Saturday, August 23, 2008

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Monday, June 16, 2008

Sunday, June 1, 2008

The BradLands at 10

Photo thanks to Claudecf and Creative Commons

Ten years. Ten years! There are very few things in my life that have lasted 10 years. A few friendships, certainly, and surprisingly after an early life spent apartment- and house-hopping, my current residence. No romantic relationship got anywhere near that long, no professional gig, either (although the current one is creeping up on a decade).

But this website turns 10 today, published continually and more or less regularly since June 1, 1998.

The BradLands had been around, in various forms and at various addresses, for a few years before that, but the registration of this domain marks the official birthday. I couldn't have imagined then how many wonderful opportunities, how many delightful diversions and how many cherished friendships would grow from my decision to publish a personal website would grow when I posted those first few words. I am constantly amazed and humbled by the good it has brought into my life.

I selfishly do this just for me—The BradLands have been my playground to read, learn, link and grow—but I do rather hope you've had a bit of enjoyment as well. If you stop by regularly or just stumbled in occasionally, thank you for spending a little of your time reading over my shoulder.

The second decade begins today.

Monday, May 5, 2008

No shoes

Perhaps you've noticed an uptick in activity around these parts, which can probably be directly attributed to one thing: the theatre season is ended (for me, professionally, anyway), which means a greater amount of spare time (read: "more than none"). For the past several months, whatever hours weren't given over to flacking and sleeping were spent on consulting gigs, spreading the gospel of weblogs and social media, and even developing a few non-personal website projects, while this site went fallow. The cobbler's children etcetera etcetera.

But this past weekend I carved out a couple of hours, spent some time sprucing up the joint and doing a little spring cleaning hereabout. Fact is, I missed the place, and I really, really hope to be giving it at least a little attention every day. After all, I'll need somewhere to announce those aforementioned website projects to the few hundred or so of you who still stop by here regularly. Some sort of web masochists, you are, I suppose.

One change in particular to note: I've jiggered things so that posts to the ever-more-inaccurately-named The Daily Brad will now show up in this space, as well as in their traditional home over there. This isn't intentioned to signal a return to anything like daily publishing of tidbits from My So-Called Lifestyle, but I hope it at least encourages me to write somewhat more than annually. (To celebrate this subtle shift, I'll start by republishing one of my first and favorite Daily Brad bits. Look for it following this post.)

All of this excitement comes amidst a little frenzy of activity in my offline life as well, including some home remodeling, a decade-overdue deep cleaning of the basement, a minor medical "procedure", not a small amount of travel and a rekindled, complicated long-distance romance.

And you get to peek over my shoulder for it all. You poor, wretched creatures. You have no idea what you're in for. And neither do I.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Are the new viewers gone yet?

Whew. October—the month that doesn't exist—is nearly over. Opening five shows in four weeks (actually, seven in nine) makes Brad something something. I'm treating myself to a brief getaway. Chatter resumes in five days.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

In olden days…

Last month, The BradLands turned nine and today, for the first time in three years, she is whole. Almost.

Over the weekend, I finished importing nearly a decade of Must See HTTP:// entries and six years (on and off) of The Daily Brad into the new Expression Engine database. That's nearly 2,000 posts altogether, going back to 1998 when the whole thing was hand-coded, manually archived, permalinkless and filled with now-deprecated HTML.

Since a lot of those posts were stuffed into systems that didn't make them easily exportable, it was a cut-and-paste operation, which means I also had the opportunity to read almost ten years of the drivel to which I've subjected you. There're a lot of in-jokes and punchlines to which I've forgotten the set-up, a number of cryptic references to personal life trauma and a whole whale of a lot of broken links, as sites I frequented and enjoyed years ago now come back depressingly 404.

Still, there's a lot of links and love stuffed into the archives, which you can now browse by category, date or tag. Yes, I'm adding freeform tags to all of the new posts hereabout and as time permits, I'll be tagging the back catalog also (right now, just over 5% of the posts have tags attached). I've also added an "On this day..." feature to the sidebar; you can have a glimpse of what was going on in The BradLands on this day in the past. On July 17, for example, I had something to say or link to in 1998, 2000, 2001 and 2003. That may prove to be a fun feature as time goes by.

Not everything is back in place, mind you. I still have a stack of non-weblog content to re-establish, include the old OutLook commentaries, the original Dispatches From The BradLands (essays from two defunct print publications), an assortment of particularly popular features I wrote for the Post-Dispatch and other papers, and the "Maybe It's Just Me..." series, which included the Why I Weblog rumination.

And then there are the old scrapbooks (Behind the Curtain and several SXSW galleries), the junk drawer (where old April Fool jokes went to moulder) and, of course, The Cute List. I hope to get a headstart on all of those bits this weekend in my (ahahahahaha!) spare time. At all events, I hope to be finished well before the site reaches its tenth anniversary next June.

Ten years of this? No wonder I'm so tired.

Monday, July 9, 2007

The BradLands version 6.0

I'm bringing sexy Helvetica back! Yep, The BradLands were closed over the weekend ("Moose out front should'a told ya") while I ported the site over to run on Expression Engine (EE) and gave the place a new coat of pixels. Not everything is back in place yet—this here weblog and The Daily Brad are good to go—but I'll be adding content and tweaking things on a continuing basis. The oldest content that hasn't made the transition during the past two redesigns will eventually make it here as well.

This is the third site—after SXSW Baby! and the site for The Rep—that I've built with Expression Engine and it just continues to impress (and, occasionally, frustrate) the hell out of me. It has given me the opportunity to learn quite a few new things, though, and developing all of the sites I work with regularly on the same platform certainly has its advantages. I'll have some more to say about EE in a while, including some tips and tricks I've picked up along the ascent of its learning curve.

I'd decided to port The BradLands to EE a while ago, but I was still a bit reluctant to move away from Movable Type, particularly after having the opportunity to beta test their awfully slick new 4.0 version. I still have a few small projects running MT, and when the new version is finished, I'll give it a good look before making any other transitions.

One final bit of housekeeping: If you're subscribed to the old site RSS or Atom feeds, the redirects I put in place should flip your feed reader over to the Feedburner versions. Just to be sure, though, you might want to check your subscriptions. This weblog is now feeding http://feeds.feedburner.com/MustSeeHttp and The Daily Brad is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDailyBrad (and yes, I am planning to resume writing over there, thanksforasking).

Let me know if you find anything terribly wrong with the site, won't you?

Friday, July 6, 2007

Dig we must…

Thank you for visiting The BradLands. We regret to inform you that we are unable to offer our customary hospitality at this time, as we are closed for summer cleaning and renovations. We encourage you to come again, and we look forward to serving you in the future. Please watch for an announcement of our reopening in all of the most fashionable weblogging magazines and color Sunday newspaper supplements.

Again, thank you for visiting and have a flawless day.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Feedback back

I think I've managed to get the comments feature working again, although I've borked the "Preview" template so, well, let's get it right the first time, OK? I've also upped the anti-spam mojo a bit, which means nothing to you, dear reader, but the world to me.

As always, new comments are held for moderation—the only sort of moderation we endorse around these parts—but Typekey-authenticated comments or comments by previously trusted correspondents zip right through.

Your two cents are once again welcomed and encouraged here.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Another anniversary, of sorts, coming up

This coming Saturday, it will have been eight years since I published a braindump I called Why I Weblog. The piece grew from a post and dialog on the earliest weblog-related listserv, was linked to by a lot of folks who were doing this sort of thing back in the day, and three years later was even published in a book.

I concluded my ramblings with this thought:

As the weblog movement matures, our sites will wrest editorial authority from the few editors of today and divide it among the many. “They” can continue to publish the chaff; we’ll be there to point our hungry readers toward the wheat. Hopefully, we’ll have fun doing it and learn a lot along the way.

And so it goes, my friends. And so it goes. Try not to let a day go by without having fun and learning while we’re revolutionizing the media, okay?

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Got something to say?

Comments are somehow borked. Got something to say? Please be in touch.

Monday, June 4, 2007

The BradLands turns nine

It was around 3,300 days ago that I flipped the switch and transferred the moribund site first called The BradLands from its home in AOL's wonky FTP space to this brand-new domain. Along the way, the site got a state-of-the-art Adobe PageMill makeover and took on the form of something new: we called it a "weblog".

That's nine years of pushing bits and pixels around this joint, and nearly 13 years on the web altogether. Good gawd, y'all.

Nearly a decade later and the place is still a mess. I'd really rather hoped to spruce things up a bit in time for this year's anniversary, but lots of archives still rest in old text files, broken internal links abound and the whole shooting match is about as far from "standards-compliant" as can be.

I love the old girl, though, I do. Thanks for stopping by.

Monday, March 5, 2007

Everything old…

From the official Tumblr blog:

Last year, a site called project.ioni.st showed us a completely different form. The long editorials with meticulously formatted links and images we were used to seeing on blogs seemed absent. All of the editors’ thoughts, creations, experiences, and discoveries poured down the screen. It was like flipping through the scrapbook of a like-minded person we had never met.

The editors seemed to post with zero obligations. Anything neat they came across went up. Little or no commentary was needed. The only context was the author. How absolutely beautiful.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Feed (from) me…

Your attention, please: In preparation for some (long- and short-term) changes hereabout, I am changing the location of this site's feed. If you use an aggregator or newsreader to read Must See HTTP (this here weblog), please change your subscription address to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MustSeeHttp

The regular old feed will remain in place for the time being and I'll (try to) set up a redirect when things begin shifting around, but why not take a moment right now to change your subscription settings? Thanks!

Friday, April 14, 2006

Tweaks

I've made a couple of minor changes to this site in the past couple of weeks. If you read this weblog on the web, you may have noticed that the rotating taglines have returned to the top of the page. They were a feature of the weblog for a couple of years (roughly 2000-2002) and then disappeared in the last redesign. So, they're back.

I've also changed a setting in Movable Type that affects the way the archives are published. While on the main page here, newest material will always appear at the top of the page, in the monthly archive pages, the first post of the month appears at the top and proceeds down chronologically. I don't know why I didn't do this before. It's certainly the way I prefer to read other folks' archives. (And I usually read/skim a year or two of them when I discover a site; the top-down format certainly makes it easier.)

Finally, I am still slooooowly getting the archives themselves back online. There's still a three-year gap here on the weblog and two years missing from The Daily Brad. It's a spare-time chore, but I hope to get it all dumped into the Movable Type database before The BradLands' eighth anniversary come June.

Sunday, April 2, 2006

The next sound you hear

You might have spied a new addition in the column over at the right.



I can't say it'll stick around, but it's a new toy I'm playing with, courtesy of Odeo. Click on the balloon to record and send me a voice message (assuming your computer has a microphone). Sing me a ditty, talk dirty to me, make me laugh.

Stop the Madness!

If you dropped by yesterday, you might have suspected I'd gone mad for MAD. Yes, by tradition, The BradLands was tranformed for a day into an altogether different site. This year, it was The MAD Lands, a little tribute to that monthly magazine put together by "the usual gang of idiots".

Now that April Fool's Day 2006 has passed, if you'd like to relive The MAD Lands experience, this screenshot of the site will have to suffice.

There have been eight years of April Fool japes altogether here in The BradLands. That's a lot of foolery:

• 1999: Ethay entireyay itesay asway anslatedtray intoyay Igpay Atinlay orfay ethay ayday.
• 2000: The site heard Avon calling and became The BardLands
• 2001: The DrabLands re-rendered the entire site in monochrome (and this was before I knew about CSS, so that was done all by hand, kids!)
• 2002: What a sell-out I am! For 24 hours, this was The BrandLands
• 2003: A Bunch of groovy changes brought about The BradyLands
• 2004: A bit of fiction for the RSS-reading crowd: More Fool I
• 2005: My (under-)wired website: The BraLands, Must-See Double-D, and The Daily Bra.

Thanks for fooling around with me for so long!

Monday, February 20, 2006

Delightful and delovely…

About six years after everyone else figured out how to do it, I've begun using the web bookmark manager del.icio.us to publish links to the good ol' "Clearing the Cache" category here on the weblog. The service writes out my links once a day and automagically publishes them here.

I'm still working out a couple of kinks and I really wish I could change the title of the generated entry, but del.icio.us is a free service and beggars can't be choosers.

The daily links (at least on days when there are links) will be published in the main weblog syndication feed, but if you'd like to get a feed of the links only, stick this in yer reader.

Monday, October 31, 2005

It’s alive!

Remember Brad? He used to have a website?

Oy. Not much to say about the infrequency of updates here about except that summer and fall were incredibly busy. In fact, they kicked. My. Ass.

I've opened six shows since September 1, four of them in the past three weeks. If I hadn't spent the better parts of June, July and August planning a communications strategy, I'd be dead by now. As it is, I'm dead tired. But my job is to put butts in the seats (as I explained to someone over drinks Saturday night, it's my second favorite thing to do with butts), and do that we have.

So now I have this two-week professional "lull" (which is still packed with meetings, rehearsals and assorted distraction) in which to see if I can revive my meager online presence. Hey, let's all assume the long moribund Daily Brad est morte, shall we? I think I'll see about moving all of its content over here, even though not all of its content is even imported into Movable Type yet.

Sigh.

I feel some obligation to write here, mostly to myself. A couple of months ago, I was invited to attend a seminar about "blogs in business". The speaker asked how many in the audience had a blog and a handful raised their arms. Then he pointed at me and asked how long I'd been keeping one up.

"Seven years," I said.

And watched every head in the room swivel around to see the surely decrepit and shriveled old man who'd just spoken.

So I've got that, um, "pioneer" thing to keep up, see?

Anyway, let's enjoy this time while it lasts.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Taking a chance on love

I'm awfully fond of Movable Type, the weblogging software that powers parts of this site, so against my ordinarily cautious nature in these matters, I just upgraded to the latest beta release. It's niiiiiice—it looks gorgeous and feels zippier all around.

The upgrade process was, as promised, simpler than ever: just download the tarball, uncompress and upload the new files. Rather than having to run an upgrade script, the necessary upgrades happen automagically the first time I ran the software. It's the closest thing to a desktop-level "double-click to install" process I've seen yet for a web app.

One minor glitch: After the upgrade, I found I wasn't able to access my MT-Blacklist (a utility for dealing with comment spam) settings in the Plug-In control panel. It turns out to be an easily remedied problem, even for my meager skills:

For those running any version of MT-Blacklist 2.x, you can also do a search and replace within Blacklist.pl instead of uploading that file. Look for this line of code:

return 1 unless $MT::VERSION =~ m(^3.1);

And replace it with this:

return 1 unless MT->version_number >= 3.1;

It's also necessary to move the files mt-blacklist-styles.css and mt-blacklist.js from the root MT directory into the new mt-static directory so the MT-blacklist pages render correctly.

Wow. I think this is one of the geekiest things I've written in recent memory, and I even understood most of it.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

…make Brad something something

The late spring and summer, usually a bit of a respite from the hustle that attends the theatre season and the academic term, have shaped up this year to be extraordinarily busy for me. The past two and the coming three weeks are particularly packed, as two rather significant projects come to a climax. I didn't leave the office until after 11 this evening, and there are a few more late nights in the offing.

Among the tasks on my to-do list is refashioning a rather large website and I'd really hoped to do it up right. But after spending two days and change attempting to craft a set of CSS-based templates that would look halfway decent across multiple browsers and platforms, I folded. A couple of hours later and the whole thing was on track with table-based layouts and a soupcon of CSS to paste it together. Le sigh. Maybe someday I'll understand classes and the box model and floating and all that. Not today.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to restore the house to some semblance of order after neglecting a fair amount of chores and general tidying for far too long. I'd hoped to remodel my home office, but my inability to find suitable furnishings (my preternatural pickiness combined with some bizarre room dimensions) has returned me to my original plan of commissioning some custom cabinet work that will, alas, probably have to wait until the fall or winter.

And! I discovered last weekend on a trip to buy some storage containers of which I'm fond that Organized Living is closing! Where will I go now to indulge my cabinet and closet porn festish? I mean, sure, in the short term I'm loving the discounts on things I've put off buying for awhile, but in two or three weeks when there's a vacant storefront where my mecca used to be—what then?!

The take-away message? Busy. Very busy. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Skinning Movable Type

Customizing Movable Type's Interface with Application Templates: A guide to "skinning" the MT web application, as well as modifying its features.

Also, visual examples on Flickr.

And still a disorganized mess…

Seven years! Where does the time go? Today marks The BradLands' seventh anniversary at this domain, and nearly 11 years on the web total. So, happy anniversary to us.

Things are still a mess around here, with gaping holes in the archives where I still haven't managed to import everything into the Movable Type database. (And by "import", I mean "cut and paste from entries composed way back when using state-of-the-art Adobe Pagemill".) I haven't done a decent, consistent and personally satisfying site design in ages (y'all read this as a news feed anyway, though, right?), although I restored some bits and bangles from the old design because I missed the typewriter-like typeface and the purple.

The purple! Gah, folks will probably think I'm trying to imitate Anil now. Heck, I already post nearly as often as he does.

(For posterity, I have managed to get a few of the early months back online. Here, for example, is day one of this weblog, June 1, 1998.)

This site—including this weblog and The Daily Brad—for all that I abuse and ignore it, has been one of the most positive additions I've ever made to my life. It is the indirect cause of too many adventures and friendships and opportunities to grow (some I took, some I did not) to count.

This spring when I made my annual pilgrimage to Austin for South by Southwest, I was extremely flattered to hear two friends talk about how I had touched their lives. Kevin Smokler mentioned that his last-night dinners were a bit inspired by my annual Break Bread with Brad shindigs. And Bryan J. Busch told the crowd at Fray Café that it was at a BBWB post-prandial karaoke party he first considered singing in a band.

Not to get all George Bailey on you, but always it surprises me just how much influence one person can have on others, usually without even knowing it.

What I do know is how much influence the folks I've had the distinct privilege of meeting—often only "virtually"—as a member of the personal publishing communities that arose from a handful of weblogs and journals back in the late 20th century have had on me. A lot, and an overwhelmingly positive influence at that.

Thank you. Truly and sincerely, thank you.

I promise I'll get this place organized somewhat better before it turns 10.