The Whirlwind

I have a confirmed third reader.

It has been a website week. The shiny new TARANTULAS.com website I created was launched earlier in the week and I launched my new Exotic Fauna website this morning. Both are state-of-the-art XHTML/CSS thingamajigs. The T.com site is a complete overhaul of a site T.com owner Alex Orleans launched in the mid-90s. Since I am still working with him and T.com, and the designer of the original site has long left this spinning Earth, it was time to create a fresh web presence. As the new site showcases the clean tableless CSS layout that most sites use today and I have been studying, I felt it was time to upgrade the EF site to match. Please visit both sites and shoot me an e-mail at exoticfauna[at]gmail[dot]com if you have any comments.

I won't expound too much today on my magazine and DVD projects and how I let them wither. I have to be brief as I need to shower and shave for my gig at the museum tonight. For now I will just say that I have been thinking of ways to resurrect them for months now and have kicked some ideas around with Billy over the past week.

Suffice it to say that the buggery DVD that wouldn't play in all but MY OWN DVD player has been converted to a QuickTime computer movie. I can't afford to have it professionally mastered for DVD player use, and I want to at least get it out there, especially to those who ordered the faulty original. I was further motivated by my creation of the aforementioned TARANTULAS.com site. I tried to add as much content as possible, focusing on frequently asked questions from beginners. Of course, this was also self-serving as I grow very tired of answering the same questions over and over via email. So, through the process of adding written care information to get the neophyte tarantula keeper headed in the right direction, I decided to add a Care Videos page and I uploaded four excerpts from my DVD project to YouTube and embedded them into the page. The same clips are embedded into the Video page on the Exotic Fauna page. So, I have now started the ball rolling on getting the footage I spent a great deal of time with before I left Nashville out for public gawking.

As for ARACHNOCULTURE magazine, creating the seven print issues was quite an accomplishment. I will always be proud of them and the positive feedback they received worldwide. But producing them was cost-prohibitive and labor-intensive so I am now focused on an E-Zine version that will be available online. I haven't worked out all the details, but it will likely be available as a password-protected download at no cost to my past paying readers and at a nominal fee to new readers. Since the magazine was small format [half page], I am currently laying out the most recent issue as a full page PDF file and will take it from there.

I just realized that this post was actually on-topic; at least about exotic animals if not about kissing large hirsute arachnids. I will have to return to disc-golfing, brewery-touring, movie-going and longing for a canoe and bicycle in my next vomitous blog. See you then, MJ