Robot Loves Kitten

Helloindie is a biweekly email zine about the DIY craft revolution. It began its life designed to be a print publication, but with limited funding available and the magazine market tightening, I decided it would be prudent to redirect efforts to an online product.

Being an ezine allows the magazine to grow at a more natural pace, letting us explore the vibrant DIY craft scene (a moniker denoting its difference from the traditional American craft movement) at our own pace.

I built the backend using open source applications, including DADA Mail and WordPress. I customized WordPress to serve as a magazine-style newsletter generator, after not finding suitable newsletter creation options out in the market. This way, I get to leverage the powerful multiuser environment of WordPress to write and edit articles, while having custom control over the newsletter template, from images to colors. I can also easily update template design if I want. Once I’m ready to publish out a newsletter, I simply copy and paste the generated code into DADA Mail and send it.

It seems somewhat complicated, but I find that complexity often leads to the simplest solution.

Shooting War is an online graphic novel serialized over 8 weeks and SMITH’s first original content production. Again, as with most every SMITH project to date, I designed and built the site (on top of WordPress).

There’s some customization behind the scenes to faciliate easy publishing of each weekly chapter. Once the panel graphics are finalized, I do some resizing, upload all the necessary files, and generate thumbnail images and the chapter’s html code. Everything on the homepage is dynamically inserted, including weekly Flash intros, splash graphics, and chapter thumbnails. We can also customize which comments we’d like to highlight on the homepage.