Evolving as a Blogger
I’m staring down the barrel of my 1000th post (this is 997), and the three-year blogiversary of The Geek Whisperer (10/4/11), and I’ve been feeling creatively paralyzed. Hitting one thousand posts within three years while earning a masters degree; maintaining full-time employment; starting a business; and having a fulfilling social life is a serious source of pride. I started blogging simply to understand it for professional reasons, and unintentionally found myself on a very geeky journey of self-discovery.
When I started The Geek Whisperer someone close to me asked, “How are you possibly going to have enough to say to make this last more than a few weeks?” The truth is that even if I wrote all day, every day I’m not sure I’d ever run out of cool things to talk about; we live in very interesting times. This blog is about sharing my passions and interests, and I’ve never had a shortage of either. This is both a blessing and a curse.
It’s wonderful because I can’t remember the last time I was bored.
It’s painful because I will never learn all that I want to learn, or accomplish everything that I hope to accomplish.
What’s a geek to do?
The simple answer is evolve. I will not abandon this blog. I love writing it far too much to stop. Even if everyone stopped reading, I’d still keep writing.
The bigger question is how will I evolve?
I’ve got a lot of things in the works that I’m incredibly excited about, and will reveal over time. To pursue those passions, I need to post less. However my intent is to post high quality content when I do. The short, “check this out” posts that filled the gaps between substantial thought are going away because people don’t seem to read them very often.
Thank you for reading
As I’ve said many times before, I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read.
Thank you for sharing my links; buying from the Shop; commenting; and taking the time out of your day to read. I know there are a lot of other great websites out there and I’m thankful for every person who feels that mine is worth their time.
Thank you for your continued support. Here’s to the next three years.
Typography For the Non-Designer
Typography is the art of arranging and selecting fonts. Non-designers usually don’t even know the word, let alone how to do it well.
I’m not a designer, but in working with them over the years, I’ve picked up some basic knowledge.
When designing anything with type, it’s been my experience that non-designers usually screw their work from the get go by choosing a fancy-looking fonts like comic sans, papyrus or an unreadable script.
The best tip I’ve learned is to pick a simple, balanced, sans-serif font like Trebuchet or Helvetica.
What’s a sans-serif?
Sans-serif don’t have anything hanging off them:
Why use a sans-serif?
They are clean and simple, and as a result, they are easy to use.
Here’s an example, imagine we’re trying to choose a typeface for a new company called, Incredible Inc.
The first is Trebuchet, the second is Comic Sans, the third is Time New Roman, and the final one is some script font.
Trebuchet looks clean, simple, professional and readable.
Comic Sans is readable when it’s large, but doesn’t look clean or professional.
Times New Roman is a bit cramped and busy.
And the script is absolutely brutal to read.
The bottom-line
Do what you like, but using Helvetica or Trebuchet is an easy way to make text look visually appealing without having to build up all of the skills and experience necessary to understand design.
The Geek Whisperer – New Look, Same Great Taste!
I hope you enjoy the new navigation, and design.
I’ll be posting daily again.
Maintenance Complete!
All of my domain maintenance is finished. I hope it didn’t cause any issues.
Everything on this site should be mapped to “thegeekwhisperer.com.” My old and lame “geekwhisperin.wordpress.com” domain is no more (but all redirects from that domain should work too).
Please let me know if you encounter any problems at all.
Thanks!
A bit of site maintenance
I’ll be doing a a bit of site maintenance over the next day. Apologies if it disrupts your access.
Finding Uses For about.me
I love finding free and code-less ways to help people accomplish their web needs. Specifically for this reason I started to mess around with different ways of using about.me.
Typical about.me
about.me lets you create a single splash page that can link out to other websites. It’s intended for personal splash pages like this little exercise in narcissism… DavidSpira.net (It’s a work in progress, and so is the Behance profile).
That profile is built from the stock stuff that about.me provides, then I purchased the domain davidspira.net from Hover.com, and mapped the domain to my about.me page. It was simple, and took me about an hour… It would have been less if I had been less finicky about the typography.
Eventually I will browbeat Mark Krajnak into shoot a new portrait of me to serve as the background.
Holding Page
Here’s a less typical application of about.me for you.
After many years in education, my mother is starting a new college counseling business.
I’ve been doing my best to help her get it off the ground, but one thing she needed was a placeholder web page so that she could put her URL on her business cards
I don’t code a ton these days, but I could make a single holding page in HTML, the thing is that if my mom wanted to make a change, I would have to change it, and that’s a pain for everyone.
So I threw together a quick holding page in about.me. It has everything you would want in a holding page (StepByStepCollege.com):
- Business name
- Description of the business
- Teaser of what’s to come
- Email button
- When the logo is finished, we can add that too
The beauty of this is that my mom is in complete control of the page, if she wants to make a change, she can do it simply, and without having to ask anyone for help. It makes both of our lives easier.
When we’re ready to launch the real site, we will, but until then, she doesn’t have a dead link.
Rodrigo y Gabriela, “Live in France” Review
Insane guitar duo, and my favorite band Rodrigo y Gabriela (RyG) have released a new live album called Live in France.
It basically captures their latest tour, and most of their second studio album 11:11 (minus Atman, Logos & Master Maqui).
The good
RyG are the only band I know of where I at the very least like every song they have released. I absolutely love their music, and Live in France is no exception.
Five songs stand-out:
Hanuman (dedicated to Carlos Santana) – This rocking first track will get your blood flowing
Gabriela’s Solo – Gabriela is easily one of the most incredible guitarists playing today. Her approach to playing rhythm guitar while filling in percussion blows me away even after years of watching her play. Most guitarists, I can watch and feel confident that if I practice my ass off, one day I could play like that… I have never once felt I could, or ever will be able to reproduce a single bar of her work. Ever. Needless to say, her solo is spectacular.
11:11 (dedicated to Pink Floyd) – Spacey and beautiful, whenever I listen to this song I find myself wishing it would last for 20 or 30 minutes.
Rodrigo’s Solo – The dude can shred, and this solo rocks. Most shredders play on electric guitars with a ton of distortion, Rodrigo does it on an acoustic guitar without distortion. If you don’t play guitar, let me assure you, what he does is incredibly difficult.
Tamacun – My favorite track on the album, Tamacun is a party in song form.
The not-so-good
This may sound ridiculous, but I’m upset that there isn’t more on this album.
I saw RyG on this tour at Radio City Music Hall, and two of the standout performances for me were Atman performed with Alex Skolnick, and Orion performed with Metallica’s Rob Trujillo. I desperately wanted recordings of those performances on this album, and I’m very disappointed by their absence.
To be blunt, as great as Live in France is, the show they put on in New York was better.
The bottom-line
This album is so good that my only complaint is that it isn’t longer. RyG manage to create difficult and unique music that is also very intense and beautiful. It’s a rare feat.
Regardless of your musical tastes, I think you will find something to love on this record.
