Two new sites

Hello, it’s a been awhile. Burnout got the best of me earlier in the year, but not before I could launch two new sites.

In February I launched a personal site for my dear friend, writer extraordinaire Rhonda Lieberman. She is extremely not online, and it took several years to talk her into it. Persistence paid off and now she has a nice little “calling card” site, as she refers to it. I’m going to do a separate post about the site in the near(ish) future, But it should be no surprise that it’s built with Eleventy!

Also in February, and also related, I redid the site for one of Rhonda’s projects, The Cats-in-Residence Program. The project ran from 2013 to 2016, but started in the late 90’s in an empty lot in Long Island City, Queens.

I’m going to write a separate post about this one too, but the gist is that the previous version was a quickly thrown together WordPress site. It had been on my list to clean up and move to Eleventy, and having it prominently featured on Rhonda’s site was the push I needed.

Another reason I’m happy to have given it a nice clean up is that it’s a really cool project! And I’m proud to have been involved as a Cat-Tweeter, Instagrammer, zine contributor and Web Meowster (…sorry).

I previously mentioned that I was working on a couple of projects for a friend and wanting to slowly work my way into freelancing. I’m still not currently thinking about ditching the day job, but I would like to continue to do little, well-crafted sites for individuals or small businesses. In fact I have another one in the hopper that hasn’t started yet.

With that in mind I’m not adding either of these sites to the Projects section of this site. I define “projects” as sites I do for myself. This brings me to a somewhat existential question… do I add a “Work” section here or start a separate site for freelance/client work?

I’m leaning heavily towards a new separate site, as “Work” would imply my “Portfolio”, which would include work from my vast collection of jobs over the last twenty some years. And honestly I just don’t want to do that. Trying to figure out how to represent that feels too much like work itself.

I don’t have a timeline for any of this, which perhaps is the best part (see previously mentioned burnout). In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of digital housekeeping, and have found many an odd and hilarious item. I may start a Twitter thread of some of the better ones as I slowly emerge from burnout.