0olong

Towards the end of last year, I was hired to create a new web site for International Times - once a radical underground newspaper, now whatever the 21st century online equivalent of that might be.

I'm happy with the web site, and it publishes interesting writing and art every week, but I would very much like to see more talented artists contributing illustrations, montages, and stand-alone pieces for it - so this is an appeal for anyone who might be interested in sharing their work with its audience to get in touch.

I'm still having a hard time believing that anyone thought even for a moment that 'Feedback' was a sensible place to file birthdays. Has anyone ever said to you 'Well done! It's my birthday!'? Or 'It's my deviantArt birthday today, couldn't you have timed it a bit better?'

No. Because birthdays are not feedback. Hence I am once again using my dA journal to moan about stupid UI decisions on this site. Bleh.

I finally got round to organising my work into some galleries - sculpture, self-portraits, computer-generated and burlesque and costumery.

I suppose I should probably make one for other photography, too, and possibly drawing...

Why does dA still think I'm 30 even though it knows I was born on the 26th of May, 1978? I remember there being a setting for age somewhere, despite there also being a setting for DOB, but I can't even find that now.

Sometimes I think deviantART should focus more on its user interface...

EDIT: Found it. There's a little arrow in the box where it says '30', and that brings up an 'edit' link, and that's where you change your age. Obviously this still doesn't explain why it doesn't just calculate my age from my date of birth.

Also unexplained: Why does it take three clicks to get from my profile to the page where I can edit this entry? Why isn't there just a direct 'Edit' link on the entry itself?

I have a rather large web site - oolong.co.uk - cobbled together over the course of about a decade, with diverse content and no real coherency to the same thing. I've been planning on overhauling it radically for quite some time, thinking I'll probably migrate most of it to Drupal, but I don't really know Drupal yet... oolong.co.uk/drupal-6.5 contains my efforts to date. It seems to be much harder to get started with than WordPress, which I know reasonably well, and which I already use for three active, bloggy sub-sites: oolong.co.uk/oo for general things that fascinate me, oolong.co.uk/zoo for my sculptures, and oolong.co.uk/play for my generative art.

So I have a few things bouncing around in my head here...
(1) How can I bring a sense of coherence to the whole site? Can I do that at all, in fact? And is it worth it? Should I maybe bring all my content under the rubric of one of the blogs? Should I add another one for photography? Should I design myself a logo?
(2) Should I keep plugging at Drupal? How long will it take me to get something together that I can really use for everything I currently have in static HTML pages?
(3) Is the current shape of my site actively putting off potential employers? Is there too much of me in there? And if so, should I make a separate, 'professional' site? And if so, which profession(s) should it be aimed at?!

As you can see, quite a mess of stuff in there. You guys are all creative, right? Do many of you have your own web site? If so, how do you manage the personal/creative/professional boundaries, if you respect them at all?