I Am Still Alive

It’s nearly April and most all of the (few) posts I have committed to record this year have been to say that I am still around. Well, this one is no different, but I reckon that I will fill in some blanks and then resume posting more regularly (we’ll see).

It’s been a busy six or so weeks. I have transitioned from Brooklyn to the Pacific Coast – in Los Angeles for the time being – and am making my move northward in a few weeks presumably. I brought thousands of pounds of type, letterpress printing machines and most all of my other belongings (save a couple couches and scrap wood) along with me for the ride.

With all of that hardware safely in a storage facility (storage in West Los Angeles is plentiful and surprisingly affordable), I set about traveling a bit around the south west and even spent the first few weeks in March back in New York for the art fairs (Artlog had a booth at the Pulse Art Fair). I reckon flights back and forth between the West and East Coasts will be frequent (heading back to New York again in a few days for about a week actually).

Besides beach time, I have really been focused on coding. I built/am finishing a web application called Arlo that should be officially launching sometime next week. It’s an extraction of the Artlog portfolio system but, I figure, an enormous improvement on that system. It’s a hosted and flexible platform for web publishing and content management. Arlo is modular and will be deployed for several different types of users. Initially the setup is geared towards artists and creatives, but the plan is to tweak things in the near future for folks in bands and art galleries (letting them do a lot more online with greater ease and control than they are accustomed to).

I will be posting a bit more about it as the launch nears, but suffice it to say for now that I’ve spent just about every minute or so of my work days for the last couple months on Arlo. It’s a lot of work to make things easy for folks.

Arlo also represents a big shift for Artlog.com. Artlog is a partnership between myself and Manish Vora. It’s about a year old and we spent most of that last year exploring the art industry and figuring out where we fit within it. Part of the problem of Artlog is that up until this point I think we weren’t disciplined enough staving off feature-creep. Quite the opposite it was actually our ‘strategy’ to do as much as possible in the short term to see what worked and what didn’t (gauging feedback, user traction online and offline, financial benefits, and our own exhaustion). And it was indeed exhausting, but quite a bit worked in the process and we realized that it was time to focus our business.

So, a few months back we decided to strip as much as possible out of the Artlog app to really clarify the Artlog mission as a place to discover/share art information and art events. Most everything that doesn’t directly contribute to this goal will be pulled. Most of this work is ahead of me and it may take some time (as the only guy doing any development around here). Those orphaned features that we figure are most promising/useful will find new homes of their own like Arlo.

And to reflect this restructuring, we are now informally doing business as Ay Are Tee and Artlog and Arlo are the services that we produce. It’s a lot of names. I know. I think it will make more sense in time.

And that now bring us to I Am Still Alive. I started IASA as a design company three years back and in the meantime stopped doing any client design to focus on self-directed projects. At this point the plan is to use the business structure of I Am Still Alive to house my own personal side projects. So things may be a bit quiet around here (aside from blog posts) for a bit, but once I get settled up in San Francisco and get a shop set up there, I plan on resuming the printing business with renewed vigor and on relaunching this website then in the late Spring-early Summer.

And there you have it.

I woke up on the early side today and made some changes to this site’s layout. I am largely re-organizing things to make room for some fun projects and to accommodate a new direction for I Am Still Alive as an organization. I reckon the new masthead is a bit easier to navigate now, in any case.

More to come. Apologies if things look a bit too spare for now.

I am off to New Orleans to recharge over the weekend, but I will be back in action Tuesday morning. I have been working on some exciting new changes to this site and to the Artlog – expect extraordinary awesomeness in short order.

Amazon S3 went down for about 8 hours yesterday, effecting a number of our in-house projects including this site, Artlog, and all sites powered by Backlight. Considerably larger sites that also use S3 for media storage like Twitter and Tumblr were similarly hamstrung.

S3 is an amazing service despite this and other recent outages. Fortunately, Amazon recently setup a page providing status updates for their web services which went a long ways toward effectively keeping customers informed of progress. It’s an example other companies providing web-services should strive toward.

This is just to say that I am testing (yet another) URL routing system out for this site. This site may be acting a bit crazy this morning.

Thanks for bearing with us.

I am setting up a directory for printmaking studios in the city. The focus will be less on “jobbing” printers and more on spaces where workshops, open studio time, education and collaborative projects are happening.

If you run/work at/know of such an organization, hit me up.

I have just updated the RSS feeds to include findings and I’ve also set up personal feeds for myself and Hunter now that he is posting a bit as well.

I’ve long been inspired by the site ffffound and have spent a good amount of time browsing it. It’s still closed to new members – invite only – which is prolly a good thing and likely helps keep the imagery consistently interesting.

That being said, I’d like to start bookmarking images myself. So I set up something similar here this afternoon.

Behold Findings – a functional copy built specifically for my own bookmarking.

I am starting to roll out the organizations directory. You can see the first organization in the directory here.

It’s a bit of a replacement for the places section (sort of a false start and a misnomer in any case) I had set up a while back. More to come.

I forgot to mention last week when I made these changes, but I re-worked the URL routing for the different media types on this site. Basically, I’ve namespaced most of the raw materials-type objects (notes, links, stills, sounds, videos, locations, recipes…) so that they more obviously belong to the user that posted them.

What used to be something like

http://www.iamstillalive.net/notes/2007/04/has_many_through_with_has_many_polymorphs

is now

http://dylan.iamstillalive.net/notes/3-has_many-through-with-has_many_polymorphs

I know. I know.

I am currently the only person publishing here, but that will ideally not always be the case (I just realized that I have to fix the RSS feeds to reflect the new structure), but the front page of the site is going to be changing pretty significantly as I Am Still Alive starts venturing into somewhat new territory.

I’d say a small portion of the images, notes, & whatever that I post will actually make it to the front page. So if you want to keep up on what Dylan (I) is (am) doing, have a look at my user profile/tumblelog/activity feed.

I just finished setting up sound and video capabilities for this here website. I’ve got to tweak the interface for the media player somewhat, but the broad strokes are in place in any case.

It’s my plan to continue building out tools like these and then at some point in the not too distant future to open up user signups to other folks to let them use these tools to power their own websites – I’ll write a bit more about all that as it becomes more fleshed out.

So I guess I am posting recipes (for food or whatever) now here too.

I’ve just pushed the beginnings of a new design for this site live. It’s considerably wider and the navigation has been simplified to accommodate more content types. I’ll be rolling a lot more out over the weekend and talking a bit more about it as I have more time.

That all being said, I am pretty jazzed about it for now.

I am making some changes to how the front page works on this site. I am trying to knead in some of the different kinds of content published here (notes, places and products for now, but soon other more far out stuff).

It’s starting to feel a bit more like a tumblelog and I think that’s alright.

It took me a bit longer than I expected to re-build it (not that the building took long, but finding time to spend on it was hard), but it’s done now; I just re-launched the I Am Still Alive store.

There are currently just 5 prints for sale. That’ll change, though. I plan to put a new product up there weekly at least and while they’ll be primarily letterpress prints produced in-house (use the tools you’ve got), I’d like to experiment a bit with other media and collaborate with other folks.

I just deployed some modifications to this site in anticipation of the store’s (soon, soon, soon) relaunch.

You can now explore content [like notes, places, products (eventually), images, people] by tags or through the search I just threw together.

The homepage now has a grid of notable content to highlight stuff from around the site.

I am also re-launching the store early next week with some new prints and some re-prints.

Here’s a sneak preview of one of the re-prints. This is a test, tho. It’ll end up in silver/blue.

I expect we’ll run out of some of the prints, so sign up for the RSS feeds or the mailing list.

I’ve just finished setting up a skeleton for the places section on I Am Still Alive. It’s still a bit half baked, but Martha added the studio data from the We Dig Yoga project which never really took – so we are starting off with 80+ yoga studios in Los Angeles and New York and a handful of my Brooklyn favorites.

In the next week or so, I will be opening user signups and allowing folks to claim listings, to add new ones and to add comments. Relating specifically to yoga, I will set it up so that if a studio claims their own listing, they will then be able to post their course schedules (which users will also be able to subscribe to or send to their mobile phones). This is pretty much just the first step in opening things up a bit and trying to engage people in a new way.

More after the jump

I have set up a new feed for the notebook. (That was easy.)

Folks already subscribed via http://feeds.feedburner.com/iamstillalive/notes don’t need to do anything. The rest of you should consider subscribing (I figure).

I am going to be going through archives from previous incarnations of this site and reposting notes that might be useful to folks out there in the lonely vastness of the internets.

The notes getting reposted will likely have a technical bias (likely rails related). The urls are gonna break but that’s not the end of the world, I figure.