Our Goofy Ass Kid Website

August 08, 2008

nate beaty has gone crazy

If I’ve not blathered to you in person about it, we recently at my dayjob relaunched holamun2.com. This was the culmination of an 8++ month operation pulling out the wildly (manmade) cancerous and expanding Wordpress innards and replacing them with a Drupal intestinal tract. The primary New Thing is user accounts and profiles and all the social hooha that goes with that; but the rest of the site has also been restructured pretty heavily.

Our design and development cycle feels much like a newspaper. That is, pretty much perpetual barreling forward movement with rapid deadlines and constant creative output. This doesn’t allow much time for the many OCD hands in the soup to perfect anything to our satisfaction, be it cronjob or Drupal module or CSS stylesheet or gif-cropping code. (Woa, I just saw some eyes go glossy.)

Despite the perpetual Marx-bros-esque coding fiasco, we’ve managed to put together something that, as the dust settles and the hundreds of kids a day (!!) sign up and abuse it, I’m beginning to be pretty proud of. It’s a goofy-ass looking kid who was born a bit early and is stumbling along the first stages of life, but we’re scrambling to get caught up with our 1,200 to-do tasks in the queue.

During the relaunch, we’ve still managed to put out some great content. Of particular interest lately is a glitter set of mutant piñatas by Laura Park which is equally cool as her first set of cannibalistic fruits. Joseph Robertson has been making videos to illustrate mun2 pools (sorry about the music, and for the Starburst ad that I designed and coded into our goddamn video player, sigh). Our inhouse team interviewed and made a great slideshow of Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets. It didn’t connect too well with our kids (L@t1N0 t33n5 r b0r3d), but I think it would with most folks I know.