cdcstudios.com | portfolio v7.1

All righty all you Seattlite party hounds. There’s a party tonight happening down at Chop Suey in honor of Ms. Tamara Weikel (djtamara) turning 30 years old. Those of you who know me know that I always speak highly of Tamara’s musical abilities and being all around righteous babe person should hop in your cars, cabs, carts or rollerblades and skedaddle down to Chop Suey at 9pm.

According to Sam Mickens in “The Stranger” (free Seattle weekly):

“Seattle’s own OG DJ Tamara has already, at the near dawn of her third decade, enjoyed an artistic career of astonishing volume and ridiculous diversity. A voraciously busy club DJ, multimedia artist, improvising musician, and lots of other shiz, Tamara has devoted her young life to an insanely passionate embrace of performance and composition in a far-flung swath of modes and settings. Apropos to the hostess’s free-range artistic involvements, this night—a massive party in celebration of the DJ’s 30th birthday—features modern soul, performance art, mashup DJs, electronic producers, free improvisers, and probably too much more to properly list. Co-headliner Reggie Watts has, like Tamara, managed a musical career that veers from the most pop-wielding, sweaty R&B to all stripes of experimental and improvised music.”

All in all seeing Tamara as well as Reggie Watts, Jacob London, KRNL.Panic, DJ Freddy King of Pants and the Degenerate Art Ensemble is going to be the event of the year if not the millenium so far (hyperbole is my strong suit).

So after 3 months of putting it off and being overwhelmed with a myriad number of projects, I’ve taken the initiative in creating an internet er I mean upgrading Wordpress to version 2.02. I’d expected to need a few hours to do this and check over everything but after following the 4 steps recommended (backing up, disabling plugins, etc) I uploaded the new files and 7 minutes later (hooray for fast ftp speeds) was sitting at my normal happy dashboard :D

Now all I need to do is fix Falbum as well as tweak a few other things and I can relax with the backend of this thing.

Now that I’ve got this done I can start working on the 3 themes I’ve got planned. One will be just for my usuage but the other 2 will go up for grabs. This will bring my custom theme creation number to a whopping 5 (counting the current recycled theme as well as the theme I made for Tamara Weikel).

Other than that I’ve got about 50 other things to get done today including hopefully finally moving the “recent captivations” portion of the sidebar over to the del.icio.us links plugin I forgot the name of and then possibly updating a few other things.

So far I’m absolutely in love with the spiffy AJAX interface for posting although it would be nice to be able to minimize the uploads box since I rarely use that function of Wordpress.

After a few delays I’ve finally gotten the site finished. Tamara is a good friend and great person who does what she can to make sure the world is a better place. Not an easy person to label just a good quality humanist that is well worth knowing. Residing in Seattle, Tamara first came to my attention when she was on tour with Ani Difranco. Enjoying her unique dj’ing style I visited her website and selected her as a dj of the month for the now defunct cdcrecords. I also signed up for her newsletter which quickly showed just what a noble person she is. Earlier this year while in Seattle we went out to coffee and discussed making her a site with blog that was less about the persona of djtamara and more about Tamara Weikel. If you read the title you’ll see just what a varied person she is. But enough gushing about Tamara onto the info about the site creation.

It was a pleasure designing a site that she was happy with and that allowed her to be able to update the site regardless of where she is. Using the newest version of Wordpress a variety of plugins and my trusty Powerbook I created this site to let her easily post to her blog as well as link to her favorite places. Integration with Falbum (as is also used here) keeps her photography right where you can see it best. I also added in a rather extensive links list using Nandini Doreswamy’s excellent Multilayered Fudge. In addition to that there’s also a mixed install of Sifr running, both a wordpress plugin version called Fancytitles and also a traditional Sifr installation. The photograph used in the header was a photo I took in Vancouver, British Columbia.
I’m quite happy with this site and am quite happy to have made the site for Tamara.

Give it a look and if you like the xhtml/css goodness let me know.

Tamaraweikel.com

Happy Holidays to you Tamara!