Hello, WordPress.
It’s always fun to take the new gadget out for a test spin, so here I am, doing my best to spin donuts in an icy digital parking lot. It’s not that WordPress is particularly new, nor is it even new to me (thanks to my work at The Geek Life and Mad Art Lab), but this is the first revamp of Tin Lizard Productions since I first put up the site around eight years ago.
The redesign is far from done. I need to personalize it more. I need to get the gallery up and running, and then fill it full of all the old comics art that lived on the previous site. I need to get these old web coding muscles moving again. But I believe I have solved the key thing: I have established a digital home.
Let’s face it: my digital social life was ailing. LiveJournal, which for over ten years was my mainstay, has been vacated by 90% of the community that once drew me there every day. I came to dread Facebook, yet I needed its user base to advertise my occasional live shows. Google+ has proven to be difficult to deal with. (Ever try to auto-post anything to G+? Their API is read-only.) My creative endeavors were strewn across the web, at various shared blogs, podcasts, Flickr, YouTube, a stray Tumblr account, and yet my own home web site reflected none of it, because it still had to be manually updated in HTML.
Then I injured my shoulder and my back last year, meaning I had to spend far less time staring at computers. My Twitter account was my only account that remained lively, because I could post there, in seconds, from my phone. Everything else floundered, taking much of my social life with it.
So let’s call this killing a dozen birds with one stone. In theory, whatever I post here on Tin Lizard Productions should also flow to Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal. (I’d also feed this to G+ if they’d only let me. [shakes fist at the sky]) Most of my other online projects — posts to Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, Mad Art Lab, The Geek Life, etc — will all flow into this one spot, then flow like a river to the other social sites.
And then you, my dear reader, may choose to ignore my noise upon your social network of choice!
The anal retentive data nerd in me rejoices at this newfound digital zen simplicity. I can post in one place, and bother everyone, everywhere, all at the same time!
I love the future!
Oh, and because this is a test run, I’ll also post this awesome Polish movie poster for Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster (aka Ebirah, Horror of the Deep) (1978):