Dear Web Design Muses,

I truly appreciate it when you make appearances in my life, as that burst of inspiration that leads me to get lost in designing a website for eight hours and forget the rest of the world in the meantime is really quite fun. But would you mind being a little more convenient about when you appear? You always seem to come when I’m flooded with papers or final exams, and then when summer rolls around and I can stay up until 6am staring at my computer screen, you’re on vacation too.

We haven’t been spending a lot of time together over the past few months, so it was nice to see you again tonight. And, miraculously, I redesigned an entire site (my best friend’s cakes website - I’ll put the new layout up once she approves it) easily and without encountering any serious bugs, which was very exciting!

Next I want to redesign this site. I got bored of this layout about a week after I put it up. And I still need to find a real purpose for it. So, Design Muses, won’t you please come again soon?

Much love,
Kirstie

With my departure from Spain and return to California quickly approaching, my head has been filled with all kinds of plans for what to do when I’m back. And living the tourist life for almost a year has made me want to continue seeing the world that way even after I return to the city I’ve spent my entire 21 years in. I want to take daytrips to cute nearby towns, like my current daytrips to places like Toledo and Salamanca. I want to discover adorable, hole-in-the-wall coffee shops like the countless establishments I pass by every day in Madrid. I want to visit all the museums in L.A. I’ve somehow managed to avoid my entire life (though I may die if I have to see one more 16th-century religious painting). I’ve taken advantage of all these things in the ten months I’ve spent in Madrid but never in the 21 years I’ve spent in L.A., but it’s not too late to start.

One of my favorite things about Madrid (and all of Europe) is the ease of public transportation. I walk a minute to the metro station, hop on a metro for a few minutes, maybe do a transfer or two, and then I’m at my destination, without having to worry about gas money or parking or focusing while I drive. Whenever anyone here asks me how the public transportation is in Los Angeles, I loudly guffaw and then answer some variation on, “Horrendous!” And L.A. public transportation definitely does get a bad rap, though I have to admit, I have very limited experience with it, so is it really as horrendous as I proclaim? I’ve taken the Gold Line from Pasadena to Olvera Street, which was easy and eliminated the parking problem, and I used to take the local bus the few blocks from my middle/high school to my house, which also worked well. I think people in L.A. believe public transportation to be full of smelly vagabonds and dangerous gang members, but I’m pretty sure it’s nowhere near as bad as some think. Besides, I’m very accustomed to visits from dirty, limbless, singing beggars in the Madrid metro. How bad could the patrons of Los Angeles public transportation really be?

So my plan this summer is to experiment with L.A. public transportation. I have a fantastic car with great gas mileage, but this will be an adventure. I’ve checked out Metro.net, which has a handy trip planner, and though there may not be metro stops conveniently located every few blocks like we have here in Madrid, and though public transportation, in most cases, takes a lot longer than driving by car, it’s definitely possible to get around. There’s a bus stop about a two minute walk from my mom’s house and a train station thirty minutes away (or five minutes by car, though a 30-minute walk seems minimal after all the walking I’ve done here). I’m sure the summer heat will make the walking considerably less fun, but it’s worth a shot, right?

Anything I can do to keep pretending I live in Europe. And maybe I can spend less money and save the environment while I’m at it.

I just coined that nickname. Pretty cool, right? So cool. You’re dying of cool overload. It’s kind of like Po’ Folks Restaurant. Or the po’ po’. Or, considerably less awesome, po-po-po-poker face.

Um, anyway, I finally got my portfolio back up, which you can see here. SimpleViewer ftw. I’m not the hugest fan of the designs I included in it, but I suppose that’s more incentive to work on my design skills, right? Maybe one day I’ll be as talented as these guys.

The first two are layouts I created today in Photoshop but haven’t yet coded. I’ve normally been one to design mostly via HTML rather than in Photoshop, but I thought I’d switch things up. And pardon the super narcissistic layout featuring a photo of me. I wanted to play with using images in my layouts, since my recent ones have been text and shape based, and I suppose if you’re going to have a photo of someone on your personal site, it might as well be you. Coding those layouts will probably be fairly complicated, so I’ll probably put it off a bit. And I did just put this layout up a few weeks ago (though, not going to lie, I’m already a bit bored of it).

I spent my day doing this rather than working on my 50-page paper about Twitter, but the class is called Internet Design and Programming, not Digital Marketing. I should be doing this kind of thing for my assignment, not writing an exhaustively long analysis of a digital marketing tool.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or this is sadly the only website you’ve accessed in the past week, you’ve heard talk of recent Facebook reforms announced by founder Mark Zuckerberg last week at San Francisco web conference F8. Whenever Facebook introduces a change to the site, the social network’s millions of citizens invariably have a collective panic attack and proceed to have heated debates about the minimal reform, some threatening to boycott the site forever and others praising the change, until a few weeks pass and users forget this feature was never part of Facebook.

Weirdly, with this reform, I’ve seen very little uproar on Facebook itself, though perhaps this is because few (include myself) fully understand this new feature, and, besides, people have to finally be sick of declaring the end of the world every time Facebook makes a change, right? However, there has been significant discussion of the new feature on webby blogs like Mashable and on news sites like CNN, and the experts of the web industry all seem to agree on one thing: this is a Very Big Deal. The internet’s about to change.

So that’s cool. We’re witnessing some huge revolution, apparently. Whether this is true or not, eh, I don’t know. I’ll leave that to the experts to figure out. But I will say one thing: sry2say, Facebook, I’m not impressed. As I understand it, this new feature basically enables websites to include buttons in their posts that allow readers to share the content on Facebook, much akin to the well-established reTweet/share on Digg/etc. buttons. The only difference is that Facebook will be creepier about keeping track of what you re-post and use it to stalk you in the future. Right? Can someone please tell me if I’m interpreting this wrong?

So, great, now we can share interesting posts on Facebook. But we could already do that before through the link sharing feature; it just may have taken a little more effort. Now that it requires virtually no effort, my newsfeed can be more easily flooded by thousands of “funny,” “clever” links posted by people I barely know. Sweet.

See, I enjoy seeing reTweets on Twitter and reblogs on Tumblr. But there’s a big difference between the people I follow on Twitter and Tumblr and those I’m friends with on Facebook. On Twitter and Tumblr, I rarely add people I know in real life but rather people I find interesting because we share the same sense of humor or taste in websites/movies/television shows/whatever. Therefore, odds are, I’ll like what they’re re-posting. On the other hand, the people I’m Facebook friends with? Not gonna lie, most of them are deathly dull. I’m friends with them because we went to the same elementary school or hung out once. And even my close friends don’t necessarily share my same e-interests. How many times have you been subjected to the classic, “Oh my God, I have to show you the funniest video on YouTube,” only to be forced to sit through a 10-minute video while patronizing your friend with fake laughter? That’s what Facebook’s new “like” feature is, although at least you won’t have to provide the fake laughter. If I want to share a link with friends, I’ll send it directly to those who I know will actually be entertained by it, not to all 592 people Facebook calls my “friends.”

The way fan pages appear on your Facebook profile seems to be in a transition stage at the moment, so I’m not sure how they’ll ultimately be integrated into profiles, but, just because I liked an article one day doesn’t mean I want it permanently pasted in my profile, forming part of my Facebook identity. It would be fine if it only showed up in my feed, as sharing a link would have, but I don’t want it to be included in my interests as well.

Another little thing that bugs me is that liking someone’s “liking” action results in the page your friend liked being added to your profile too. No! I don’t like pedophiles! I just like that Bob Loblaw liked pedophiles because it made me laugh! And neither can I comment on his action, saying, “Hey, Bob, you might want to be careful in case the po’ po’ are trolling your profile.”

I can see the appeal for bloggers, owners of online companies, and other webmasters. If this were a real blog where I was actually trying to accumulate readers, I could include a “like” button in this post, hope a few people buy into the new feature enough to use it, and hope that those people have some friends who are actually interested in clicking through to this post, thereby boosting my site’s ratings, probably more so than having it shared on less popular sites like Twitter or Digg would do. So I’m not saying this feature won’t be widely used or make an impact; I’m just saying that I personally have no desire to do any “liking” anytime soon, though perhaps one day I’ll consider experimenting with being on the “liked” side of things.

Don’t get me wrong — I love Facebook. Sure, it’s a little overrated and the world would probably be a better place without Farmville and MafiaWars, but where else can I stalk everyone and their mom (and, these days, that expression can be taken literally — shoutout to my 21 family members of the age of 40 who now inhabit the formerly students-only site) or brag to the world via travel photos about how kickass my life is? And I have a lot of respect for any company that can be as successful as Facebook has been. But Facebook has already taken over our lives enough. It doesn’t need to get all up in the entire internet’s grill as well.

Hooray, new layout! We’ll see how long it takes for me to get sick of this one. I suppose I should give credit somewhere to Be Sew Happy since I shamelessly stole one of their patterns and then edited it for my background, but, other than that, woot, I can take all the credit.

I love when I get the urge to redesign or create a site and then get completely sucked into it. I was so ~in the zone~ yesterday that I wound up dying of hunger when it got to be 7 or 8pm and I had only eaten a bowl of cereal all day. Er, not good, I realize, but I’m just saying it’s fun to get so sucked into something.

So, yeah, nothing too exciting with this layout, but it’s new and colorful and girly, and it’s a lot easier to navigate than my previous layout. The only problem is that having the blog on the main page puts more pressure on actually writing something interesting here, but I guess I can work on that later. [Insert subliminal messages that make you think this post is the best thing you've ever read.]

If you notice any serious issues with the layout, let me know and you’ll be my new best friend. Unless you don’t want to be best friends, in which case I’ll just give you a kind but non-committal thanks.