WordPress vs. Blogger: Thoughts Anyone?

I'm currently spearheading an exciting project at the office: guiding our organization through a major website redesign. For a well-established, not-exactly-small non-profit with a limited budget, collating and meeting everyone's needs is harder than it looks!

I ended up deciding to use WordPress as a content management system and combine our website and blog into one pretty unit. Hopefully the new site will launch by late February.

It seems like this solution is going to work well for us, and it got me to thinking about Mix Tapes & Scribbles (I consider this sort of learning/experimenting a major perk of my job). I've been waiting for a Blogger iPhone app, but I think I've come to terms with the fact that it's never going to exist. WordPress not only has an app for convenient, manage-and-moderate-anywhere control, it would let me return to self-hosting as opposed to redirecting my domain to Blogger.

Disadvantages include having to maintain my own platform again (I did this before with Movable Type) and being tempted to get overambitious with customizations. Also, Google rules the data mining and indexing world, so having them host the blog does very well for search engine results.

In the end, switching to WordPress could give me a much more attractive, easier to manage home for Mix Tapes & Scribbles, but just like the Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux argument, there are no clear answers.

So I turn to you, Dear Readers, and ask: have you had any experience with Blogger, WordPress, or even switched between the two? Have you used the WordPress app on your iPhone/iPod/iPad? What do you have to share with me?

Friday Surprises

What a busy Friday! I don't know about you, but my office provided no shortage of chaos this morning. Fortunately, everything settled down and when the mail came, I had a surprise! 16 exposures of monochrome film for Polaroid fun this weekend.

Hope you had some nice surprises today, too!

Rumors are true: whenever I use my phone to take pictures for the the
blog, I insist on stylizing them.

A Video, and Something Unexpected

I may have an office job (albeit in an office that looks and often feels like someone's house), but every once in a while I give thanks for my background and formal education in the arts. It's easy to assume we wouldn't mix well with the business world, but I have a bias for the BFA-holding members of our staff. In many ways, I think that degree unlocks as many secrets to career success as one in business.

Last night, my job gave something back.

My education taught me how to take critique, when to defend, and never to assume a piece is "done" just because I can see the whole thing in front of my eyes. Yesterday morning I thought I had a finished product. Instead, my colleagues got into an argument in my office at 10:30 and ended up telling me to reshoot the first portion, take it home, work it in, and re-render the video. All before the tech run-through for our biggest event of the year at 5:00.

No sweat, right? We managed to get it in a few takes, and I had time to fit it in and do some last-minute editing in time to help everyone else get ready at 3:00.

After going through hell for that video, seeing it projected at the front of the room might have made me cry if it weren't for the guy at the mixing board asking me if I thought the audio sounded good. Suddenly I felt nervous, nervous in the way I used to get before a performance when we had just a few minutes to warm up before the doors opened. We'd cut off in the middle of a phrase and it would be time to get backstage and hope I'd nail the tough parts.

At the end of the evening it felt the same: applause, house lights going up, and a sea of mingling conversation. A few people—always the important ones—finding me in the crowd to tell me it was great.

I don't know if I have the right words for how much I miss that feeling, or how glad I was to realize this was another way I could have it again. Suffice it to say it's the only thing I've ever loved going through weeks of hell for.

But enough sentimental stuff. I know you really just read to the end so you could see the video.



If you'd rather watch in HD just like the computer gods intended, click here.

Where My Hours Have Gone...

This morning as I sat in a meeting I noticed something: my eye was twitching. Everyone's eyes get twitchy, but this kept up all day. In fact, today may be the twitchiest day my eyes have ever had.

Why? Well, I suspect it's because this is all I've been looking at lately. Fortunately, I just polished up what I think could be the final version of my video—a product of over 30 hours of work and 90 minutes of footage. I have to keep it under wraps until it shows at our big event for work tomorrow, but after that you can be sure it'll find its way onto the pages of this blog.

Wish me luck!

Inspiration #18: Making Sure Your Day Job is Fun

I worked 10 hours today, only to come home, make dinner, and spend until midnight straightening up around the house.  Not a lot of fun, and certainly no time to sit down at the piano or work on my novel.  But on a normal day, it's important for an ambitious soul like me to make sure my day job isn't sucking the creative life out of my bones.  Lucky for me, I enjoy the work I do.  Even luckier, I have some friends at the office who make me laugh on a regular basis.

Because everyone knows that when you're in the midst of a hard day, baffled by your own monthly report, and/or wondering how you're going to meet your deadlines, spending five minutes pretending you're on a reality TV show can be exactly what you need to keep going.  That leads to better work, yes, but also to a mood that's much healthier to carry home.

Coming Back

So, over the past two months I've managed to break the template for this blog (hence its current bare-bones appearance) while posting no updates and going through an astoundingly busy and stressful time in my life. Most of the busy part has evaporated (I hope) with last night's culmination of a major project at the office: our organization's 40th anniversary celebration. Having seen my first major fundraising event come and go, I finally have a spare moment to breathe.

Normally, today I would be attempting to get back on track, jump-start a creative project, figure out where I can go from here. But I'm not. Why? Because even though I didn't keep my blog up to date or work on any big creative projects, I managed to keep up my daily writing practice. Since my last post here I have nearly filled a looseleaf notebook and used my writing to keep tabs on myself, even when I felt I didn't have enough time to think and feel an appropriate amount, didn't have energy to process some major shifts happening in my life.

So while I've been absent from the internet, I've kept working. And I'm ready to jump into National Novel Writing Month next week. I'm ready to start work on the projects I've been cooking over the past couple months. And that's a major victory. I sacrificed a lot when the going got tough, but I didn't give up my creative practice -- that hasn't always been true for me, and I'm sure there are many more of us creative folk in the same boat. For that, I'm willing to give myself a pat on the back.