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.

Some website projects I’ve been working on in the past couple months:

• Launching the design for MetaArts, an educational publishing development house in Chicago
• Launching MyWomanToday, which I worked on through Webstudio Boston — I did all the backend Ruby coding for this social network
• HTML coding for Really Useful Information
• Some updates and changes to Lamp Glass’s online store
• Wordpress customization for Tall Tales from the Antiques Trail — it’s still under development, but this will be a blog where a local antique dealer collects colorful stories (from his own experience as well as from colleagues) about the business

I’ve also been enhancing my Wordpress skills and learning sIFR for some other projects that are still in the behind-the-scenes stages. One of the great things about being a freelancer is getting to learn new technological skills with almost every project!

Here’s a few inspiring websites (and other things) I’ve encountered recently:

1. Subtraction: monochrome, gridded, super-clean site. I keep coming back to this one when I’m thinking about a new design.
2. Verbalized: perfect use of graphic elements and typography to create a visually appealing design without ever distracting the user from the content
3. DJ:nod: a great combination of organic illustration and clean, usable grid design, with a subtle use of Flash
4. The Intelligent Labor website isn’t anything special, but I’ve noticed their trucks driving around Cambridge and admired the bold, steampunky-yet-current style on the vehicles.
5. Winter in Boston — Jesse and I have been enjoying going on some photo-taking walks. Winter scenes make me want to do monochrome design!

This blog — and my main site — have a new look! I’ve been working on this design for what seems like forever (actually it’s a few months, but that’s still quite some time) and I’m very excited to finally launch it — let me know what you think!

A few sites I’ve launched recently:

• MyIGEA is a restaurant review site aimed at food-allergy sufferers; when you sign up, you list the allergies that you (or a friend/family member) have, and the site generates a list of restaurants that other users with the same allergy rated highly. I did all the back-end coding for this (it’s another Tensegrity project and I worked with one of their designers).
  Once I started working on this site I became more attuned to food allergies, and I realized how many people there are that could benefit from a resource like this — so I’m pretty psyched about launching this. It’s still in “alpha”, which means that the features aren’t finalized and there will be some more development, but it’s open to the public and available for you to sign up and start reviewing!
• Pianofarm.net is the new site that I designed for my mom’s piano studio; this is the first static site that I built since discovering the CushyCMS system of updating content, and I’m really impressed with how it was wicked easy both for me to set up and for my mom to use. (Anyone who doesn’t already have a CMS might want to check this out — I can set it up in less than an hour, and you can then easily update your own content, which should save you some time/money.)
• I posted about the initial launch of espressy a few months ago, but in December we launched the second version of the site, with a revised design and category system.

This blog is now powered by Wordpress! I switched over from Blogger in part because Wordpress offers more features and extensibility — like that tasty tag cloud over there — and also in part because I keep the free-as-in-beer-and-speech Wordpress code on my own server, where I can read and modify it, or not, to my heart’s content. Ah, delicious freedom!

Plus, Wordpress was not only super-easy to install and set up, but importing all my old Blogger posts and implementing redirects from the Blogger page addresses and feeds to the new versions took just a few minutes. It’s not surprising that Wordpress is considered the best blogging platform out there!

It’s sporting the default Wordpress theme for now, but expect an exciting redesign of both this blog and my portfolio site in the coming weeks!

This week a site I’ve been working on for a while went live — espressy.com! I’m pretty excited about this one, in part because it’s probably the largest web project I’ve done so far — I did all the back-end coding and a lot of the front-end coding as well.

Espressy has user profiles, blogs, photo albums, and stuff like that, but the most fun part is posting links to other sites with commentary and discussion — in fact, you can check out my broadcast there to see what pages I’ve been interested in sharing!

Now that allofmp3 is no longer available, I don’t know where to buy new music. Allofmp3 was perfect — inexpensive, DRM-free, convenient to download, and it even let me buy music in my favorite non-proprietary format. But alas, such perfection went hand-in-hand with questionable legality, and US users can no longer add money to their accounts.

Since I manage my music collection on a computer, buying music on CD would require tedious additional steps of ripping the music to my hard drive and leave me with an inconvenient physical artifact. The iTunes store isn’t compatible with my computers’ software or the OS I prefer to run on my iPod — I refuse to by any kind of DRM’d music, anyway, since DRM means you don’t really own your music. I tried eMusic, which is where I got most of the new songs on this mix, but their selection was constrictingly small, and their pricing scheme (different subscription levels get you different numbers of per-month downloads, that expire at the end of the month) created some perverse incentives. Amazon and Yahoo! sell DRM-free music, but at $1+ a song it’s a bit pricey for me (perhaps the conclusion to this dilemma is that I can’t actually afford to buy much new music!).

Mostly I’ve been listening to Pandora and music I already have lately, but if anyone knows of an alternative place to buy music that doesn’t have the issues outlined above, let me know!