Amazon S3 outages
Amazon S3 went down for about 8 hours yesterday, effecting a number of our in-house projects including this site, Artlog, and all sites powered by Backlight. Considerably larger sites that also use S3 for media storage like Twitter and Tumblr were similarly hamstrung.
S3 is an amazing service despite this and other recent outages. Fortunately, Amazon recently setup a page providing status updates for their web services which went a long ways toward effectively keeping customers informed of progress. It’s an example other companies providing web-services should strive toward.
Beware broken links
This is just to say that I am testing (yet another) URL routing system out for this site. This site may be acting a bit crazy this morning.
Thanks for bearing with us.
New York City Printmaking Studios Directory
I am setting up a directory for printmaking studios in the city. The focus will be less on “jobbing” printers and more on spaces where workshops, open studio time, education and collaborative projects are happening.
If you run/work at/know of such an organization, hit me up.
RSS Feeds updated
I have just updated the RSS feeds to include findings and I’ve also set up personal feeds for myself and Hunter now that he is posting a bit as well.
Findings
I’ve long been inspired by the site ffffound and have spent a good amount of time browsing it. It’s still closed to new members – invite only – which is prolly a good thing and likely helps keep the imagery consistently interesting.
That being said, I’d like to start bookmarking images myself. So I set up something similar here this afternoon.
Behold Findings – a functional copy built specifically for my own bookmarking.
Organizations
I am starting to roll out the organizations directory. You can see the first organization in the directory here.
It’s a bit of a replacement for the places section (sort of a false start and a misnomer in any case) I had set up a while back. More to come.
Re-routing
I forgot to mention last week when I made these changes, but I re-worked the URL routing for the different media types on this site. Basically, I’ve namespaced most of the raw materials-type objects (notes, links, stills, sounds, videos, locations, recipes…) so that they more obviously belong to the user that posted them.
What used to be something like
http://www.iamstillalive.net/notes/2007/04/has_many_through_with_has_many_polymorphs
is now
http://iamstillalive.net/users/1-dylan/notes/3-has_many-through-with-has_many_polymorphs
I know. I know.
I am currently the only person publishing here, but that will ideally not always be the case (I just realized that I have to fix the RSS feeds to reflect the new structure), but the front page of the site is going to be changing pretty significantly as I Am Still Alive starts venturing into somewhat new territory.
I’d say a small portion of the images, notes, & whatever that I post will actually make it to the front page. So if you want to keep up on what Dylan (I) is (am) doing, have a look at my user profile/tumblelog/activity feed.
Now with sound & video
I just finished setting up sound and video capabilities for this here website. I’ve got to tweak the interface for the media player somewhat, but the broad strokes are in place in any case.
It’s my plan to continue building out tools like these and then at some point in the not too distant future to open up user signups to other folks to let them use these tools to power their own websites – I’ll write a bit more about all that as it becomes more fleshed out.
Clear your browser cache
I’ve just pushed the beginnings of a new design for this site live. It’s considerably wider and the navigation has been simplified to accommodate more content types. I’ll be rolling a lot more out over the weekend and talking a bit more about it as I have more time.
That all being said, I am pretty jazzed about it for now.
Changing up the front page
I am making some changes to how the front page works on this site. I am trying to knead in some of the different kinds of content published here (notes, places and products for now, but soon other more far out stuff).
It’s starting to feel a bit more like a tumblelog and I think that’s alright.
Just re-launched the store
It took me a bit longer than I expected to re-build it (not that the building took long, but finding time to spend on it was hard), but it’s done now; I just re-launched the I Am Still Alive store.
There are currently just 5 prints for sale. That’ll change, though. I plan to put a new product up there weekly at least and while they’ll be primarily letterpress prints produced in-house (use the tools you’ve got), I’d like to experiment a bit with other media and collaborate with other folks.
Search, tags, layout adjustments
I just deployed some modifications to this site in anticipation of the store’s (soon, soon, soon) relaunch.
You can now explore content [like notes, places, products (eventually), images, people] by tags or through the search I just threw together.
The homepage now has a grid of notable content to highlight stuff from around the site.
Oh and
I am also re-launching the store early next week with some new prints and some re-prints.
Here’s a sneak preview of one of the re-prints. This is a test, tho. It’ll end up in silver/blue.
I expect we’ll run out of some of the prints, so sign up for the RSS feeds or the mailing list.
(Basic) places
I’ve just finished setting up a skeleton for the places section on I Am Still Alive. It’s still a bit half baked, but Martha added the studio data from the We Dig Yoga project which never really took – so we are starting off with 80+ yoga studios in Los Angeles and New York and a handful of my Brooklyn favorites.
In the next week or so, I will be opening user signups and allowing folks to claim listings, to add new ones and to add comments. Relating specifically to yoga, I will set it up so that if a studio claims their own listing, they will then be able to post their course schedules (which users will also be able to subscribe to or send to their mobile phones). This is pretty much just the first step in opening things up a bit and trying to engage people in a new way.
Feedzor
I have set up a new feed for the notebook. (That was easy.)
Folks already subscribed via http://feeds.feedburner.com/iamstillalive/notes don’t need to do anything. The rest of you should consider subscribing (I figure).
Some old notes
I am going to be going through archives from previous incarnations of this site and reposting notes that might be useful to folks out there in the lonely vastness of the internets.
The notes getting reposted will likely have a technical bias (likely rails related). The urls are gonna break but that’s not the end of the world, I figure.
Re-working it
So I am starting in on a reworking of the I Am Still Alive site and I am doing it while the site is live—incrementally and somewhat organically.
I am folding several previously distinct projects (most notably, We Dig Yoga and the store) in on each other and reworking the core functionality already in place. I am giving recently released Rails 2.0 and all its REST-ful goodness a shot and have deployed the site at Rails Machine (Brad and Rob have been a great help so far).
