Throughout the course of a designer’s career there are always a series of projects that are taken on to fulfill their own vision of what design should be. These projects live outside the normal studio-client workflow-out of the purview of any “outsider” input. The results of these personal ventures remain free of commercial influence, further the design dialogue and satisfy the need for the creative voice.

I recently set out on this path to personal creation in the form of the online design publication, SweetMachiMachi. SMx2, as it has come to be called around our studio, has been a long time in coming, but until last month remained nothing more than a series of notes in my personal design/idea journal (a book that could be the subject of an entire post on its own).

I’ve spent several years writing and editing for publications (design and otherwise), and while each publication I’ve worked for has provided a great experience, I’ve always been subject to editorial discretion when it came to subject matter and content that I’ve been allowed to cover. Many of my ideas on how a publication should be run and what it should cover have had to remain mine.

With the creation of SMx2 that gets to change. The editorial vision of the publication becomes a micro-cosm of my views (and by default future contributors’ views) of the design world. It is my hope that this publication can adequately represent the diversity, beauty and talent that the modern design profession has to offer and a resource for other designers and non-designers who are looking for a bit of inspiration.

Throughout the course of this publication’s life there will be many changes to format and structure I’m sure, but it will always strive to remain true to the idea of exposing the world to new designers, artists and studios and the work the create.

I firmly subscribe to the thought of designer as publisher/entrepreneur and take stock in the fact that creatives have the responsibility to create and contribute outside of the typical studio/client framework. SweetMachiMachi is just one small contribution, but hopefully through its posts it will provide a subtext into the larger, more diverse world of design.

After a strenuous and long battle with Wordpress and its glitch which left the admin screens completely unstyled and useless, I’ve migrated webclique to a new host and a new Wordpress installation. The process was arduous and painful as I could not get the new host to actually import the sql database. In the end, I ended up simply exporting all of my posts and comments and then re-importing them into the new WP install. Hopefully I will never need to move to another host, or I might just start over.

There are still a few issues with the migration-namely the loss of my widget-based toolbar, but that should be relatively easy to fix over the next day or so. Other than that, though, the basic export and import feature worked like a charm. Now back to work. Whew!

The last week with Wordpress has been a nightmare! After upgrading to 2.8.4 (which I did because of a reported security risk in the previous version) and logging in I noticed that all the formatting and style for the admin screens was gone. Portions of the css were working (color, small icons, etc.), but the bulk of the formatting was just gone.

I spent nearly a week installing and re-installing WP, hoping that each day a fix would be dropped into the source code and re-uploaded, with no effect. The WP forums offered no more help to the situation either. There were a few people experiencing the same problems I was having, but there were no fixes listed-lots of theories, but no fixes.

My hope is, though, that someone will get the actual Wordpress install fixed, so we don’t continue to have this problem.

So, I did what any self-respecting wanna-be geek would do, I went into Wordpress and hacked one of the includes to get the formatting of the admin screens back. It was more like a hacker-light as all I really did is bypass the PHP that was supposed to be automagically dropping in the css links and hard coded it into the header include. But, it worked, and now I am happy because I can use Wordpress again.

Hopefully, someone will come along and make a proper fix for this problem, but in the meantime hopefully others who are experiencing the same issues will find my little hack useful.