This is the first Christmas I will not get to spend with my Mom and I find myself feeling like I want to implode. Christmas was her favorite time of year. Starting right after Thanksgiving, she would adorn her house with boxes and boxes of decorations, lights and holiday finery. She bought gifts for families who needed a little help, planned and created decorations for her church Christmas party, and always made dinner for us on Christmas Eve. Now that it’s here I feel lost, out of step with the world around me. I would give anything for one more Christmas dinner listening to her favorite Johnny Mathis Christmas record and hearing her laugh as we opened our traditional “white elephant” gifts before dinner. Just a few more moments. The moments are all that we have. The space between them is just filler. The moments and the feelings are what you take with you and they are what’s left behind. So I urge you to create more moments in your lives. Tell the people around you how much you love them and how much they enrich your experience. Tell your parents. Tell your spouse. Your boyfriend, girlfriend, best friend or old friend. Tell them. Merry Chirstmas.

Well, after months of development and noodling, we pushed Faded & Blurred 2.0 live yesterday. It’s been a really wonderful process building this site. Though this site is for the users, the actual building of it was sort of a personal challenge. This site is built on a Joomla backend, and up until a couple months ago, I didn’t really even know what Joomla was. I knew of it, but had never really looked into it. When I was researching how to add a social networking component to the new version of F&B, I read through several web development blogs, many of which sung the praises of using Joomla. Looking into it, I found that it seemed to fit our needs moving forward. It’s modular, scalable and has a fantastic worldwide development community that are often more than willing to answer questions, even provide code snippets. I talked it over with Frank and Nikki, who asked if I knew Joomla. “No”, I responded “but I will.” I think they were a little hesitant, but they said go for it. So we started pouring over sites like Model Mayhem, Supershoots, DP Review and even Facebook and MySpace, trying to come up with a list of features that we wanted to integrate into F&B 2. At the same time, I began researching Joomla. I started reading books, blog posts and forum discussions, trying to wrap my head around Joomla’s rather different way of doing things. Monday, all of it came together and we released 2.0 into the wild. It’s a huge improvement over our initial site, offering discussion forums, social networking and bookmarking, twitter integration and a lot more. Also, we’ve made a commitment to trying to make F&B more of a destination site for photographers and image makers. We’ve got features, reviews, and some great interviews lined up with some of the most creative and interesting people we can find. We don’t know exactly where it’s going, but hey, part of the fun is just hanging on and enjoying the ride.

See for yourself at: http://fadedandblurred.com

I know I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been working on some new media projects, not the least of which is the redesign of the upcoming and much anticipated Faded & Blurred 2.0. It’s a pretty large project, my first using the Joomla CMS. So the last couple of months, much of my free time has been buried in learning how to work within the Joomla framework. We’re launching the site very soon, so please give me your feedback, when you’ve had a chance to check it out.
I did take some time out over Thanksgiving to get out of town and take some pictures. Nikki and I went up to San Francisco for a couple of days and photo walked the City. San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the world, and it’s one that I would love to spend a great deal more time exploring. All in all, we shot somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 photographs during our visit, some of which I present below.

You can see more of my photos on my flickr page and also on Nikki’s blog.