SEAN WOODWARD

WordPress has a number of features to enable blogs to resemble traditional websites – static pages and plugins for Flickr, del.icio.us etc. Sometimes though you want to make an announcement without creating/editing a static page and resetting that as the homepage. Here’s where a plugin like Sticky comes in handy – it enables you to tag blog items as Announcements and they stay at the tope of the page until you change them. Ideal for , well.. announcements for events or creating a Blog Item of The Day!

Conferences, training days and seminars are great ways of re-focusing. Removing yourself from normal environments has a way of crystallising experience. Even as a delegate or guest speaker you soon realise that there is an element of chaos at work, as no matter how well you prepare your notes, like all live events, anything can happen!

My recent experience at the Writing Industries Conference has helped me re-evaluate the media I work in. In the digital age its no longer necessary to compartmentalise your skill-sets. You can be a specialist with many specialties! I was introduced to the notion of “transliteracy” by Mahendra Solanki‘s brief mention in conversation about Sue Thomas‘ work. It’s a good label for my own work – crossing as it does the boundaries of poetry, fiction, art, digital art, music, electronic music, digital photography, illustration and importantly – web delivery platforms. After a few days considering how best to describe that mix of genres I came up with “transmedia technologies”*. It wasn’t long however before James Sebastian over at the Invisible Lodge suggested a variation (with due respect to SteveG as well) ….

Call me a …. Transmedia Alchemist!

So there we have it, a new label, new moniker, new pigeonhole for the masses and a cause to champion!

I still enjoy “new-renaissance man” – a term coined by a magazine to describe my work some years ago but its kinda hard living up to the notion of someone akin to Leonardo DaVinci !

*Transmedia Alchemist (source: Sean Woodward, ) – An adept at fusing arts and technology, regardless of discipline or platform.

photo credit: keso

This evening I updated the site to the latest (2.3.3) version of WordPress. It was all very painless (something one comes to expect from WordPress) and started to examine areas of increased functionality for this blog.

I recently started something similar, reviewing Movable Type’s extendability with my Reality Architecting blog. The first plugin of interest allows you to link to Amazon titles and I’ve incorporated this in the sidebar to show some of my previous publications.

Given my recent induction to the Cult of iPhone, I was very interested to find the iWPhone plugin. This enables the blog to be formatted especially for the iPhone / iPod Touch when you browse the site but otherwise renders the pages normally for PC/Mac based browsers.