I Made This: Deviant Quarterly Review

A few weeks ago I went live with a brand-new project: The Deviant Quarterly Review is a real-life infographic of the hottest social media stories of the quarter. It’s curated four times annually by the awesome folks over at Social Deviant, where my friend Pavan Bapu works. The graffiti artist, CZRPRZ, painted the mural in twenty-four hours. The timelapse video of the mural was shot by director/producer extraordinaire Yuriy Chernin. Initially I implemented the video as a full-screen background using BigVideoJS, which includes a Flash fallback for users on older browsers. After a couple of days of analyzing the site traffic, though, I switched to plain HTML5 video – we had very few visitors on older browsers requiring Flash, and this seemed like a more lightweight way to deliver video to almost everyone without running the risk of Flash malfunction and superslow load times [plus, the BigVideo plugin added about...

Full Disclosure: I’ve been working on this post for three years and I still don’t have a real conclusion.

I lost my mom to breast cancer, and as a result, I can't stand those damned pink ribbons.

Attention Management, Part 2: Daily and Weekly Routines [In Which Amanda Lee Turns Into Her Dad]

All work and no play makes Amanda Lee a dull girl [who writes crappy markup, eats too much garbage trying to stay awake, gets snippy with her friends, and eventually falls asleep while sitting at her desk].

Attention Management, Part 1: Quitting

A quick administrative note: I started a brand-spanking new job this month and I’m having a blast. I’ll be doing front-end mobile development and design with these lovely folks, who are seriously some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever interacted with. I’m still kind of shocked they brought me on, and I’m working my tail off to keep up. Lifehacker types love to talk about time management because it’s important, and I’m not going to argue about that. But I’m learning that I’ve got another limitation that’s possibly even greater – limited attention. I’m not talking about ADHD, which I quite possibly also have. [Fun fact: I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, but my mom didn't want me to be medicated for it. I still never have been, though I fantasize about how much more I could get done if I were.] What I mean is, I...
Full Disclosure: I guess you can call me a "serial entrepreneur" now.

Full Disclosure: I guess you can call me a “serial entrepreneur” now.

My Etsy shop, I Love Life I Love You, has sat unused for almost a year now. And I'm okay with that.

The Traditional Christmas Video E-Card [Made with Love by Chris Collins]

Chris made this video two years ago, and it’s still amazing. Merry holidays, y’all.

31 New Things: Grow out my Hair for the Whole Year [First Photo]

[I'm trying to do 31 new things in my 31st year.

I Made This: Tot Dogs website

One of my clients is a couple that owns several restaurants in the Cincinnati area who are opening a brand-new restaurant concept. We’re holding off on launching a full site until they’re certain when they’re opening, but for the time being, I made a quick placeholder site. I suggested the email signup form so that we can keep track of the people that want more information about Tot Dogs. After the full site launches, we’ll send an email announcement, and then that list will be our marketing list if we end up doing any email campaigns. [And it goes without saying, if you live in Cincinnati and you're into gourmet hot dogs, you should totally sign up for the list. It'll be neato.] The logo was done, so it was just a matter of finding a color scheme that worked well with it. I think it looks great. Don’t you?...
Latest entries

Places I’ve Lived, Part 1

The first in a series.

UX Stuff That No One Really Thinks About [but that can make or break a site]

You should always have a link to the home page and the previous page on every page. True facts: a lot of people browse the web on an iPhone, and the iPhone doesn’t have a back button. Make stuff behave the way that people think it’s going to behave. Don’t make it look like a...

A List of Lists

Three things that happened in the last week that sucked My dog and I both had stomach flu within 24 hours of each other. I don’t even want to talk about it. I went live with a huge client project that’s bigger than anything I’ve ever made before, and the anxiety…oh, the anxiety! Potential security...

Things to Do More Of, In General

Share things digitally instead of printing them. Sometimes you need a piece of paper for something official [like the Social Security Administration or the license bureau], but aren’t email/Dropbox/Evernote/Zoho/Google Drive awesome? Hold on when you’re on public transit. Look a homeless person in the eye, even if you’re telling them you can’t spare anything to...

Cool Stuff from Around the Web

Tips for winter fashion when it’s HELL-ASS COLD. Which it is approximately sixty percent of the time in my city. [This entire blog is hilarious and fun. Read it all.] The future of mobile web: relevant to my work. Hand-mixed gradient nails from Redditor GrannyRista. Better-than-ordinary website navigation. Plasticking your windows. I do this every...

Faithful Friend: Comic Relief

My dog was very bad. This is his public shaming.

Nine Marginally Productive Ways to Spend the Extra Hour When Daylight Savings Time Happens

Find a couple of pieces of clothing that need to be fixed, and do it.

Measuring the Easy Stuff vs. Measuring What Matters

I went to a super-competitive nationally ranked school, and while I valued the education it gave me, it warped my view of what was within the normal range of acceptable intelligence. As a result, I felt an intense need to prove I belonged there, so I became obsessively focused on the minutia of the numbers...

Throwback Thursday: How to Make Heels Bearable

[This post went live in summer 2008. Since then, I have successfully continued wearing heels ninety percent of the time that I'm not at the gym or in a yoga pose.] Full disclosure: Before I moved to New York two years ago, I wore heels all the time. I’d had the same three pairs of...

Non-Dirty Networking: Schmoozing [sans skeeziness!]

As part of my efforts to be better at Grown-Ass Lady Stuff, I’m trying to learn more about Businessy Things in a way that doesn’t make me want to take a bath afterward. So in the past year, I’ve gone to a handful of networking events. The biggest difference between networking and hanging out is...

Photos: Our House

I’ve been storing some of my books in my mom’s old train case. Before we had really bought any wall art, I found an old S encyclopedia at a thrift store, so I cut it up and put the pictures in frames. Pictured here: South America, skeletons, sailboats, and space travel. We are not fans...

Today I’m Reading About: New Year’s Resolutions

I’ve written before about how I’m more likely to make resolutions in the fall than at new years’. This is probably because a) I love the structure of a school year, even though it’s been a lot of years since I’ve been in school; b) I’d rather make resolutions around my age than any other...