Baby, baby, baby…

One intense weekend struggling with assorted import and export nonsense and, voila, the new SXSW Baby! awakens from a long winter's nap. Yes, friends, it's only a few short weeks until the annual pilgrimage south of the boredom for South by Southwest Interactive (and Film and Music), and your favorite site for news, tips and trivia is live. Be good to the Baby!, and the Baby! will be good to you.

The main blog is up and running and some other features, old (such as the Ride/Room Share board) and new (stay tuned!) will be coming online shortly. If you're planning the trip to Austin this year—or even considering it—pop on over and check it out.

This is the second major site I've built with the new love of my content-managing life, Expression Engine. The robust blogging features of the software (including unlimited custom field, status and category groups), built-in membership and community management, and extremely flexible templating system are really, really nice.

There's a slightly steep learning curve (steeper still when you're..., well, me), but once I ascended it, the site-building process seems the most natural thing in the world. The EE documentation is extensive, although I would love to see a "...For Dummies" book or its like; that would definitely have given me a jump-start last year when I was beginning to learn it. But there's an active community growing up around the software, a new "fan magazine" online and more and more sites every day to serve as good examples. (Plus the pMachine crew are planning a SXSW meetup.)

And I'm planning, eventually, to convert The BradLands to run on EE as well. My heart is still full for Blogger, Movable Type and, yes, even Frontier and my own miserable hand-coding. But one of the main goals of this site has always been to learn, and EE's basis of PHP and MySQL offer a great opportunity to push my meager skills along the path. In my copious free time...

Anyway, check out SXSW Baby! and perhaps I'll see you in Austin.

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