the MARTINI SHAKER

According to the Internet Wayback Machine, the MARTINI SHAKER was born on March 26, 2004 at 12:15 am. The post was not your typical, throwaway “Hello World” affair, but instead was a blurb on light-transmitting concrete:

LiTraCon is a new form of concrete that allows light to pass through it via a fiber optic matrix embedded in it. I can think of some incredible design possibilities for this stuff…

This site began six years ago as one of those “weblogs” that people were talking so much about. But, after discovering Delicious a couple of months later, I took the site down. It seemed rather ridiculous to me to curate my links in this fashion when Delicious was so much easier and had bookmarklets to automate the process.

Then, in February 2005, I realized that I could use a blog to actually write about things that were on my mind, and the MARTINI SHAKER was relaunched. As many of you well know, it started out as a blog about Flash and After Effects and very quickly devolved into the mish-mash of hand-waving rants and raves about the state of creativity that we all know today.

Over the last couple of months I’ve done a lot of thinking about who I’ve become and who I want to be in the future. My online properties play a central role in all of that, and last night I made the definitive decision to put the MARTINI SHAKER to pasture.

One of the biggest issues that I saw in my current online persona was the fragmentation of how I present myself to different audiences, and this site has represented that the most over the years. When I originally shifted my focus away from Flash to general theories about creativity, I caught a lot of flak from the Macromedia developer community that I “wasn’t maintaining focus” and that I needed to be providing “relevant programming tips.” At first, this made me reluctant to post what I really wanted to on a regular basis until some good friends reminded me that this was my site and that I could post whatever I damn well pleased.

However, I think in the back of my mind, the MARTINI SHAKER has always represented a certain facet of what I think I need to be for people while my Tumblr site¹, the ROCKS GLASS has become a better representation of who I really am and who I really want to be now and in the future.

So. That’s why this site must end. I need to simplify as much as I need to shed mental baggage.

I will not be taking this site down. There are 552 posts that represent the last five years of growth, thought and change. They helped me to write, and they might still be of use to others, so I want them to remain.

RSS subscribers to this site should see no interruption of service. I will be automatically switching this site’s RSS feed to the one on the ROCKS GLASS. You’ll continue to get all my thoughts, but in a slightly less filtered fashion. I realize that it means that I’ll probably lose some of you. That’s OK. This is what I need to do to make me happy. I hope you understand.

This is all in the name of becoming better. Better at what I offer. Better in how I offer it. Better at who I am and want to be. Hopefully this will signify your opportunity to make yourself better as well.

See you on the Tumblr.