member-artist pages and added a gallery feature. Hopefully more member who are artists will take advantage of this benefit.

Now I get to do the proofreading and the fretting... I know there's got to be some overlooked placeholder text in there somewhere... or some links on some child page. 

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To Flash or not to Flash... not really a question

More reasons to not use Flash on websites...

Steve Jobs - Thoughts on Flash

Actually, I look at Adobe in much the same way I look at Microsoft. Both companies are very protective of their brand, their products and their code... and that's okay. Both companies constantly buy up small companies, dismantle their small, inexpensive cool software applications and roll them into the hugely overpriced applications that they sell... and that's not okay.

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New Website Address

I've put a new website up at http://montagaelmay.com.

It's the same design with new galleries of my visual art work added. There are four galleries: mosaic work (which if you've been reading this blog for very long you have seen most of the mosaics); sculpture; Interstices (a two artist show I participated in); and a gallery of encaustic Artist Trading Cards.

There's also a selection of my written stories, and a bit more about me and my art practice and my views on sustainable living.

Google Chrome

I just downloaded Chrome.

Seems like it renders text ala Firefox, images come across well, and it is FAST,FAST, FAST in regard to scripts and multimedia.

Side-by-side comparison of text rendering: (left-to-right) Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE7.

It also uploads fast. The image above uploaded so fast I thought I was seeing things...

I will be checking out my favorite bandwidth-heavy sites and see if it really is as fast as it seems.

Winona County DFL Website

I did not work on the tapestry last night. I had wanted to go to the DFL Tech committee meeting, get lots of work done and then come home and work on the tapestry.

Instead of doing that, I ended up having only one other member of my committee attend the meeting and then staying an extra hour at the DFL to teach someone how to use Google Groups.

Frustrated by the lack of progress and the lack of response to my requests for help with the website content, I decided to do it myself and then bring it back to a few key people who I know will get me the information that I need. When I got home (around 7 pm) I started working on the site. Shortly before midnight I posted the redesign to a temporary location and am now waiting on more information and feedback.

New Blog Design

I just did a major redesign of this blog. I wanted it to more closely match my website. The redesign involved hacking the Blogger template.

I need to be able to do this for the various blogs that my co-workers create for the university. I had tried before but was not too successful at actually modifying the template (instead of just changing colors and fonts) until I found some excellent guidelines provided by Amanda Fazani of BloggerBuster. Now I need to take a look at all the blogs I manage and assist with for the university.

This is the fun part of my job.

Over my lunch hour I might play with different colors for borders and text. Or maybe not...

Making Decisions

Today I am making decisions - all sorts of decisions.

1. Whether or not to move some websites to SiteGround so that I can use Drupal for CMS
   
   • Magnetic Aesthetic
   • Winona DFL
   • Sustain Winona
     
     
2. What changes need made to payroll items
   
   • deductions & exemptions
   • payroll automatic deposit: how much to which account
   • how long to keep kids on insurance
     
     
3. Priority of house repair tasks
   • ROOF - 1st week in August - $6,500.00 (hired Zane's Roofing)
     
   • Front porch - priority moved from after back porch to before, in order to get it done before roof in August - Some decking, posts, railings, roof joists and decking - $800.00 (us doing labor)
     
   • Back porch - remove screen, replace with lattice, level and paint decking - $125.00
     
   • Side porch - replace screens, add door(s), paint deck and posts & railings
     
   • Finish fence - 5 panels, 6 posts - $180.00
     
   • Landscaping (Mike & Nova for front yard, Mike, Nova, Abelisto & I for back)
   • Cracked plaster (6 spots on 1st floor, 3 on 2nd) - $125.00
     
   • Paint walls - $200.00
     
   • Stain woodwork - $100.00
     
   • Downstairs bathroom - yuk
   • Upstairs bathroom - more yuk
     
     
4. New car or no new car or new-used car - leaning towards putting off this decision until I hear back from EC
   
   
5. Tapestry, or Armor, or Quilt project next

I think that's all that I need to decide on today.

New site published

I uploaded the new www.854w5th.com website. The home page for the site has not been changed, but the sites for Abelisto (Wes) and myself (Monta) are totally redesigned. These redesigns are totally my work, and are not based on templates. The home page for 854w5th.com is still template based. Wes' pages reflect his current Beekeeping research and project. Mine are primarily an updated portfolio website.

I will be redesigning that page soon. I may need to do the Winona DFL site first.

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American Craft Council Show

Abelisto & I went up to the Saint Paul on Friday to attend the American Craft Council show at the River Center. Another professor was teaching Abelisto's second class of the day so he was finished at 8:353a.m. I have vacation time that needs to be used up before May 31.

So I took the day off. We saw a lot of really interesting work - most of it way out of our price range. There was an ottoman made by Robert Harman that I loved. We spoke with Robert (I think it was Robert). His studio is in my hometown (Bloomington Indiana) and we promised to come by next time we go to visit family. His work is wonderful.

I made contact with a couple artists who are interested in having me do their websites. That might be a good thing, when everything is said and done.

Doing another redesign

I must be a bit crazy.
I am right in the middle of a nearly overwhelming web redesign at work - a huge project with the herculean task of condensing and redesigning a website that now has over 3000 pages.

I just redesigned the Sustain Winona website, and I am still playing with that a bit.

I am on the technology committee (chair no less!?!) for the Winona County DFL and have undertaken the redesign of that website.

I have promised to look at the Dakota Homecoming site and see about redesigning it.

And I have decided that I need to redo Abelisto & my website.

Last night I worked on Abelisto's part of our website.

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Sustain Winona

Last week (or maybe it was the week before) I finished doing the Sustain Winona website. I am not in the Sustain Winona task force - I just wanted to redo the website since it was not what I thought it should/could be.

No one has given me any change or told me that they hated it, so I thought I would post a link here (and in my Blogroll) just to share the site.

Sustain Winona

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Making Sustainability Sustainable

Went to the Twin Cities this week with my boss for the meeting between our web team and the vendor that we are working with on the website redesign. It is a bit over two hours each way for us to go up there. We talk a lot. It is sort of nice to be able to do that. On the way up we talked about our tastes in music (I had taken my iPod and FM transmitter) and our families and what we were doing at various times growing up (we are close in age, but from different areas of the country) which got us started again on music. He asked if I could guess what artists were on his iPod (he has a really strange mix). We also talked about sustainable living, something which interests both of us.

On the way back we talked a great deal about sustainability - after we finished taking apart the meeting we had just been to and putting it back together again.

My boss gave me a charge - figure out how to make sustainability, the sustainable life movement, sustainable.

Now that is quite an assignment. Anyone have any IDEAS?

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Between teaching and the website redesign

I am now teaching part of Brother Roderick's Graphic Design II class. I am teaching the website design part of the class. the class meets three times per week for one hour and 15 minutes. I have one of those class sessions. It is not really enough - we need an entire class for web design. The university is a bit behind, make that a lot behind. However I have made myself a bit of a P.I.T.A. (pain-in-the-ass) to the VP of Academic Affairs (who so unfairly and incorrectly dismissed Abelisto's sabbatical proposal) and the best I could do would be to push the university to create the class and hire someone else to teach it. I may do this. Our students really need it. They are leaving here at a great, great disadvantage. I need to wait until near the end of the semester though. I do not want to get Roderick into any hot water about me team teaching his class. I am not getting paid for it, so they cannot bitch about that. I think that as long as the students feel they are getting information and skills they need they will be happy. Those two things should keep the administration off of Roderick's back.

This post started out being an explanation of why I have been so lax with this blog... Between learning the things that I need to learn in order to give the students the best I can give, and the craziness of the web redesign project, I am generally sick of computers by the time I get home. I do not believe I have mentioned it in this blog, but the university is in the midst of a total website redesign. Everything is on the table. As Director of Web Communication, a major part of the work is mine. I can tell you that when you are doing a redesign of a 3000+ page website, it is a bit grueling.

Anyway, once again I am trying to reconnect with this blog.

We will see.

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Goddard College

My alma mater just redesigned their website. This is interesting to me for a number of reasons. Perhaps first and foremost because I am facing a redesign of the website at work. I am pretty certain that Goddard's was done for far less money and far less anxiety and pain than ours will be.

I love the simplicity and directness of the Goddard site. The site authors have provided just enough information for someone to decide if they are intrigued or put off by the Goddard pedagogy and its progressive educational model.

Our website contains far, far too much information (around 3,500 pages of it). It is a mishmash of information for students, employees, and others. I am pushing for creating two distinct sites - an internal, or portal site, which contains information for internal constituencies, and an external, marketing site containing information for the rest of the world. I think I am gaining converts...

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