Had a super-duper cultural couple of days.
Sunday, I went to the Walt Disney Concert Hall for the first time ever. Bizarre as the place may seem on the outside, the inside is marvelous. It is designed to feel intimate (indeed some classrooms at my University felt larger than the hall), but still seats nearly 2,500 people. Tremendous, really.
Inside sources tell me that the wood used to construct the theatre is the same wood that cellos are made of.
Personally, I give the concert itself mixed reviews. It had kind of a funky program, ranging from very popular music (think "Singing in the Rain") to more obscure works by Strauss and Dvorak. I don't mind either, but found it odd that they would share a playbill.
I did particulary enjoy the piece by Leonard Bernstein called "A Young Person's Guide to Television" which featured a medley of works from many favorite TV shows and commercials, including such favs as Pink Panther, Plop Plop Fizz Fizz, The Brady Bunch, NBC Nightly News, and many, many others. What wasn't so fun was the dipstick guy sitting beside me, who insisted on saying the name of each piece he recognized at more than just a whisper.
After the concert, I walked across the street to see the Basquiat Exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art. That is one weird exhibition. I know it is very popular, and people are lining up to get in, but maybe that work was just a little too contemporary for my taste.
Monday morning, my art-filled life continued, and I went with some friends to go see the King Tut exhibit at LACMA. Now this display is quite a spectacle. A lot of time and money went into the creation of this exhibit. If you are a fan of the legends of Tut, I recommend you go, but don't be too disappointed when you learn that the main coffin, sarcophagus and other big pieces from the tomb didn't leave Egypt.
By the way, there is TYPO on one of the historical exhibits in the display, which I find very upsetting, especially considering how much money went into producing this show. However, since this may be one of the last time this show gets to L.A., if you are interested, you probably should take a look. I recommend you go early in the morning to avoid the larger crowds. Our reservation was at 10 am, and while there were a lot of people there, it was manageable.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Monday, August 08, 2005
Monica The Tech Geek
Most of you know, I run a website for writers. But what surprises most of my readers is that I actually have a techno-geek background. Many a person has lost a bet, when it has come to guessing my major in college. (Mathematics, and I'm not lying.)
After college, most of my marketing successes came on the shoulders of understanding data, how to store it, how to access it, how to manipulate it. I'm a crackpot programmer in database languages, and I challenge you to find a database software I can't manage.
So, how come, I was asked the other day, I'm not using a database to manage the very data-heavy content on my website, OnceWritten.com? The question came from a super techo-nerd friend of mine, who felt, I think, that I'd lost the way. I'd abandoned the data crowd in favor of my cool new literary crowd.
The thing is, that he was right. I'd developed a data-reliant website, and was hand coding each page. Egads, you can imagine how long that took me every week.
So now my new challenge is this. I'm already converting the site, but now all of a sudden all my web pages are going from a .htm ending to a .php ending to keep up with the new code. Doesn't sound like too much of a problem, does it? And really it isn't. But oh my gosh, I'm losing my very cool Google Page Rank left and right. I'm being dumped from a 5 (and even in some very cool cases a 6) to a zero for the same content. Frustrating to be sure.
However, I guess its better to do it now, rather than save it for later. I only wish, my techno geek pal had challenged me to do this much, much sooner.
There is a lesson to be learned in this tale, which is, if you are considering creating a website, and have a general "marketing" plan, or at least an idea of what you'd like to have that website do in a few years, think twice before you plop down a bunch of code, that may become obsolete in a year's time. When you have over 300 pages, as I do, you will not be ecstatic about re-coding every page.
And for those of you checking in at the website periodically, be patient with the changes. They are happening slowly, but surely, and I'm trying to cover my tracks. If you happen to catch a link to nowhere, do let me know, so I can get those loose ends taken care of.
After college, most of my marketing successes came on the shoulders of understanding data, how to store it, how to access it, how to manipulate it. I'm a crackpot programmer in database languages, and I challenge you to find a database software I can't manage.
So, how come, I was asked the other day, I'm not using a database to manage the very data-heavy content on my website, OnceWritten.com? The question came from a super techo-nerd friend of mine, who felt, I think, that I'd lost the way. I'd abandoned the data crowd in favor of my cool new literary crowd.
The thing is, that he was right. I'd developed a data-reliant website, and was hand coding each page. Egads, you can imagine how long that took me every week.
So now my new challenge is this. I'm already converting the site, but now all of a sudden all my web pages are going from a .htm ending to a .php ending to keep up with the new code. Doesn't sound like too much of a problem, does it? And really it isn't. But oh my gosh, I'm losing my very cool Google Page Rank left and right. I'm being dumped from a 5 (and even in some very cool cases a 6) to a zero for the same content. Frustrating to be sure.
However, I guess its better to do it now, rather than save it for later. I only wish, my techno geek pal had challenged me to do this much, much sooner.
There is a lesson to be learned in this tale, which is, if you are considering creating a website, and have a general "marketing" plan, or at least an idea of what you'd like to have that website do in a few years, think twice before you plop down a bunch of code, that may become obsolete in a year's time. When you have over 300 pages, as I do, you will not be ecstatic about re-coding every page.
And for those of you checking in at the website periodically, be patient with the changes. They are happening slowly, but surely, and I'm trying to cover my tracks. If you happen to catch a link to nowhere, do let me know, so I can get those loose ends taken care of.
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