Charm FX

Why is encouraging creativity and art in the U.S. an issue? As someone who looks for creative ways to act and move in the world, and someone who’s spent a great deal of time in creative organizations, you run into some things repeatedly that are counterproductive to creativity, as well as the best interest of your community.

Most nations in the world have a long history when compared to the U.S. and this history is reflected in centuries of Art and obvious signs, documents and remains of personal and organizational expression over hundreds or thousands of years.

The U.S. has existed as a nation for only a little more than 200 years. While it has some public art, much of it is reflected in monuments and the results of a few public programs.

Many can go about their day, work, shopping or where ever without encountering anything beyond utilitarian structures, highways and parks. There is little to make them reconsider their environment and a lot to facilitate them focusing on work or supporting themselves.

Beyond this, specifically creative careers often carry a stigma with an association that the only way you can make a living is through teaching, public funding or grants. Getting a position teaching art, especially at the college level, is nearly impossible. There have been times when this was easier to do, but budgets have changed and those that have those positions haven’t given them up. Pursuing public funding and grants is an entire skill set that not everyone possesses or seeks to learn. It involves it’s own set of politics and an understanding of jumping hurdles, as well as costs of developing proposals and applications.

If you’re a person who counts creativity as a big percentage of your DNA, wouldn’t an environment where those insights were encouraged and valued be preferable? Wouldn’t such an environment provide more opportunities for the country generally? If you think so, we’re left with changing things. It’s up to us to make more Art, create more innovation and not leave the “making” to the corporations. It’s up to us to create groups and communities that make space for these activities. It’s up to us to put examples of Art/art and innovation out in the world where everyone in our community can see and experience them. Museums are great, but you shouldn’t be required to go to a specific building to see great stuff. Some things need to be lived with, experienced everyday, to allow all their benefits to seep into your experience. We’ve got to make this happen.

What do you think?

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Recently, I began building my personal portfolio site on my own domain at http://wilhaslup.com.

I had started a personal blog on Tumblr.com earlier this year mainly because of it’s ease of use, “Configurability” and features AND it’s lack of branding like blogger.com and some other blog sites. Tumblr.com also offers you the ability to use your own domain name, has a large community of users, and it facilitates the potential for your posts to go viral via other users ‘reblogging’ your posts on their blogs within the community.

My personal preference for site building these days is to use Wordpress both for it’s features and ease of expandability. While many host on Wordpress.com, I see it as a priority to host my own Wordpress installation within my own server account for reasons I’ll cover in other entries.

After constructing a custom theme for my domain, my goal became to visually integrate my domain on my server with my blog on Tumblr.com. This required me to be able to

1.) adjust my server records to direct traffic appropriately

2.) change the navigation bar function in Wordpress with plugin

3.) port my Wordpress theme and use code on Tumblr blog

I’m sure for some of the less technical, your eyes have glazed over by now, but this really isn’t as difficult as it sounds.

For the first problem, Tumblr allows you to use your own web address based on a URL you own. It requires you to make some edits in the “A” record on your server account and to edit a setting in the Customize area of your blog settings. You can find instructions for how to do this on using custom domains on Tumblr here. For my purposes I’m using blog.wilhaslup.com as the address for my blog so that’s what I had to add to my “A” record. You can do something similar or name it anything you like as long as it’s based on the domain name you own and are using for the rest of your site.

The Wordpress navigation bar adjustment is accomplished using the “Page Links To” plugin in your Wordpress installation and adding the link in the area at the bottom of the edit page for the page you want to redirect. You can find and install this easily from within your Wordpress admin are by selecting the “Add New” section under “Plugins” and searching for “Page Links to”.

Porting your Wordpress theme takes some familiarity with editing HTML, but isn’t terribly difficult. Tumblr provides details on using Tumblr codes within a custom HTML theme at http://www.tumblr.com/docs/custom_themes.

If you’ve installed your theme on your Wordpress site, you can simply ‘View Source’ while looking at one of your pages, ‘Copy’ and past into ‘Notepad’ or some other text editor. Your going to want to make sure you’ve installed the plugin mentioned above first, and configured a page for your Tumblr blog so it shows up in the navigation bar and you’ve edited the link area at the bottom of the edit page for that page. You must use a text editor and not a word processor to edit HTML to avoid the software adding all sorts of codes and things HTML can’t have in it. You need something that will save a .txt document.

Looking at the code for your sample Wordpress page you should be able to easily identify the content of the page, i.e. the title & text information on that page. Your going to remove that information and be replacing it with the Tumblr codes so Tumblr knows where to put your blog posts. Once you’ve looked over Tumblr’s code documentation, enter the codes for the various kinds of posts along with dates and any post navigation you may want to include. Now you’re going to follow their instructions and add you ported Wordpress theme by replacing what’s in “Theme” tab once you’ve clicked the Tumblr “Customize” button.
Once you hit ‘Save & Close’ your Tumblr blog should look identical to your Wordpress installation as well as sharing it’s navigation. Your Tumblr blog posts should show in the content area and your server should handle directing traffic between the two, i.e. blog.yourdomain.com & www.yourdomain.com, seamlessly. From the users point of view there’s no indication they’ve gone to another server.

Benefits: Your blog exists within the Tumblr community and posts can be ‘reblogged’ within that community. Your site navigation crosses to your own server where you have more control of what you can include on other pages.

Negatives: None that I can think of.

I wrote these steps down pretty quickly so if anything is unclear please post comments and I’ll respond to clarify or edit the post. If anyone has other thoughts on how to increase viral potential of their content please mention them for everyone’s benefit.