Andy Chase

After about 5 and a half years with my current hosting company, my account is a predictably cluttered mess of files, some of which are still being hosted while others are just junk thrown up for testing purposes, and others which are just sitting there taking up space.

In the past I have resisted the idea of doing a clean sweep, not wanting to irk people arriving from search engines, or who might actually have a page bookmarked… but considering that I don’t really pay attention to my stats or incoming searches these days, do I really care?

I’m taking a break from my module development frustrations and turning my attention to design. It’s been quite a while since I actually designed a site from top to bottom, versus taking an existing theme like Kubrick or Bonsai and fiddling with colors and a graphic or two.

My wife gave me an excellent Shag t-shirt for Christmas along with another 1950's collecting guide/photo reference, and suddenly I'm all interested in design and even digital illustration again.Not much to write for tonight. I Put up another good photo of the Safari Inn sign from yesterday.

I spent most of the evening diddling around with Painter 6. After 5 comfortable years spent using Adobe (and to a lesser extent, Macromedia) interfaces, Painter is positively confounding.

Plus there's the added strangeness of not having actually painted since high school. I got pretty good with acrylics, but didn't stick with them when I pursued animation in college. So it's like learning to paint again through the layer of abstraction added by drawing on a tablet and seeing the results on the screen; the lack of immediate, physical feedback is disconcerting. But I shall persevere.

Also, go visit Shag's site. Go there right now. No finishing up your e-mail or reading The Onion, just go. And if you're going to be in L.A. next month, go see his exhibition, Bottomless Cocktail, at the La Luz De Jesus gallery in Hollywood. I missed the Night of the Tiki exhibition last fall, so I'm looking forward to this one.

I first came across Shag in an article in Juxtapoz a few months ago. I know I'd seen his stuff somewhere before that, but that was the first time I learned that there was an illustrator who specializes pretty much exclusively in exactly the kind of retro-tiki-lounge stuff I like. The Night of the Tiki book has been on my Amazon Wishlist ever since I saw that article, but my wife gave me an excellent Shag t-shirt for Christmas along with another 1950's collecting guide/photo reference, and suddenly I'm all interested in design and even digital illustration again.

Things have come a long way since I used to painstakingly draw 32 color, 320x240 scenes on my Amiga 500 in DeluxePaint IV and although I'm way out of practice, I know I'll be able to blow my older stuff away in time. That boxy old mouse has nothing on a pressure-sensitive tablet.

When I started monkeying around with category indices last night, I didn't fully realize what I was getting into.When I started monkeying around with category indices last night, I didn't fully realize what I was getting into; to date I had the site set up under the assumption that I'd only be making one post per day, regardless of category.

By indexing everything by category and date I can't realistically continue to structure the site using paths like /blog/year/month/day/index.html; in my need to play catchup with blog entries since last Thursday I'm going to have a couple of overlapping posts on the same dates but in different categories.

It's not a big deal to move to something like /categories/category/blogtitle.html, but it's a pain in the ass now that Google has crawled the old indexes for September, October, and November. I suppose I can keep those around and add a META robots tag telling Googlebot not to index or follow those pages any more. Eventually I'll have the server throw a 401 error and redirect hits to those pages somewhere useful. I'll probably maintain the /blog/year/month/index.html monthly indexes, but break the up the listings for each month by category then descending date.

Then there's the added complexity of having the site broken into much more distinct sections; it's now Category > Blog instead of Blog(Category). I'm already doing this to some extent using the categories' description field from the database, but it's still a little bit clunky.

Plus I want to clean up the icons a tiny bit now that I see them all side by side.