Web Development

Allow me, if you will, a moment of geek rapture, and to present you with our shiny, newly revamped and sexed-up blog platform over at The Daily Gotham.

Go ahead, take a look. See how gorgeous it is; bask in its bloggy goodness.

What you'll see, all prettiness aside, is a kick-ass publishing platform that's marvelously easy to use, loads nicely, looks great and works like a charm. And while I claim partial credit for the look and feel of it, the heavy lifting - and it was heavy - was done by our very own Liza. Everyone, give her a round of applause, and stay tuned, because Culture Kitchen is next.

Me, I think it's going to kick ass. In fact, I'm sure of it.

Nezua has identified a problem with accessing [workspace|workspace]. There also seems to be a problem with the drop-down menus.

Just wanted you to know I'm looking into it. I've been doing development work, which is why I have not been blogging for a while. Coding consumes every waking moment whenever I plunge into it, but it's for a good reason.

If you want to know what's coming to our site, you may want to take a look at Hollywoodistas.com. With my new template and Michael's new design, we're looking to deal with usability issues with the new design. I'll have a longer post on the new design.

In the meantime, please use this post to let me know what other problems you've had with the site, any ideas on how to make it better and, last but not least, throw a praise or two my way. After all this development work, I always need a hug

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So what's new?

I switched the navigation and blogging tools menus to the top of the sidebar on the left. Since they are collapsible, you can just open and close them as you need.

Hate it? Love it? I want to know it all.

Before you go on hating though, I want you all to know that this was more than just an exercise in designing a Drupal site. I am trying to find add more space to make more visible the work and interaction of regular members. I want to find ways of making visible the way people interact in the site --so it's not just the front-pagers who get featured and highlighted.  

Here's what I feel about it at the moment: It's busy. I do like the new molotov-guy design. I do think that the actual logo (the word culturekitchen) could be much, much smaller.

What do you think?

1. Go to your home page
2. Click on edit
3. Scroll down to find the Theme Configuration.
4. Click on culturekitchen_red.2

This is the design I am working on at the moment. Please note that it is far from finished; but if you want to see what I am obsessed with at the moment, you can switch to this design and see it change right before your very eyes. If all the changes make you crazy, then switch back to the original (which is culturekitchen_red).

Use this post to log your questions or comments on the new design. All imput and opinions are most certainly welcomed.

Come out, come out wherever you are...

I'm not asking you to come out of the closet :lol: I'm asking you to come and play on the site --especially if you are one of the thousands of people reading us through our feeds.

In the past few weeks I have been working on the technology and design of culturekitchen. Check out our growing list of features. I actually have a longer post to make about what I am rolling out this weekend; but right now I need your help with two things :

We're trying to deal with the performance issues a lot of you are experience. A page ought not take more than just a couple of seconds to load. So apologies for the problems.

:/

In the meantime, enjoy a view of the weird world of Semana Santa (Holy Week) in Sevilla.

Penitents of 'San Gonzalo' brotherhood participate in a Holy Week procession in Seville, southern Spain, Monday April 10, 2006. Hundreds of processions take place throughout Spain during the Easter Holy Week. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

A certain person who shall remain unnamed practices Santeria. Now, given this person is probably a poster child for the US Heartland, I've just got to say that it totally knocked me over when said person mentioned the orishas.

WOW! Santeros are everywhere.

I grew up with santeria (yes, my parents were Catholics and Pagans) and so I've spent most of my life walking away from it. As y'all know, I'm an atheist. But ... but ... this , person has been telling, "you know, light a candle, girl, light a candle". Of course, I've hemmed and hawed about it. Then Mr. Man reminded me of a story he read somewhere.

An anthropologist is in some South Pacific island. The "natives" are performing a ceremony before building a fence. The anthropologist asks why to his translator. The translator thinks for a moment and says : "The magic wroks best when we build a strong fence". The prayer, the ceremony, the rituals are not because magic is in them, it's because magic happens when people believe it will be so. It gives them strenght, pumps them up, energizes them, inspires them.

Well, I'm gonna pump that server up.

Here you've got it, las siete potencias africanas, who will hopefully maintain the smooth going of our site :

If you need to know ... my guardian angel or orisha is Oshun (we write it Ochun in Puerto Rico). The colors of the old culturekitchen were an homage to my potencia : golden yellow, green, white and orange.

More after the jump...

The good news is, the site is back up. The bad news is, we still have not gotten the new server. Hopefully the transition will go smoothly and the added RAM will have this site hopping.

Hopefully.

Loading times in Firefox on my Powerbook G4 are still slowish. If you have slower machines, can you tell me how bad it is on your end? Safari seems to be the only browser to load with no problems ... although the site looks a bit funky in it.

The image galleries are all out of whack. I will be working on them throughout the weekend. This would be a good time to contribute to my caffeine, acetominophen and Snickers fund.

The real bad news is that I tore down the site I had built using CivicSpace to rebuild it using my own Drupal mix. Pitty. I had real high hopes for CivicSpace. It really is not ready for a consumer market.