Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been working on a particularly exciting new project: launching Parallactic Consulting — a new web design and development company in Boston and Chicago!

I teamed up with some friends and fellow U of C alums to form Parallactic; it’s awesome to get to work with this much combined talent and experience (as you can see). With both more personpower and a greater variety of skills and experience, we should be able to take on much larger projects than any of us can do as individuals. I’m pretty excited about what’s in store for this!

I’m still accepting small/mid-size projects as an individual, but for larger projects, I’m steering people toward Parallactic - spread the word!

What I’ve been working on lately:

• Launched the new site for Templeman Automation. I created a custom design for this product development company and implemented the design with a custom version of WordPress so that Templeman can easily add new product or project pages and display news blurbs and a featured product on the front page. I integrated Google Checkout with the site to give users an easy way to purchase Templeman’s products. I also got to learn sIFR for this project, which was lots of fun to work with — all the headlines in the site are automatically transformed into a custom font.
• Added some new features to the Fly Over The City bike messenger dispatch site — the client wanted a holding area for jobs to be deleted and a label printing function for clients.
• Made some tweaks to Flathound, a real estate search site written in Ruby on Rails; the coolest part of this project was adding an edit-in-place feature for administrators, so a user can just click on a field in a list of apartments and immediately get an edit box without having to go to a separate page.
• Added some new features to Espressy; in addition to listing several countries they identify with, users can now add specific details about their relationships to those countries and share thoughts, memories, and recommendations.

I’ve also been doing some design work and some more Ruby on Rails coding for projects that are yet to be launched — and another interesting project that I’ll post about soon!

The books I’ve been reading this year, and some thoughts on them:

• America’s Women – Gail Collins: I love Collins’s columns in the New York Times and hoped this book would have a similar mix of historical detail with genuinely entertaining writing, and I was not disappointed. This is a great take on American history focused on women’s roles. Collins does a great job of weaving stories about particularly noteworthy and accomplished women with painstaking research on daily life and the experiences of average women at different periods of history. Highly recommended!
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design – Jason Beaird: A good overview of some of the basic aspects of design for the web. The most useful part of this book for me was Beaird’s explanations of the importance of texture and detailed tutorials and examples of how to use appropriate texture on a site – they definitely helped me add depth to my designs.
• Blink – Malcolm Gladwell: I bought this in an airport bookstore and blew through it on the plane. It’s a quick, fun read about the ways in which humans make decisions unconsciously (and often rationalize them later!).
• The Stone Raft – Jose Saramago: Some friends started a book club, and this was the first selection. It was pretty fun to read, if a little slow — a story of magical realism that became a lot more interesting when we looked up its geopolitical context (Portugal in the 1980s) and were able to put together some of the themes with the social and political state of the setting.
• The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon: I’d already read this book more than once (it’s one of my all-time favorites), but I re-read it after I chose it for the book club’s second meeting.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz: Another book club selection! I’d heard a lot of praise for this book, and it did not disappoint; it’s a dizzying pastiche of Dominican history, science-fiction and comic book references, mythology, Spanish slang, and compelling characters woven into an intriguing story. Highly recommended!
• A History of U.S. Feminisms – Rory Dicker: With a chapter for each of the three “waves”, this book is a straightforward summary of feminism’s ideas, conflicts, and accomplishments over the past century and a half. I’m still looking for something more theoretical/practical and less historical to recommend as a feminism primer, but for now, this is the best book I’ve found for the general newcomer to feminism.
• Feminism Is For Everybody – bell hooks: This book is really intelligent. hooks clearly explains what she believes should be the core tenets of feminism, and lays out a proposal for a new version of feminism that won’t have the heterosexist and white-centered connotations sometimes associated with the second wave, but instead will be inclusive and useful to all people. Possibly a little dense for people new to feminist thought, but highly recommended.
• Full Frontal Feminism - Jessica Valenti: By the founder of the excellent blog feministing.com. The subtitle is “A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters”, and that’s exactly what it is. I was hoping for a more seriously written introduction for a broader audience; Valenti’s slangy tone put me off a little (I could tell she was trying to be deliberately casual, but it made it seem like she wasn’t forming her thoughts carefully — even though she was). However, this would be a good introduction for the “I’m POST-feminist!” high-school/college crowd. I’ve also heard that Valenti’s later books (He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut and The Purity Myth) are less slangy and more in-depth, so I’ll probably try to pick them up.
• Better - Atul Gawande: Another book club selection. This was interesting to read since I knew almost nothing about the medical system. Gawande mixes personal anecdotes about his experiences as a surgeon with analysis on why things go wrong and what doctors can do to make improvements. A fast read that raises some interesting issues.