Origins: A User-Generated Museum Exhibit created using iPads, Google Maps and WordPress

Visitors interacting with Origins online at the Chinese American Museum. Photo © Francis Specker Origins: The Birth and Rise of Chinese American Communities in Los Angeles is a permanent, cutting edge exhibition celebrating the growth and development, since the 1890s, of Chinese American enclaves from Downtown Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Valley. Read more

Museum Row Guest House

Speaking of LA, while in town to attend the Origins opening I stayed at the Museum Row Guest House, operated by Carla Roth and Merritt Price. The house is located just a short stroll through the charming neighborhood to LACMA, the La Brea Tar Pits and the farmers market and shops at The Grove. Read more

WordPress 3.5 media_order Issue Affects Custom Galleries

The revamped Add Media interface in WordPress 3.5 improves a great many things about media management. It’s fantastic and thanks go out to the team for all the hard work! Unfortunately, the removal of a visible menu order field and the associated “Sort by Ascending / Descending” links has created an issue that affects some plugins and themes. Read more

Website for Photographer Samuel James

I’m happy to launch a new website for documentary photographer Samuel A. James, an American working in Nigeria. The site runs the WordPress theme/plugin package I’ve dubbed “Carolyn”, after its initial commissioner, Carolyn Drake. The idea behind this package is to create a system that can be used to quickly deploy portfolio sites of a certain kind. Read more

Template Part Shortcode and Carolyn Google Analytics WordPress Plugins

I’ve released a couple more plugins to the WordPress plugin directory. They are the result of day-to-day maintenance on a variety of WordPress sites. Template Part Shortcode Template parts are reusable snippets of code stored in your theme directory. Normally, they are called by other template files using the get_template_part() function. Read more

Website redesign for the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History

Like many of my museum colleagues, I’m a big fan of Nina Simon’s blog, Museum 2.0. When the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, of which she is the director, needed a new website, I jumped at the opportunity. Simon praised my work, saying, “Marty is everything I could have wanted from a designer — he overdelivered on my vague directives and pushed me to think more rigorously about what we were trying to do.” Read more

Collecting as an Artistic Mode

This is the second part of my notes on Museums By Artists, edited by A. A. Bronson & Peggy Gale and published by Art Metropole in 1983. Phrases have been lifted from the text, then grouped with like. See also: Museums, Collections and Art. Read more

Website for Photographer Carolyn Drake

Carolyn Drake’s website I recently had the pleasure of creating sites with documentary photographer Carolyn Drake. Carolyn has an amazing eye and strong sense of narrative, which she brought to her layout and navigation. This site is built on WordPress, with custom gallery-presentation plugins and theme. Read more

Website for Photographer Andres Gonzalez

Andres Gonzalez’s website I recently had the pleasure of creating sites with documentary photographer Andres Gonzalez. EachAndreshas an amazing eye and strong sense of narrative, which he brought to his layout and navigation. The site is built on WordPress, with custom a gallery-presentation plugin and theme. Read more

Center a Google Map on the Latest WordPress Post

This is a follow-up to my previous post on integrating WordPress and Google Maps. Damien asks: “Would it be possible to centre the map on my latest post?” Yes, it is! This builds off the example in the previous post and I’m using the Address Geocoder plugin to set latlngs. Read more

Website Redevelopment for Honoria in Ciberspazio

An artist’s project I collaborated on has recently launched. Or I should say re-launched, as it existed before; I’ve been involved in getting it back to fighting form. Honoria in Ciberspazio is Honoria Starbuck’s jam. Begun in 1997, it’s “the first internet opera” — written via online collaboration and performed via webcast, with the online condition as its subject. Read more

Website Redesign for Tiffany Malakooti’s “Belog”

An artist’s project I collaborated on has recently launched. Or I should say re-launched, as it existed before; I’ve been involved in getting it back to fighting form. Belog is Tiffany Malakooti’s jam. She’s assembled a collection of Persian art and culture that is beautiful and often quite funny. Read more