I recently rebuilt the back-end of www.buddywakefield.com for, well, Buddy Wakefield. His site was beautifully designed, but a hot mess behind the scenes, with some of the pages living outside of the Wordpress structure and a mishmash of posts and odd categories within it. I decided quickly after checking it out that it would be easier to just rebuild the theme than to fix it, using all of my favorite code bits and stylesheet formats.

This site also presented me with a new challenge … a cheap-if-not-free mailing list system. My first (and fall-back) plan was phplist, which I use for {open}’s mailing list, but since I’m a big fan of giving my non-techie clients one super-simple admin interface to work through, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to find a *great* mailing list Wordpress plugin to use. And I did!! MailPress is pretty fantastic. Configuring it is a bit technical (and the automated-mail feature can be a bit trigger-happy, which I discovered upon waking up the morning after installing it, so caution is warranted), but the KEY part is that *using* it it pretty freakin’ simple! Yay!

This project was especially close to my heart for a two reasons (besides the MailPress discovery and the joy of building a theme from a pretty design).

1) Buddy Wakefield is a truly inspiring poet, and it was great to be able to work with him and help him sculpt his web presence. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing him perform multiple times, at {open}, at the Lightbulb Mouth Radio Hour, and at the ever-so-great Poetry Cruise with the ineffable Derrick Brown. A line from one of his poems has been resonating in my head since last summer.

2) As soon as the site was finished, Buddy took off on tour with none other than Ms. Ani Difranco, opening for her spring 2010 tour. Now, there aren’t that many people living I consider to be role models, but Ani has been a huge influence in my life; not just through her songs, which form a significantly large part of my life’s soundtrack (my plays of Dilate alone rivals any Beatles album I’ve ever had), but as an example of a truly independent businesswoman, who took control of her life and her art, created her own company (and works with amazing people like Buddy), and lives for so much more than money and precedent. She played at the Long Beach Convention Center (the Terrace Theater or one of those) right after I opened {open}, and the fact that I only had to walk down the street to see Ani Difranco was a truly symbolic experience for me (I’m sappy like that). Anyway, it’s always been my pie-in-the-sky dream to have Ani play {open} … and the fact that I am thismuch closer to even that possibility …. well, it’s just really, really, reallllllly rad.