Happy New Year! No cards went out this year, and I’m just getting this post in on the official French deadline of after-the-31st-it’s-too-late-for-new-year-wishes.

After our big move to Normandy last October, I was overly-ambitious for the holidays, hosting both a Christmas feast and a New Year’s shindig, still piecing together Ikea furniture at the last minute to make sure everyone had a place to sit. A turkey was bought from a neighbor and slaughtered the day before it was roasted. Miniature Christmas stockings were knit.

Somehow during all of the this I managed to work, and in the last couple of weeks launched not one, but two websites! Exciting times!

The first was a brand new site for M2A, specialist in the field of promotional objects. I had done some work for them several years ago for a newsletter project, but this was our first website project together. Another fabulous design by C&C associés.

www.m-2a.fr

The second site was actually a lot of firsts. It was the first website ever created for Tout Terrain, a well-established company working in the events business (setup, signalization, consulting, logistics, etc). It was my first freelance collaboration with the very talented Pierre-Alexandre Loy of Spasm Design, also the designer behind Yooko.fr. Finally, it was my first real dabbling with JQuery, once again pushing the limits of WordPress to create some really interesting effects. Oh, and last but not least, my first full-on tackle of PHPlist, including some cool work on templates and custom subscribe pages.

www.tout-terrain.com

Wishing you all a prosperous 2012, but above all, health, love and happiness.
Bonne année !

I am very pleased to announce that as of last week, I have officially joined the team at Yookô.fr. We had been testing the waters over the last few months, as you might have guessed from the onslaught of posts on Facebook and Twitter, and, well, we decided it was a good match. After launching the English version of the website not long ago, we are now gearing up to take the site in all kinds of exciting new directions…so stay tuned!

Yookô.fr, First E-magazine and Professional Network – Design, Decoration, & Interior Architecture. Check it out >> http://www.yooko.fr/en

One of the exciting projects that I’ve been working on over the past months is www.loisivethe.com. We launched the main site just a couple weeks ago, featuring gorgeous watercolor art by Jennifer Chevais. But wait, it’s not over! The on-line shop is well underway – my first adventure with Prestashop – and soon you will be able to purchase many of L’OisiveThé’s fabulous yarns on-line.

In other recent news, MySenses.fr got an overhaul for the launch of their new “Cold” line. While I was at it, I took the opportunity to convert the website to WordPress. Look for their on-line shop in the coming months as well!

ClosetAudit.com went live today with their pre-launch site, inviting users to participate in the Urban Darling Closet Audit Challenge. Get your videos ready ladies, the grab bags are chocked full o’ goodies!

Logo and web design by yours truely.

I love pretty much everything about WordPress, except one thing: updates. Of course I can’t really complain about updates because I would be lost without them. With each one comes a slew of bug fixes, security bolstering and cool new features. But with each one you are never sure that things are going to work just right. Because ontop of WordPress, you have installed all these very handy plugins that may or may not work properly once upgraded. Too many variables involved!

So before each WordPress update, I invariably backup the database and all files *just in case*. Until today, I was doing this by hand, ie, exporting directly from phpmyadmin and downloading via FTP. This can take HOURS, depending on how speedy my Internet connection is feeling that day.

Well, I finally got smart and started poking around at WP plugins to do the work for me. And although the results that came up under my seach for “backup” on the WordPress.org site didn’t look too promising, my first pick looks like a winner.

I’ve gone with Xcloner. It’s a breeze to install – only one directory with a subfolder needs to be created in addition to the basic upload. And after a few minutes to check CHMOD settings, I was good to go. I clicked on “backup”, and in less than 10 minutes, Xcloner had exported a complete database file and cloned the entire website (including files outside of WordPress in my root folder) into a TAR file.

It also has a “restore” function, so that in the event that something DOES go wrong after an update, you can easily go back to the older version until you figure out what it is. There is also a cron function that is supposed to allow the auto-scheduling of backups, but I’ll admit I haven’t explored that yet and am perplexed as to why it talks about backups for a Joomla site (ew).

Because “small” generally means superficial, banal, and otherwise harmless. It does not prepare you for people like the gentleman I am about to describe, who are at the very heart of the expression “over-sharing”.

I was sitting inside the US consulate, waiting my turn and otherwise minding my own business, when an elderly man a couple seats down asks me where I got the FedEx envelope that was in my lap. I explained that it was something I had received that morning, and then took the time to tell him how to get to the FedEx office in Paris, which isn’t far from the embassy. But this monsieur was a talker, and he wasn’t done with me yet.

So we chatted a bit, and he was nice enough. We had a few things in common and we talked about that. For a while it was small talk: superficial, banal and harmless enough. Then he asked, as eventually most everyone does, how I came to be in France. I told the story as I usually do, “There was a boy…,” and how we had broken up and I went on to meet my husband.

“I knew this girl,” he starts out, as things take a turn for the worst. I never understood his relationship to the girl, only that he was telling me a horrible story about this pretty, intelligent girl who committed SUICIDE after breaking up with HER boyfriend. He goes on to lament her poor family for all she put them through, and how he doesn’t understand why anyone would do something like that.

“She must have been unstable,” he says. “I’m so glad to hear that you’re happy, that you bounced back.”

Um, what? Did this man just congratulate me for not KILLING MYSELF after a breakup? Did I give him any reason to seguay into the deep, dark and no-longer-small aspects of anonymous conversation? or did he just spontaneously over-share on a whim?

But it didn’t stop there. It got worse. Then he starts telling me about his son’s cancer. In graphic detail. I was appauled. I didn’t know what to say. I started staring off in the direction of the teller counters, hoping he would take a hint. He kept talking. Finally, I mustered the words together and found an excuse, saying that I was nervous about my appointment and would really rather not talk.

I have been in a horrible mood every since.

I have been working with this design studio for close to ten years now, producing websites for their clients. So when they called me up one day and said they were [finally] working on their own website, I almost did a jig. Seriously.

Working with them is always a pleasure, because not only are they seasoned professionals with an eye for design, but they are constantly challenging me to say “yes” where other producers would surely say “no”. I knew this site was gonna be blast to build.

And it was. Everything in the site is random: the headers, the portfolio elements, the music, the footer images – even the Flash intro displays randomly one of several options. Which means that the site is always a new experience, always a smörgåsbord of color, imagery and mixed media.

www.cetcassocies.fr

Elevage-Oak.com was launched in the Fall of 2009, just in time to show off its warm autumn colors.

Designed by Valérie Guillot in one of our first collaborations, I again produced the site using WordPress, pushing my knowledge of the CMS even further.

One of the great challenges of the site was the very precise page layout for the individual ponies and their genealogical “trees”. The result had to be easy enough to reproduce by the client, but still work using the limited capacity of the back-end to integrate specific style cues. While I don’t know if my code is exactly kosher, it did the trick, and the client’s updates so far have respected the overall site design. I call that success.

www.elevage-oak.com

The last time Sophie and I got together, I told her, “Oh great, there’s this new place I heard about called Merce and the Muse. Let’s meet there.” Arriving a little bit early, I was aghast to find the place closed. It was Monday. Of course. Argggh.

So this time I said, “You pick the spot.” Le Loire Dans la Théière is just my kind of place: funky, with mis-matched tables and chairs, a splatter of posters and paintings all over the walls, and a staff only slightly more eclectic than the clientèle.

She had warned me ahead of time, “They have the best cakes!” After going havsies (isn’t that the best way to eat?) on a linguine with mushrooms and a fabulous omelet (bien baveuse), I couldn’t resist the chocolate crumble. Yes, chocolate crumble. Three layers of textured heaven. Sophie had a Mirabelle pie which was the lightest and creamiest I’ve ever tasted. I wish I could remember the names of all the other pies and cakes they had – you’ll have to go see for yourself!

Le Loire dans la Théière
3 Rue des Rosiers
75004 Paris, France
01 42 72 90 61

métro : St. Paul

Not long ago when I was working at L’Oisive Thé, I went to bus a table where two customers were enjoying brunch. Brunch at L’Oisive Thé consists of your choice of hot beverage, a glass of orange juice, two eggs à la coque, served with mouillettes and toasts and accompanied with jam and butter, followed by a feuilleté with a small salad. That adds up to a big meal and a lot of dishes.

As I went to take away the plate of eggs and toasts to make room for the second round, the gentleman held up a defensive hand over his toast and jam saying that he wanted to save them for later. He says to me, “Parce que le sucré servi avant le salé, franchement, ça ne se fait pas !” He was seemingly scandalized that we had served him sweet foods (the jam and toasts) before his savory feuilleté and salad. All I could do was sigh and tell him that brunch was an Anglo concept and that yes, “ça se fait tout le temps.”

Traditionally, sweet mixed with savory isn’t as common in French cuisine as it is in American or English modern cooking. Luckily, I married a Frenchman who lived in London for five years, working in restaurants specializing in British modern food. Lately, his thing has been smothering jam on cheese. Although dangerous for the waste-line, it is a wicked good combination.

So I was quite delighted when I stumbled on this new line from Monoprix Gourmet of spiced jams made for eating with cheeses and sold right in the cheese section of the store. And while I’d rather just buy a large jar of jam and spice it myself rather than pay the exorbitant price they ask for these little pots, I am glad to see sucré-salé going mainstream in France. Vive le French modern food!

*photo from Passion Gourmandise (thanks to whom I’ve discovered that these little jams have been out for years! Autant pour moi !)