Erik Moe: Critic at Large

Sally Grossman and Bob Dylan as featured on the cover of the 1965 Dylan album Bringing It All Back Home

Over the past couple of years my undying need to share with you, dear reader, has increasingly been occurring elsewhere. Facebook friends get updates targeted to a small audience. Google Reader users get shared articles and comment threads (links available on the front sidebar of this blog).

Both of these are indispensable in their own very specific ways, but the tool I turn to most often for sharing ideas and creative outbursts is Twitter. Easy mobile use and mandatory brevity have proven to be a powerful combination. As I near my 1,000th Tweet (née update) I’m realizing that a scary amount of my travel documentation, creative output, political commentary, and electronic shout-outs over the past three years have been taking place over there. Yes, most of these are nanostories of marginal interest given a few days’ (hours?) hindsight. Of the rest, I’m hoping a lightly-edited weekly Twitter digest will spark an occasional item of longer than 140 characters. If not, at least I’m archiving these ideas far from the reach of the hated fail whale.

Note: Many thanks to Alex King and his excellent Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress.

..this blog is just acclimating to WordPress 2.1.

While I’m at it, I’ve migrated my RSS feeds over to Chicago’s own FeedBurner, which allows me to play with some tricks in the feed and on the site (like those snazzy email, digg, and del.icio.us links at the bottom of each post). The sidebar excerpt from About Documentaries and the front page excerpt from this blog are also now powered by FeedBurner, which seems to be speeding up page load times quite a bit.

If you scroll down on the blog’s front page you’ll see another RSS feed trick. I’ve added a “What I’m Reading” section drawn from the Shared Items feature of Google Reader – which has been my feed reader of choice for about two months now. If you want to keep up with my reading list regularly, you can bookmark the blog-like page Google generates over here, or grab its RSS feed.

Temporarily missing are the sidebar lists of music and film recommendations. I’ve been neglecting these lists anyway. If you really miss them and ask nicely, maybe they’ll come back.

Another new site design. My goal is to have a more polished look that is consistent between the various sections of the site. A new front page layout went live earlier in the week. Yesterday, I took those elements and applied them to these blog pages. My much-loved mascot “The Boxman” has been given a rest from all his relentless hovering for the time being. I’ll have to see about finding place for him in the new layout. While I’ve been tinkering I also added tag support – a useful tool for cross-referencing on this blog and with other blogs. More changes to the text and the secondary templates are likely to follow. Comments encouraged.

Note: I haven’t had a chance to look at the changes on Windows browsers yet – so if this text is upside down and backwards, blame Microsoft.

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.0, so you might have noticed some missing or messed up pages today – sorry. So far, everything seems to be working properly now. If you notice anything odd, please leave a comment. Most of the changes are on the publishing end for the time being, but in the coming weeks I may tweak the site design to take full advantage of the upgrade. Anyone else out there need help upgrading or customizing your blog?

While I’m talking about the technical, I’d like to give lots of thanks to the dedicated folks behind WordPress. It is an Open Source project that relies on donations and volunteers. The software is constantly top-notch, and the community behind it is dedicated to giving people solid independent tools for publishing. It’s like being around for the invention of paper.

One of my recent Flash projects went live a few days ago. It’s a timeline! Who doesn’t love timelines? Sure, it isn’t exactly the Met’s timeline of all things visual in the history of planet Earth, but it does have a cool zoom effect if you skip around a bit. You can launch the timeline from the sidebar on this page.

While I’m talking design, have a gander at my latest portfolio (beta). I’ll be adding more samples to it in the coming days.

I’ve been trying out a few options for subsidizing these strange art and blogging habits I have. Google Adsense ads are now in the sidebars — click them if they appeal to you (excessive gratuitous clicks will be ignored). Movie and music reviews now include commission-generating links to Amazon.com for anyone who is moved to spend money based on my tastes. I’m also experimenting with merchandise at CafePress for all of you who feel you need to pick up a t-shirt or sticker before you move on to visit the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. A range of options for supporting this site are detailed on the new Ways to Support This Site page.

As Flash Animation becomes a bigger part of my freelance practice, I’m also starting to play around with creating content for you, the entertainment-starved web wanderer. If you poke around, you’ll notice minor changes to the Flash header on this page (The Boxman now follows your mouse around after he wanders in from the background). The front page of this domain also has a new snazzier navigation animation with space dedicated to a new animation section. I’m not exactly planning to be the next Brothers Chaps, but I hope there’s some fun in store.

So much better! I’ve moved everything to erikmoe.com and ditched that buggy iBlogger software in favor of WordPress 1.5. I’m loving it so far. And, as you can hopefully see, I even built a hot little flash animation to keep our mascot, “Boxman” in the scene. A bunch of the older posts got munched in the translation. I’ll need to go back and fix them soon. Otherwise, everything looks to be working smoothly. I also tried out Movable Type 3.15 briefly, but kept running into undocumented glitches in the installation of MT and the add-ons I would have needed. I might play with it more for other projects, but if you are thinking about installing blog software on your website, I would definitely reccommend WordPress at this point. WordPress 1.5 is still in beta testing, though there are a ton of people using it. All indications are that the final, official release is due in a matter of days or weeks (not months).

No, you aren’t going crazy. I’ve finally given in and found a way to turn this into an actual blog-ity blog blog while keeping my design elements. There are some wrinkles and links to fix yet. And there are some design changes that need to happen here and there. I’m working on it.

More site design changes. Added “10 Records” sidebar to the front page and also moved “25 films” to the front page. Deleted “Cinema” page. I’ll continue to add blurbs here. Older blurbs remain on the older page. I’m trying to keep this as simple as possible. The friends page remains and has been slightly changed.