Quiet this week - DSL out since for about 5 days and the Dreamhost server with this site was down for 2. Have many images to post. I'll catch up over the weekend.

Announcing the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture! If you are a reader of design::writings and were wondering why the postings on there were so sporadic over the last several months this is why.

Our official launch is today.

The Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. We're working on creating resources for information architects, information about promoting IA and the benefits of IA, and we're creating a framework that can support research and advancement of the discipline.

One of the initiatives I am personally working on is the creation of tools for in-house IAs. Having dealt with these issues myself, I know how frustrating it can be to "sell" your work to your own people. Tools, process maps, ROI studies, research on effectiveness, case studies, elevator pitches and other things that you can use, will make your life and mine easier. When we can spend our time "doing" our work instead of "justifying" it we will all be better off.

Trying to use Brad Choate's pagination code in a new blog to serve up multiple page Photo Albums. I want to link this blog to those albums, but use MT to manage my templates and style sheets. I am having trouble getting the pagination code to work correctly - I had a bunch of parse errors which I fixed and now it is finally down to one Fatal error in the defining of a function that is defined at the beginning of the script.

The Gen Arts pics and Sheila's installation will be posted once I get this fixed.

Anyone have experience with these scripts and PHP? I would love your help.

the erinmalone::photolog is two years old today. wow I can't believe it - and now it is on it's own domain. yippee!

the photolog is now officially moved to erinmalone.com. any folks linked to me should change their links. tomorrow is the 2 year anniversary of my blog!

switching isp's for erinmalone.com, so this site may be a little wacky for a day or two. Not sure how easy or difficult moving MT and databases over will be - if anyone has done this, any advice is welcome.

I have moved all my files over to Moveable Type and am now in the process of re-entering all my entries - by hand. I am into September - going backwards and have done all the early Blogger posts from before June - so just a couple of months missing.

I will have to add the comments back in by hand since I was not able to get Greymatter working right again. Bummer.

I was about to convert all to Movable type - but since I can't rebuild, I will have to move everything over by hand. Luckily - it's only 51 entries.

So until this is ported - read new entries here.

Importing old Blogger entries as a test before moving Greymatter entries over. So far they give me a dialog of success but the posts are nowhere to be found. mmm. Also my style sheets are acting weird.

Redesigned my homepage and the photolog section using only CSS for positioning and formatting. Looks good on the 5.0 browsers and in NS 6.1. Is passable in NS 4.7 (barely). Let me know wat you think and if anything is broken.

Now working to setup and transfer Photolog a.k.a erinmalone.com to MoveableType for publishing and managing. Will keep you posted on success or lack thereof.

Tweaking my stylesheets a bit for increased legibility. How subtle is too subtle and when are things too garish? I guess it depends on your monitor, your platform and how old you are. Mom doesn't read the photolog because the type is too small. Ok - now it is bumped up a little. Hope it is better.

Testing out a new way to implement my photo albums. The greymatter popup links generate way too many html files to keep track of down the line. In addition, there is no sense of next and previous in a series. So here is a mini-test using javascript and some of my images from my trip last year to hawaii. All these images, with captions can be found in my travels area. Click on the thumbnail to launch the album.

I am converting my personal journal into a GreyMatter photo journal. I will be hosting the pages on my ISP and will be adding images on a regular basis. The Blogger pages will still be linked but I won't be using the tool anymore for updates.

I recently got two new digital cameras - a Pencam and Canon D30 - which finally made it out of Illinois. These two items, plus the desire to share more visuals are prompting this change.

Enjoy.

Was checking my log files and traffic info and came across this referrer. Do a search on AltaVista for like a chicken with its head cut off and my site comes up in slot number 2. I must have said those words somewhere in DesignWritings. But it is too funny....

The new site is done! EM Design: Home. I have worked for a long time to redesign my site so that I can now point to it as I look for a new job. It has been a year and a half since I did a redesign. I think it looks pretty good.

The Dr. Leslie project is finally pushed (around 3 am a last night) and now I am making my way through the pages to find the bugs. I have a message board and feedback form and am setting up a site search with the wizards on the ISP. I am also hacking into my first PERL scripts so eventually I will beable to write my own.

Once the site is bug-free, I will let Roger and otehr know it is up for their perusal. Should be interesting to see what people think. I n a lot of ways it is much better than my original thesis project.

AltaVIsta is imploding around me and more layoffs are coming this week? next week? we aren't sure but it sucks bigtime. it is very hard to concentrate and no one is working. At least the new site and the Dr. Leslie project are occupying my time.

I am redesigning my website and am overwhelmed with how much it has grown. My site EM Design, like my life is full of so much baggage that I can't seem to get rid of.

I am not sure when I will finish - everytime I make one change it is magnified by 1000 pages. shit.

Ok - so I work at AltaVista. This weekend I put Google search on my homepage. This is so funny! And very cool. It searches my site as well as the web and the offerings we have at work can't do that. Besides it's free.

I finally finished working on the photos of Diana and Jovani's wedding. Geez - like it only took 4 1/2 months. I figure I probably would have taken longer if Debsue hadn't gotten her images up. I am lame.

I have completed a big chunk of the Dr. Leslie project migration from the Hypercard stacks and figure I will be able to get the Artists Bios area up fairly soon. I really don't want to live on my computer and am squeezing that work in between work, gardening, guitar lessons and painting my room.