http://tacticalphilanthropy.com
Launched October 2007

Responsibilities on this project

information architecture

graphic design

user interface design

Wordpress configuration and template development

Wordpress consulting

job board template and configuration

What an honor and privilege to work with Sean Stannard-Stockton of Ensemble Capital Management on the Tactical Philanthropy blog redesign. It’s these types of projects that make work feel like living. Work is joy, learning, growth, and relationship.

Growth: Never trained in graphic design, I was challenged to come up with a user interface and look&feel for a blog that must be professional yet trancendent, warm yet not too fuzzy, all about money yet triple bottom line. In the process I pushed my talents forward, resurrecting years of past artistic training. An interesting revelation was discovering that I felt more confident as user interface designer, rather than branding, logo, marketing type.

Learning: The major technical objective was to move a year-old Typepad blog into Wordpress. This conquest is relatively painless using WP’s native import feature, which deftly converts all your post headings and comment permalinks. The only catch is getting old TP permalinks within the posts themselves to behave. TP has a wack permalink structure that truncates the post slug at 15 characters - something that WP permalink settings can’t grok. Unfortunately, most of the literature online only deals with forcing WP to match TP’s perma-style. But I wanted to do the reverse. Thanks to Colin Brumelle and Ivan Storck of Citizen Space for the expert support.

The simplest solution, whiched I eventually opted for, was doing a little rule-based black magic to force redirects from each old link to each new. Before this project I had barely touched the oft invisible .htaccess file - now she’s an old friend. Another possibility, unattainable at my level of programming skill, would have been to generate a php script that could do a redirect redirect by hunting the WP database for a closest match based on the “15 characters.”

Fun: