Bright & Colourful:

Arbutus Coffee (Duncan Rawlinson a.k.a. thelastminute, flickr)

I just love the colour and simplicity in this. (justinknol, flickr)

In the Vintage & weird department:

Coffee + Spankings, vintage ad (seanbonner, flickr)

Coffee means pleasure, coffee means fun! (cowtools, flickr)

Coffee can bring the world to you! - vintage brochure imagery (cowtools, flickr)

Dedicated to the craft

Coffee Break (scarygami, flickr)

Old-time charm

London coffee shop (sheyne, flickr)

MUTO: An ambiguous animation painted on public walls

In my case, to some degree, “Why should I blog?” is a rhetorical question. As someone who pretty much lives and breathes WordPress development & design these days, I shouldn’t even be uttering this question aloud.

“It’s good promotion.” “It’s good for SEO.” “It allows potential clients to become more comfortable with you.” All of these things are true. But.

I admit it, I’ve been stuck. I’ve been self-editing before I speak, to the point of not speaking (both here and on twitter). I’ve been having conversations in my head about where to take this blog, “finding my voice”, beating myself up about how sadly neglected my websites are in content, design, structure, the whole shebang. (What does shebang mean anyway?)

This blog was started in 2003, before blogging was cool, before there were 10 million sites telling you to “define your niche” and “create a publishing schedule” and “have a commenting strategy”. Before most people knew what a blog even was. I started it because I could, and because it was a way to learn (Movable Type at the time), and because I was inspired by the blog of a brilliant programmer I worked with. At that point I could talk about whatever randomness inspired me in whatever way I felt because pretty much nobody read blogs. Essentially blogging was just for me.

Fast forward some years and I’m fumbling my way through a new life of being a full-time freelance designer, and becoming more self conscious about what I publish in the blogosphere. Not that I was ever raunchy or overly personal, despite the porn-worthy words of my first post, but I began to feel like I have to present myself as An Expert. That I have to be writing for My Audience (which one?).  That I should be writing more and more for my clients. Trouble is, that’s not what this site is about.

In the beginning of my freelance adventures I threw together a quick portfolio site. It does the job, barely, but enough that I’ve hobbled along for far too long. I don’t much like it so I rarely update it and cringe when I hear new clients say they’ve been reading my site. Of course they have. And to them, it’s probably fine – they contact me, after all. But to me, it’s a sorely dissatisfying representation of what I can do. It runs on WordPress too, but I blog over here. The silliness of this does not escape me.

And here is where I often find myself when I write: wondering how I can get to the end of the post with a nice ribbon tied up around it. *sigh*

Before I wrap up I will say that there’s some clarity at the end of the tunnel. I’ll be relaunching with a new webdesign portfolio soon. Then I will be able to blog with my different hats in different places and feel so much more comfortable in them. Maybe I’ll wear a silly hat here more often. Maybe I’ll get over my self-editing a bit more. We’ll see.

Wondering why YOU should blog, and how not to make an ass of yourself in the process?

…she says, putting her Expert Hat on.

You’re not alone. Here are some links I recommend on the subject.

• Blogging Therapy series by Havi Brooks (see bottom of the post for links to topics like mean comments, what if nobody reads my blog, etc.)
• Why you blogging? and Why you hiding? by Karen J Lloyd
• Sonia Simone’s Remarkable Communication – perhaps Slow Blogging or The Sweeney Todd Guide to Blogging.
• Skellie. Especially this recent a-niche-isn’t-required post… there’s hope for me yet.

If you have any thoughts or related links to share on this, I’d love to hear them in the comments. Fire away!

Apparently it’s not uncommon for animals to jump into researchers’ boats in these situations. Must be quite the experience!

This morning I sat staring at the blank pages of my sketchbook. The very, very blank pages. And I thought “Where are all the ideas?” “Why don’t I have any?” All the while, an ear worm circling in my head: “Where the fuck do ideas come from?” (That one courtesy of Ze Frank’s brilliant riff on ideas as brain crack. Thanks for that one, Darren.)

So without further delay, here are two answers I came up with this morning. They’re not definitive, mind you. And I hope you will share your answers to these important questions in the comments.

The first answer is so obvious I’m probably not the first to think of it.

It must be the Greedy Squirrels.

You see, an idea manifests in your brain. When it’s ripe for the picking, before you even know what’s happening, it falls out of your brain and a greedy idea squirrel comes along and takes it. He then squirrels it away underground somewhere. So, odds are, when you see a truly fabulous tree, it’s thriving on the pile of ideas buried within it’s roots. So I say next time you’re short on ideas, go squirrel hunting! What the heck, it can’t hurt and it’s better than banging your head against the keyboard.

So that explains why you might lose an idea. Where do they come from in the first place?

Idea Factories

My theory is that orbiting the earth are giant indetectable idea factories. Day in, day out, minute after minute, they pump out ideas like so many widgets. So many in fact that they have an entire department devoted to randomization. This department ensures that every idea is just a little bit different from every other idea.

When ideas reach the end of the production line, they are shot out of thousands of giant Suessian tubes pointed at Earth. They travel the long, dangerous journey, and if they’re lucky enough to miss the satellites, airplanes, birds, and skyscrapers and such, they’ll land safely in one of our minds.

And if you are really lucky, the ideas you receive have lots of randomness and survived the journey without getting bruised or shat upon by a brid.

I think this theory explains why I get so many ideas outside or in the shower. Some of those ideas must land in the streams and end up coming through the shower head.

Now it’s your turn. Where do you think ideas come from? What/who’s to blame when you have none?

Here’s some quick fun for a good cause. Build yourself a beard, and the kind folks at Atto will loan a dollar to Kiva. You can even print one out instead of being a lazy git like me who photoshopped the thing onto my face.

The beard I chose is called Poseidon, apparently god of the sea, a.k.a. Neptune. Fitting considering I grew up on a boat, don’t ya think?

Also pictured: my shiny new oh-so-short boy haircut. Please, somebody remind me how good this feels next time I let a mop grow on my head.

• GrooveShark.com – Oh, my god I LOVE listening to this free music site while I work. The interface took me a little bit to figure out, but it works very well once you do. You can search for music, make your own playlists, etc.  When it’s playing you can turn on the autoplay feature and it will fill up the queue with similar songs. So very cool.
• Naomi at IttyBiz often has useful and colourful advice on marketing for small businesses. This week she’s begun a free series on how to make money online, starting with “Why we’re broke and how to fix it“.
• Speaking of making money online, I just discovered E-Junkie’s Fat Free Shopping Cart after trying out (and being impressed by) their cheap Shopping Cart solution. Oh, and if you’re signing up for e-junkie, search the web for discount codes; I found one for about 100 days free.
• Ma.gnolia online bookmarks – When I watch people trying to find links in their browser bookmarks, I wonder how I ever did without online bookmarks. I obsessively save things that I find in Ma.gnolia and love that I can search them later from anywhere. It’s like outsourcing part of your brain!
• Freecycling is a great way to get to know folks in your neighbourhood while recycling things. You can list items you don’t need and others come take them off of your hands. Or vice versa. Art and construction supplies, clothes, books, you name it, you’ll see it posted to the list sooner or later.
• Free eye-candy: Beautiful, wonderful Daily Dose of Imagery like the Yellow Buses and this Reader Behind Glass. And a couple of lovely slide shows from the Sydney Morning Herald – one on wisdom and another on sculpture by the sea.
• And just about every day I’m thankful for WordPress, the plugins people release for it, and other open source software that makes my life easier.
• UPDATE: I knew I was forgetting one! If you’re a webdesigner, you may find crossbrowsertesting.com *very* handy.

How about you? What’s on your list?

Google’s realization that links were a kind of user generated “voting” on the best site for a topic (i.e. Page Rank) and could be used to deliver better search results was arguably the real beginning of the Web 2.0 revolution.

Web 2.0 is held to an unrealistically high standard. Instead, people have to view Web 2.0 and collective intelligence in its proper context. These aren’t magic bullets that solve every problem, and collective intelligence has its downside – collective stupidity, collective cupidity, and the like.

He briefly mentions his company’s Make Magazine and Maker Faire. Sounds like a really fun science fair for grown ups adults.

The show builds on their great stage act by using their satirical songs (mostly) in musical fantasies which occur as part of their every-day life. Such as when Jemaine falls asleep at the laundromat and sings It’s Business Time.

Some other favourites:

• Inner City Pressure – Pet Shop Boys style
• “The Humans are Dead” wherein they take on robotic personas from the distant future (earlier live performance or a different version from the show) includes such gems as a binary solo and the chorus “We used poisonous gasses, and poisoned their asses”.
• Foux Da Fa Fa – a ’60′s French fantasy inspired by the girl at the pâtisserie.

I was pretty well hooked from the first episode where Jemaine and Brett sing a song of the broken-hearted, protesting “I’m not cryin’” (they’d been cutting onions making lasagna for one). The best bit from that song was this:

I’m sittin’ at this table called love

Starin’ down at the irony of life.

How come we’ve reached this fork in the road

yet it cuts like a knife?

Ah, sweet ironic cutlery.