There's an old saying, "the children of the shoemaker go barefoot", meaning that the shoemaker is so busy making shoes for other people that his kids are neglected. So it is with web design. I've been making some cool sites for people recently, see nigelparry.net for more of that, but I've been stewing in a bad place where it comes to nigelparry.com, which still sees 13,000 visitors a month.

The formerly barefoot child

Most visitors head to A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, with the rest split between the archives of the former front page news system (pictured above), the Monkey Times blog, the After 9/11 archive, and the section with my debut album, This Side of Paradise, in it. It seems unbelievable that, from February 19th until April 1st, just under 9,000 tracks from the album have been downloaded — over 200 a day or the equivalent of 900 albums.

Seeing that many visits come to such a discombobulated website whose visual look you began hating 10 minutes after it was last rush completed is just soul-destroying. After experimenting with some new looks, I realized that the reason the kids were still barefoot was precisely because I don't have enough time for this, so I grabbed the templates from nigelparry.net and switched out the header. I'll pass it off as branding if anyone asks.

The new site isn't finished, but I'm past caring about things like that and there's already a ton of new content that hasn't been available on this site before, including press appearances and interviews, so here's the preview: [link removed as you're already in the new site.]

I was going to wait until the site was more complete for launch but a book a friend in New York gave me came back to mind today, and opened my eyes to all the life flowing by undocumented. The book was by Studs Terkel, the legendary American cultural anthropologist/documentarian who spent his life interviewing the people who populate the streets of America.

Terkel was on John Stewart's Daily Show last night, and the two echoes collided with a blog entry I was rereading while reworking the site, the first entry in the Monkey Times blog. Towards the end of the entry, I was reminiscing about the good old days of A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and how good it is to be able to look back at your life through a document like that, as well as share it on the Internet. And I need to get back to that.

When I did the math, over a million people had read A Personal Diary a few years ago, which helps you remember not to underestimate the Internet as a communication medium.

I miss writing, and I'm in the perfect place for it. Harlem, where I live, is pretty funny, New York as a whole is a blast, so it's time to get back to that place of writing about what's around. The Monkey Times blog, in particular, is where that's going to take place.