I figured out that obeygiant wasn’t tech enough for technorati, I mean duh, tech is in the title. So I moved on, Come five years later and Klout is the new technorati. I did the same thing, I gave out klout points to everyone, to random people in hopes that they would give klout back. Which they did in turn, the klout score got super high (this is all for obeygiant.com again), and I got some klout perks. Which I never ever used because I don’t want free shampoo or to see a live screencast or whatever they were giving away.

Now I just sign up for these services to sign up, to have a presence. When they first came out, I did spend a lot of time on them trying to improve the score. But for an artist, its harder to get high scores on these sites because art doesn’t translate well over the internet. A lot of people link to obeygiant.com, but there are smaller non techy sites. And I only did this because I thought that they would bring hits to the websites. None of them ever brought any significant hits to the website, except for wordpress’s showcase page. Obey Giant is listed as one of the most voted on links and that brings in about 100 clicks a day, everyday, and rising. Now 100 clicks a day isn’t anything, overall, but It adds up. While technorati, klout, whatever brought in zero links a day, brought in no more internet points ever.

Now this is old but David Galbraith, had said that technorati shouldn’t give up from it’s fight with google. That it should be a blog search engine. “I say all this because Google have finally got their act together with Blog Search, and the window of opportunity for Technorati to be what they are, and what they created, is closing.” Well I never think technorati was ever that, I just think it was only got tech blogs. I never thought that it was for anybody else.

kottke.org used .html, but the site is currently a custom site with a much different permalink structure.
a link of http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/05/13417.html which now goes to http://kottke.org/07/05/on-the-battlefields-of-iraq-and-afghanistan. His website is one of the only websites which redirects the old post to the new updated post.

consumerist.com used a .php file extension for there website, I don’t know what the blog software was but it is now using WordPress. The permalink structure back then for them was:
http://consumerist.com/consumer/tools/farecast-can-save-you-50-260915.php
which is now:
http://consumerist.com/2007/05/farecast-can-save-you-50.html
They don’t have redirecting setup so I have to Google the title based on the url.

laughingsquid.com is exactly the same!
http://laughingsquid.com/virb-raising-the-bar-for-social-networks/

lifehacker.com used and uses a custom blogging software. The old links used to be:
http://lifehacker.com/software/exclusive-lifehacker-download/automate-timed-mouse-clicks-with-clickwhen-260445.php
and now they are:
http://lifehacker.com/260445/automate-timed-mouse-clicks-with-clickwhen?tag=softwareexclusivelifehackerdownload
They have a redirect from the old post to the new post.

www.boingboing.net is exactly the same
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/14/why_do_las_la_brea_t.html

Just a few examples. When I moved obeygiant.com over to WordPress, it didn’t have single pages for single blog posts. It was basically just archives of blog posts so I didn’t have to think about preserving the url or permalinks. But now that I move forward with websites I think hard about the permalink structure than I did before. I want to make sure that they last over time. And also, if there is a current one, not to mess with it.

I personally don’t know that many people who program or do web development. But I know the term is becoming more well known, and I know that kids these days want to be a web developer for Facebook or Google. I know that now WordPress development is a business, I gave a small talk at a WordPress meetup not too long ago and afterwards everyone was coming up to me to hire me. And then the next question would be, well since you don’t want to do it, do you know anybody else who would be interested? Like WordPress development has become this hot commodity.

I started doing “Web Development” when I was asked to update the spreadsheet online. This was a recurring thing that was happening where a single product number had to be updated, or one had to be added for a different color. I got sick and tired of doing this by hand, so I wrote a program where my boss could just select all of the his worksheet in excel and paste it into a textarea box. I didn’t have to do any of that work anymore and work on things that I wanted to work on.

The start of something new, and I am going to throw it into the pile of throwback Thursdays. Since I have no idea where else to put it. I found a list of links here in the blog, basically just things that I wanted to write about. About %10 percent don’t work, And I have tried to google the title and they just don’t show up anywhere. Interesting a lot of the digg links do not work, and I try to google the title and nothing. But anyways, alas, Peter Iliff Says He’s Writing ‘Point Break 2′. And come to find out five years later, he actually is not writing a point break two. Or nothing has been in production based on his imdb page. But this made me realize that I do in fact like his writing. I loved Varsity Blues, I loved Patriot Games, those were two well written movies, but of course Point Break.

But this is besides the point, how come people care more about directors or actors in movies. When really they should be following the cinematographers, or the writers. These are the two people who do more for movies than directors. Great they can make sure that the actor is on cue, most of the time these actors do it themselves and the director just says cut.

You know which cinematographer I most love? Emmanuel Lubezki, he has done the visuals for some of the most beautiful movies of all time. From A Little Princess, to The New World, to The Tree of Life. This is the man you should be following, and praising everything he does. Who cares about Peter Jackson’s directing, when really Andrew Lesnie is the man you should be paying attention to. But when some of Andrew Lesnie’s, movies list include Babe: Pig in the City, I Am Legend, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (but also all of Peter Jackson’s movies), you sort of understand a little bit.

This is what I have been doing lately. I won’t clean it up until it is full. Thats how to really do things these days anyways. I used to be so organized, but now i have so much going on, its hard to organize a desktop.

This was drafted on November 2007, I still work the same way but I only have a few things now. This is what my desktop looks like now, the screen is so much bigger.

1. Don’t be as asshole when you talk to anyone at the entrance. If we are having a bad day, we won’t listen to you, at all. You could be the most important person in the world and your a dick, you will be shut down. This goes from security, to the doorman, and they are your entrance into the world. I listen to the security for everything, if they say someone is being a dick, I won’t let them in out of respect. And if I say not to let someone in, they will do the same for me. If you were a dick before, that means you get to wait in line longer.

2. Don’t get upset if you are not on the list. If I don’t see your name on the list, it can mean a lot of things. I always get, oh so and so, put me on the list. I rarely ever have the dj’s put any names on any list.

3. Because your a promoter or DJ or bartender somewhere else, that doesn’t mean I am going to let you in. I have gone to your club/bar and you didn’t let me in. I gave up on that the first time I tried doing it at your club. And I have only done it once. Bartenders try and say that they will hook you up, that never happens.

4. You know the promoter. Great, so do I. What is his name? Oh you don’t know it, call him up then? Oh you don’t have his number? Line goes to the left.

Remember, The doorman, the security, we want you to get inside. We don’t want to hangout with you. We don’t want to talk to you. I want you to get inside as soon as possible. It is bad when police drive by and see a line, it is bad for the neighbors. We are not doing it on purpose. We want you to get inside and buy more drinks as soon as possible. We are doing the best that we can trying to make that happen.

OH, its simple, just don’t be a dick.

$ mysqldump -u username -p'password' old-db | ssh username@example.com mysql -u username -p'password' new-db

It took about one minute to transfer about 400mb of information. I am sure that there are other ways to do this, but it just worked for me perfectly.

I am no genius at this, nor do I really care about this anymore. But these were some of the tricks that I did to get known by the doormen, and promoters at the places that I visited. I currently also work the door at a club on Thursday nights, and know how people try to be remembered.

Here are some tips/tricks for getting into a club:

1. Get there early. This one is easy, if you want to see a dj, or get into a bar that has a huge line at 11 or 12 o clock. Show up at 10, or 9:30, or even earlier if you are super excited about being there.

2. RSVP early. This is the biggest mistake that most people make, not RSVP’ing. When I would go out a lot, I would rsvp to every party that there was. This way you get added to the email list of every promoter and party that they are doing. You know about the “cool” parties that are happening before anyone else and you rsvp and your on the list. The more you RSVP the more random parties that you will get invited too.

3. Befriend the promoter. This one is hard and takes some time to do. Everyone wants to befriend the promoter so, it is hard to be rememberded. But a promoter wants friends, thats why someone becomes a promoter. If you have something to give to a promoter, friends with an artist, if you are a graphic designer. Anything that could help this promoter become cooler, they will love you. In this world it is important to know that, it always helps if you know people. A super great tip is to call the promoter by there real name, and know there name, if you talk to them by there dj name, or going out name it won’t help you at all. The end goal should be to befriend the promoter, as you will get on the super exclusive vip lists.

4. Befriend the door guy. Most door guys only work the door at one party and not multiple parties. If you want to get into that one party a week, then this is a great way to get into that party. The door guy doesn’t want to have any friends, so this is pretty hard to do, but not impossible. I have found that gifts work well on door guys. I would go to parties that had gift bags or brought in swag from my work and gift it to the door guy. They would remember me and I wouldn’t have to bring anything ever again. I didn’t go and buy anything to give to the door guy, thats just creepy. It was things that I had and was fine with giving away. I had access to magazines and would bring a magazine every time there was a new issue. Money only works one time. If you want to get into a club once with money, it will work. But don’t think that you will be remembered. You will be remembered as the one who you can get money from, every time. Which is not a good thing to be known for. Unless of course you have money to give away.

5. Befriend the security. The security are easier to befriend than anyone. If you are going to a club more than once a week, the security is usually the same. Gifts work really well on security, people don’t normally think of gifting the security. Same rules apply as above. If you are a girl and try to make out with the security, thats gross. I see tones of girls/guys hitting on security. It doesn’t work all the time to befriend them, but it does work. About half of the time the security will try to get some girl in and I won’t let it happen, Or I can’t let it happen.

6. Befriend the Owner/s of the club/bar. This is the hardest thing to do, as you need there phone number or really have something for them. They meet tons of people everyday and don’t really want any more friends. They like hanging with the same crowd of friends over and over and they protect themselves. I have had people who have said that they were friends with the owner and I am not going to leave my post to go find the owner and ask him to come to the front. You would have to call the owner and he would have to come out front and get you. Which rarely happens, but it does happen.

7. Work the parties. This works the best if you can do it. If you are young and have the time to do it, and you want to get into parties. Get a job for a promoter, either being an intern or part time. You will get put on all the lists just default and people want to befriend you and all this works super easy.

8. Be friendly! When people are nice, I notice it. I don’t get it very often that when you are nice, its super great! I remember, you were nice, because it doesn’t happen very often. I will let people in for free just because they say something nice. And I am not talking about nice like, hows it going nice, or polite nice. They are just super excited and are genuinely nice and want to see the dj, or have a fun night. Now this can be hard for some people of course. And then if you come back next week I will remember how nice you were and let you in for free.

This is my seven ways of getting into a party/club/bar.

Of course there are more and I want to hear your tricks and tips.

The homepage is very simple, If there is a current/upcoming show it will show the exhibition details and then the user can click on it to find out more about said exhibition. If there is no exhibition, it shows the blog. In the backend there is a drop down of events and a none option as you will see below.

I tried to keep the backend very simple and easy to understand, I didn’t want to make too many things for people to click. It is very straightforward. The featured image acts as the event flyer image, which gets shown on the front page, the calendar page, and the single page. Every image uploaded gets resized to its correct size for being displayed in every page. The artist taxonomy is the second most important on there. When the artists gets populated it gets populated into the media upload area also.

The media upload screen I added a drop down, which gets populated by the artist taxonomy for the current exhibition. If there is only one artist in the exhibition, it will automatically select that artist. So the file uploaded will get the custom taxonomy attached to it also. This is done by using attachment_fields_to_edit, and attachment_fields_to_save. There is a radio select field for include in gallery. If you click on yes, it will include the image in the gallery whichs shows up on the exhibition page.

This is an exhibition page without any “gallery” images attached to it.

And this is an exhibition page with “gallery” images attached to it. Each image is clickable which then shows all the images in the gallery. And each image has its own attachement page. With artist name shown and which exhibition it was from and any more information that was added when uploaded. Everywhere the artist name is, is clickable, So you can fine out more information about the artist, if it isn’t displayed on the exhibition page.

This is an example of an artist’s page. It shows a brief description of the artist, which is a custom taxonomy. It shows the exhibition, and or exhibitions that they have been involved with. And if there is artwork associated with the taxonomy it will display the last 10.

This is the list of the artist taxonomy, so you can see how the description of the artist is put in. It looks awful, but it gets the job done. I have been busy lately and haven’t been able to add artists descriptions as of late, but when they are in they are in.

This is all of the artists that have ever shown in the gallery. Which links to there artist profile page. This page isn’t linked to anywhere on the site, it is only for google link baiting. And I have always wanted the gallery to have a page that shows every artist who has shown at the gallery.

This is the backend of the exhibition post type. If the user doesn’t know the name of the show they can go by the flyer usually.

This is what the calendar page looks like. We haven’t had that many shows, So I decided to just list every show that we have ever done. It shows upcoming/current/past in one page, to make it simple to view. Thats my logged in view, so thats why you see the edit link.

I am currently working on the store. I am building an integration with stripe. I am making my own store not because I think I can do a better job than anyone else, I just have a lot of friends who need a very specific store that others can’t give. So I am going to use the store here and branch it out to other clients and friends. Artists need a pretty specific and simple store to do there business, they don’t need some advanced behemoth. I would like deeper integration with the store, its its own entity right now, and I wish it was involved with the exhibition and artists profile pages. The store is the most visited part of the website and that is where people dead end.

Things I would like to change, I would like to add more emphasis on the current show and upcoming shows. It doesn’t highlight that very well, and I would like that to change. There are a few dead ends that I would like to change, but overall I think it does well of telling a story.

If you have a home butto in your navigation, You lost the internet. It is common knowledge that clicking on the logo of the website will take you home. The navigation bar is very valuable space that needs to be curated very precisely. It shouldn’t be the only way that you get people to navigate your site. I think internal linking is a lost artform, but if use it properly people will do it more.

- Don’t make the homepage the most important part of your website.
- Tell a story with your website.
- Find out where people enter your website and figure out how to get them to click somewhere else in your website.
- Don’t let your website have a dead end.

This is just a blog, so I have tons of dead links, but as a company you shouldn’t be just a blog. You should be telling a story with your website.

Why does Movable Type, Drupal, any blogging software out there need to be running scared? Well he is trying to do this with WordPress. WordPress is obviously rising in the ranks, but there are two versions of WordPress out there. WordPress.com and WordPress.org, so when they rank the blogging software out there, it just shows up as WordPress.

He simply wants the majority of websites to run open source software (WordPress).

As he describes in the video below:

All videos with matt are good listens, he is a good talker and I don’t know why he hasn’t been scouped up by some other company to do there bidding.

I recently got the pleasure of working on the Subliminal Projects website. I was able to finish my tri-fecta of websites under the “Studio Number One” umbrella (Studio Number One, OBEY GIANT, Subliminal Projects). I had wanted to work on the gallery page since I started working on the OBEY GIANT website. There is so much data and possibilities and it excited me.

Through out the years I had secretly started and stopped working on it behind the scenes, but it never really went anywhere. And when I was finally asked to do it, it was quite an easy thing to do, because most of the code was done, it just needed to be updated. And I actually found out that in the newer versions of WordPress, it was easier to do certain things.

The site is very simple, but I think laid out pretty complex in the back end. I wanted it to be possible to search for artwork from certain artists and to see the shows that they were apart of. So I created a custom taxonomy Exhibitions, and that is where the show would live. Just a basic with only two custom meta boxes, opening date, and exhibitions dates. And then a custom taxonomy of artists. Because each show can consist of one artist or multiple artists.

Because each show will have the custom taxonomy artists associated with them, I can list every artist who has ever shown at Subliminal Projects.

Then each artist has there own About page, Which pulls the taxonomy description. It also shows which exhibitions that they were part of. And pulls all of the artwork that they have ever shown at Subliminal Projects.

When the artwork is uploaded via the WordPress back end, you are given two options. One is to whether to show the image in the gallery, and the other is to associate the image with an artist who is associated with the show.

I am especially proud of this website because of all the years because of all the years of WordPress knowledge that I have that made it possible. But also, all my years of working with Subliminal Projects, It was easy for me to understand what was needed in this project. It is/was my first store website also, where I had to think about locations and what people would be looking for in the site. I also look see how people are using and want to improve on it, websites are living breathing things and should always be ever changing.

Even more, business need to stop relying on how they make money now and try and figure out how else to make money. Just in case one day, that one way that you made most of your profit just doesn’t work anymore. You have a backup plan. You make twice as much money. The world still goes round and round. Your company is still making money.

This also works for you, the person. If of course you cannot do side projects, don’t listen anymore. But you have your job which takes up a lot of your day. Why don’t you start doing some sort of side project to make some money. Even if it isn’t anything, at least it can buy lunch one day. But of course, do something that you love. If you think you can make an awesome snowboard, kickstarter. If you think that you could make an awesome mouse, kickstarter.

Well and of course if you hate your job, don’t quit at first, why don’t you try some sort of side project that you could maybe be your own boss in the future.

Or at least try.

I don’t watch movie trailers anymore, Unless they include these words: “Fast, Furious, G.I. Joe, Batman” Besides that I will not watch a movie trailer online. If I go see a movie and I am on time And I see a movie Trailer. There is nothing that I can do about that. It is part of the movie experience. But with this online age, You can watch every trailer that is coming out.

90% of the time watching a trailer online ruins the whole experience. I love being able to go into a movie theatre and being completely surprised at what the movie is about. This all started awhile back when Erin and I were able to see a Mondo Mystery Movie in Los Angeles. It was an amazing experience not knowing what movie was going to be on the screen. And it was amazing watching “28 Days Later”. I wouldn’t have never watched that movie without Mondo. And I am truly grateful.

The last four or five movies I haven’t seen the trailer for the movie. It was a great experience and I would like to try and continue this experience. It ads a great mystery to the movie and you don’t get to see the awesome parts in the trailer and be disappointed by the movie, because all the awesome parts were in the trailer. Now you see the awesome parts in the movie, and then watch the trailer later and go, ya, that part of the movie was awesome.

Let me just say this first off, I love Anthony Lister’s work. I have been waiting to get one of his superman prints for a long time. The prices are just getting to where they should be right now and I can’t wait to put it up on the wall. I have met him a few times, and he is friends of friends.

This latest piece on the Melrose Barracuda wall is an advertisement for the release of “Rise of the the Planet of the Apes”, done by Anthony Lister.

I have never seen Lister do anything like this, But I am not following him like crazy. But this is called selling out. Now I don’t think that selling out is a bad thing at all. It is smart, If I could sell out, I would sell out faster than Mr. Lister. This chance will never happen to me, Or I hope that it will one day. But there is no real chance that it ever will. I am not an artist and my work isn’t related to selling out ever (which I find sad, and will work on figuring out a way to sell out). Anyways, the idea of selling out if funny to me. What are the levels of selling out? And if one “underground” artist sells out, is it still selling out? I wouldn’t put Lister in the list of underground artists in anyway, his work is amazing and he often sell’s out his shows anyways. But if for say some higher level artist Sells out, he gets lambasted on the web.

The ultimate trump card in selling out and copying and fair use is the artist Andy Warhol. How long did it take for Andy Warhol to sell out? Was he considered a sell out, even during his time? I am really just sick of hearing the words sell out really. It is just a jealous term. I think it is a great way for artists to get there name out. I want more people to know about Anthony Lister, I just don’t want his art prices to go up. They are still to expensive for me!

Photo credit: Daily Dujour