Website Redesign (Version 4.0)

I've been working on a redesign of my personal website based on a Bootstrap template that's HTML5... ish? I quickly got in over my head w/r/t CSS and JS, but I think I strung enough stuff together so that the website will work on most devices / browsers.

The goal was to have a site that was fully morphable from desktop to tablet to smartphone and I think I got what I wanted.

One project begets another, and as I redesigned I ended up starting a SoundCloud account, reconfiguring some blog stuff (including the title of this blog, taken from a David Bazan song, "Hard To Be"), and some other things that I already forget.

The work's not done, though, because I'd like to start an archive of sorts that shows the old designs of my website and also a Site Credits page (all of the elements of the webpage were openly sourced and/or creatively commoned).

Anyway, here's the thing (let me know if anything on it breaks when you're looking at it):

http://www.justindelacruz.com/

On the FSView

My first professionalish writing gig was in college. I had wanted to write for my high school paper, but I never got around to it. After almost two years in college, I decided to respond to an ad in FSU's college newspaper, The FSView & Florida Flambeau, even though I didn't really read the newspaper. (Full Disclosure: I didn't read it after I started writing for it, either. Only when I started editing the section, and then I only ever read the stories I had to edit.)

The recruitment ad, placed by Matthew Gilmour, called for Arts & Entertainment writers, and I was going to nearly every concert I could at that time, so I sent in a sample review for The Feature's Exhibit A (a fine album) and was on my way.

My two-year stint at the 'View was pretty wild. There were a lot of great album releases and concerts to cover; we won a national award for editorial content; and the paper made news for itself when it became the first college newspaper purchased by a major corporation (Gannett Company, Inc.). This was possible because the FSView was an independent paper.

< "Brief Historical Account" >

The original FSU paper, the Florida Flambeau, was a hardhitting, political, sometimes investigative-reporting type affair. Eventually, it upset The Order when it ran a negative piece about Greek Life (fraternities / sororities). As a result, the FSView was started up by Greek Sympathizers and soon got all the Greek advertising revenue. The 'View soon went deep into the red, and the Flambeau made a deal to acquire it.

Thereafter, the 'View and the Flambeau were "one," serving the FSU campus at large, but being financially independent from university money. Which, you think, would allow them some liberties in terms of, uhh, reporting / being critical of University Affairs, but no such liberties were achieved. When I was there, the two-page spread of Entertainment (read: bars / nightclubs) ads reigned supreme, sometimes knocking my section down to one page of editorial content and two pages of ads.

Read more history here, or on Wikipedia (an entry that I wrote and got approved by the Wiki Powers That Be).

< / "Brief Historical Account" >

Moving on.

Despite all the turmoil, I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the paper and I learned a fair amount. One of the best lessons I learned is that reaching out to your co-workers (asking them how your job impacts their job and vice versa) is quite helpful if you care about doing your job right. (Note: a lot of people there, from lowly writers all the way up to the newspaper owner did not in fact care about doing their jobs right.)

Anyway, when I left the paper, I had over 100 articles posted online. About a year later, they decided to overhaul their website, and, unsurprisingly, this wiped out their online records. Luckily, I took care to get every printed issue from my time there before I left. But the downside now is that without a massive scanning project on my part, there is no way to share these articles with the general public.

Except one.

That was never published.

Here is my response to a brutally dimwitted op-ed that my then editor-in-chief ran one week:

Op-Ed: FSU Football

That's all for now, folks.

On Writing

Growing up, I didn't write anything outside of school. But my first writing success was having a blunt story of mine ("The Underground Kingdom," a scan of which will be produced as soon as I find the story from my closet) featured at a young writer's festival when I was in 5th grade. It was the tale of a kidnapped princess, a king who has lost his wits, and an underdog hero. At the end of the story, I even wrote "MORAL: Never underestimate the small guy" or some equally Mother Goose-type thing.

In middle school, I was blessed with my first great English teacher, Mrs. Julia Bradford (Roach) Roach (she had married a man with the same last name as hers, but, which she stressed, a man to whom she — and she had taken care to research this — was not related). We wrote a short story every week in order to incorporate new vocabulary words into our writing. I forget most of what I wrote. One was about a space alien / starship. I remember that an acquaintance of mine at the time, Artus Nemati, wrote a powerful series of short stories about dirt. (Or was it dust?)

Mrs. Roach had drilled us on participles, gerunds, and other high-level grammar that is all but left out of the classroom nowadays. I beefed up on this stuff when I began to study Latin in high school. But I honed my analytical writing in the classroom of Mr. William "Carter" Hammond, my high school's resident AP English (Lang/Lit) teacher, where, for every Friday during the my junior and senior years, for precisely 55 minutes, my pen furiously hit paper in an attempt to express my views on the imagery in "Blackberry Picking or the symbolism in "The Destructors" in a concise-but-non-formulaic in-class essay.

Later, I came to blame this exercise for my hyperdeveloped ability to write quickly and expertly underfire — in college, papers would 90% of the time be left off until the night before (even 18-pagers, if you can believe it) — but I soon came to the conclusion that I was simply putting off work as a defensive mechanism so that later, no matter what the grade, I could say to myself, "Well, I didn't have a lot of time to polish that one."

In college, I began blogging and I also began writing music journalism, first for FSU's student paper, and later, after graduation, for musicOMH.com. It's a neat process to sit down with new music and try to say something about it that isn't vague, hackneyed, or reductive. It's also very challenging.

In grad school I discovered my love of the personal essay. It's an amorphous, fractured beast that allows for all kinds of tangential asides and non sequiturs (when done right, of course) and doesn't necessarily articulate a well-formulated worldview or moral or lesson in the way an argumentative essay, op-ed piece, or research article does. I'd tried my clumsy hand at short fiction before (and had attempted NaNoWriMo on two separate occasions), but I found it much easier for me to write out personal essays than to write fiction.

See, instead of writing thinly veiled autobiography-as-fiction, I could start from the essential truthiness granted to the personal essay form and start to smudge the truth from that side. That is to say: because of a need to craft the presentation of information into an entertaining prose and/or linear narrative (via omission, conflation, and minor fibbing), all essayists are essentially liars, but certainly not as big of liars as fiction writers are.

See more on the "Writing" page of my website...

Look at all the pretty colors.

I usually shy away from online quizzes, but I was feeling particularly adventurous tonight (although I did not mark the "Aventurous" box on the quiz).

you are paleturquoise #AFEEEE

Your dominant hues are green and blue. You're smart and you know it, and want to use your power to help people and relate to others. Even though you tend to battle with yourself, you solve other people's conflicts well. Your saturation level is low - You stay out of stressful situations and advise others to do the same. You may not be the go-to person when something really needs done, but you know never to blow things out of proportion. Your outlook on life is bright. You see good things in situations where others may not be able to, and it frustrates you to see them get down on everything.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

I considered posting the results only if they matched what I really thought I was like, but where's the fun in that? In Psychology, we call these self-reported assessments, and it's generally acknowledged that people usually don't know what they're feeling or what they're like anyway... but colors are cool! Thanks to Jessica for this quiz!