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Florida Creatives Jobs Group July 2, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Career, Orlando, Web Sites, floridacreatives, miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Brevard, Gainesville , add a comment

Re-posted from New Group: Jobs on FloridaCreatives.com

Since the beginning of Florida Creatives, the people have always clambered for a place to post and seek jobs. In the past, I have used the FLCreatives blog for this purpose, or some folks have used the Google Groups list: those days are over.

Florida Creatives Jobs

The ground rules:

Use this space to post job availabilities, or say that you are looking for work. Please understand that joining this list will (by default) sign you up to receive email for every post or comment in this group; you can always unsubscribe and re-subscribe any time you like.

NOTE: if you are posting jobs, please do not post the jobs to other groups, such as regional groups, without permission from the group’s moderator. Dozens of people receive emails for each of the groups on our site, and we do not want to be labeled as spam.

Any comments should be directed to the complaints department at 1 /dev/null Ln, Peoria, IL 31337.

Post and seek as needed within the network.

Thanks @danielrsmith for being the final catalyst to set this up.

Doterati Drama June 12, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Events, Web Sites, floridacreatives, Social Networking , 13 comments

Last night I actually took some time to start getting involved with the discussion over at Doterati, and then this morning, I am treated as though I am a hostile outsider, and I was told by Mark Krupinski to go and read the other blogs and comments that have shaped his comments into being so aggressive.

Apparently, everybody hates Ted Murphy. I don’t. I think he’s a smart guy who wants to do his job. The fact that he’s associated with this community is actually a boon, because he’s had several successful businesses. More than I can say for myself.

I thought Tara Lamberson and Ted were doing lots of the work, but I had noticed Dan Kinchen, Robert Dempsey and others leaving lots of “Welcome” comments on everyone’s profile. It actually seemed to me like there was a concentrated effort for one of those 4 key folks to leave a comment on every profile, so when I pointed this out to Mark, I used the s-word: spam. Apparently, this is some sort of a curse word. I was just calling it like I saw it. Not trying to stir up s-word.

I also stated my distaste at using Ning, which ships with tons of features, over starting with a blog or a forum and throwing a few widgets, then seeing where everything goes from there. On this point, I am corrected. Apparently, Mark and the rest of the Membership Committee (what, they have one of those, there have been seven meetings? was there an invite list for this?) decided to set up Ning to facilitate their own internal conversations, but I was getting lots of pings to come check out the site, so I thought that was the plan - Ning forever, go Ning! Ning is King!

Appartenly Mark was not ready for the onslaught of people. This is fine.

With an onslaught of people, especially people who have read or heard lots of crazy things about Ted Murphy, who is tangentially involved with this project, that is bound to bring down a lot more s-word and f-word and c-word and l-word.

Thus far, I have yet to weigh in on the subject. Some other folks have.

Alex Rudloff left some initial Orlando Tech Association thoughts on his blog which generated some discussion. Alex tends to be good at that. In his blog, he links to a post by Lawrence Salberg on the evil Ted Murphy and his attempt to start up a social network in Orlando. I believe Lawrence missed the target by a huge degree.

I have seen Ted Murphy’s social networking outreaches, and they are always way more obvious than just putting your name at the bottom of the page. I actually joined their meetup.com group because I will be attending the IZEA Fest (which is across the street from my house) because there will be some great speakers there. What I thought was outre was the message I was sent a few minutes later - get your friends to sign up and get 25% of their ticket price! Ah, there’s the PayPerPost we all know and love…

Just in case I haven’t made it clear Ted != Doterati. Ted is a member like anyone else, and from what I can tell, each member chooses his or her level of involvement, which is as it should be. Ted put up a few dollars to buy a domain name and a Ning account. That’s fair. My name is on the Florida Creatives domain, but I don’t claim ownership of the concept. Honestly, the meetup was originally conceived as a way to get everyone in the same room so we could talk about having conferences - which he have done, and the events were great. Really great.

I can only look ahead to the future of tech in Central Florida optimistically - in my own universe there used to be zero user-groups for PHP and Drupal, and now there are 3, and I’ve been asked to speak at all 3. Rock.

We are not operating in a silo here - there is a need for lots of cross-pollination and kumbaya here. If someone makes a comment against Doterati, don’t take it personally - what you have in fact found is a passionate participant who wants to be there, and clearly has an idea of how things should be done - encourage the commentary! Maybe after they’ve whined for a few minutes they’ll stop and take a look at the potential of the thing and set up in the corner holding a sandwich board, ringing a bell and crying about how everyone should be there and sign up for the site!

Once the snapback comes on this and folks can get over it, we can all take a deep breath, have a beer, and wonder what it was we all got so flustered over. For now, I’ll try to re-read my comments before I post constructive criticism.

I love all of you guys. Hope to see you all this Monday for Florida Creatives Happy Hour or Wednesday for the Doterati Town Hall.

Petentials Reviewed by Amber and Leo June 8, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Markteting, Podcasts, Links, Reviews, Web Sites, Entrepreneurship, itunes, Petentials, Social Networking , 4 comments

Best of the Net Hooray for Google Alerts, and my media habits. A few days ago, I got an email from the google (now with a new and un-improved favicon…blech). This email linked to a blog post that linked to a podcast, and that was exciting.

The blogger was Kym Huynh, one of the hosts of a brand-new podcast called Best of the Net. In their first episode, The Google Bar, the topic was Pets, and the first story was Petentials, which is just amazing.

Then as I’m listening to some of my weekly podcasts, I noticed something even more amazing.

Net @ Night Every week, Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte sit down to talk about the latest happenings on the Internet. A few weeks ago, they were complaining about not having any guests, so they solicited the audience to email in if they had a web startup. Being the faithful listener that I am, I had to tell them about Petentials. I really thought they’d have thousands of suggestions like this every week, so I didn’t exactly expect to hear anything too soon, but…

I was listening to this week’s Net @ Night, “Tiffany Roll”, and when Amber got to the letters, I heard her say “This week’s letter is from Ryan Price in Orlando…”

Excuse me?

…and then they talked about Petentials for the next several minutes. I stopped right where I was standing and smiled the biggest smile. Right after that I called Darren and told him the good news.

Let’s keep the good vibes going - I know lots of you folks out there have podcasts and blogs - how would you like to feature a new social network that has been covered by Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur? Yeah, I thought so…!

Listen to net@night 55: Tiffany Roll (RSS, iTunes)
Listen to Best of the Net 1: The Google Bar (RSS, iTunes)

Looking at the dates that these were released, I almost wonder if the Best of the Net show heard about us via the live stream that Amber and Leo do over at TwitLive.TV while they are taping the show. If so, that makes for a great follow-up to my previous post.

Did you get enough Fringe Crush? May 31, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, Events, Fringe, Web Sites, statistics, OrlandoScene, Arts, bloggingfringe , add a comment

This year I thought I’d employ a bit of science to my Blogging of Fringe - I was worried the site had turned into all Fringe Crush, all the time, and completely about local acts instead of National and International. I was mostly right.

Here are some handy graphs to point out why we suck:
Fringe Crush Wins
Here we see Text only posts at 10%
VoiceMail Reviews and audio at 13%
Any non-Fringe Crush videos at 37%
Fringe Crush takes it home with 41%

My second criticism is that we favored local, and the numbers don’t lie:
Local vs. Otherwise
International 6%
National Acts 13%
On the Fringe 38%
Local Artists 43%

This scale is even graded on a curve, because I counted Bric-a-Brac as national because they’re from Austin, but they all used to live here, and they were produced by Beth. And the only things in the “On the Fringe” category were folks who were not in shows, but many of them have been in the past.

That means we had a distribution like this:
Us and Them
I guess 19% isn’t bad for Long Tail content. I’d like to do better. It’s a mission of mine to keep that number above 20% all the time, so I guess we did pretty well this time.

The Videos and Audio did have some categories we threw them in:
Content Channels
The new Fringe Moments were 11%
The VoiceMail Reviews at only 13%
The favorite Fringe Crush with 41%
Everything else this year with 35%

Also, I was very proud of us when I found out Beth would be presenting a Fringe Crush award for the show with the most crushes. Denna counted up the results, and by no surprise, VarieTease won! I think that’s a challenge to the cast of Oral to do some more campaigning for next year.

One last statistic, of the 32 shows I saw, 55% of them were not local.
Local vs. Otherwise, tickets bought
Again, we’re counting Bric-A-Brac and Parlour Games as National, because they are… sortof.

3 UI Design Books for Your College Class May 7, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Reviews, Books, Design, Web Sites, Graphics, interface, Teaching , 1 comment so far

My friend Jake called me a few days ago to tell me he will be teaching a User Interface Design class at Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, MI next Fall. After my congratulations, he asked me to help him pick out a textbook for his students. Here were my suggestions:

Universal Principles of Design - William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler

I loved this book from the moment I picked it up and learned why the iPod makes us happy - it’s the Golden Proportion, or the Golden Rectangle, as some might say. Then, at the bottom of that page, you get “links” to some other design topics you may find helpful when discussing the Golden Proportion, like The Rule of Thirds. Anyone who designs anything, from software to hardware and anything between, needs a copy of this book.

I told Jake to have a copy of this book around for the class to reference, but I wasn’t sure if they all needed one.

Beautiful Evidence - Edward R. Tufte

This is the one book out of these three that I don’t own… yet. I saw this in the book store while searching for a book about Processing, so you can also find it near the graphics books. Information Design is the name of the game, and Mr. Tufte has some of the most beautiful and useful designs you will ever see. He even goes in to how they displayed and photographed some of his sculpture outdoors. Absolutely breathtaking.

This book would be a great resource for a Level II UI Design class, but I think it is perhaps too detailed for beginners.

Design Whys: Designing Web Site Interface Elements - Eric Eaton

I’ve heard a lot of folks tout Don’t Make Me Think as the bible to user-interface design for the web. Honestly, the title and presentation of this book drew me in a little deeper when I was buying it a few years ago.

Since my friend was looking for a book about UI Design, I found this on my shelf and made my final recommendation to use Eric Eaton’s book for his class.

Design Whys starts out by telling you what this Interface Design stuff is all about, and walks you through specifying and planning a project. Then you get an introduction to the common UI elements: links, buttons, form elements; what makes a link clickable, colors, designing for different browsers and devices, why use a link vs. a button, basic typography. The section on Advanced Interface Elements breaks us out of what’s normally possible on the web to cover things that would now be considered AJAX-y forms, applications, metaphorical interfaces, and custom or experimental UI elements, like those created with DHTML, Flash or 3D.

After the first 200 pages of the book, he launches us into a case study of some useful websites (at least as they were in 2003). The sites in the book are no less useful, beautiful, or innaovative than they were 5 years ago, though. It’s interesting to take a look at what folks were doing back then that the world still hasn’t caught up with. We seem to be constantly wanting to homogenize the experience (maybe I’m guilty of that as well). There’s room to be daring on the web, and I don’t mean large fonts, pastels, and rounded corners.

I hope Jake takes my suggestions to heart and picks the best candidate. If you have a UI design book you swear by, or you have a comment or question about one of these books, I’d love to hear it.

Weekend Projects - Lightweight Photo Service May 5, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Web Sites, mashups, interface, open source, Web Services, Programming , add a comment

This is a project I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I’d love to do a hack weekend to get this working sometime.

One thing that’s been a problem with us at Petentials (and many other sites running Drupal) is Photo uploading, sharing, embedding, etc. Aaron Winborn created a great tool called Embedded Media Field that abstracts the hosting of photos, videos and audio files for a Drupal installation - what I’m thinking of doing is writing a custom interface for that module that allows a user to upload the files without leaving the page, and then talks to Drupal to tell it to make a new node for the photo, add it to a gallery, or the same for a batch of images - Aaron’s module does quite a bit of this already.

I was wondering if Menalto Gallery (G2) could help us out here, but that’s really meant to be used as its own system - I really just want to create a REST/CRUD interface we can throw on a subdomain to serve up images and thumbnails, while also generating new thumbnails as needed. G2 has lots of these features, but then we’d have to keep the user tables in synch and I’m not sure we need everything they have to offer.

This is not meant to be a flickr or a photobucket, but the replacement for hosting images in-house. It should be insanely transparent to the users - they should not need to register, have any plugins or enter any extra screens.

My thoughts are the following:

The application by itself won’t do anything - you’d need a CMS to integrate it with. My choice is Drupal, of course.

Certainly on the wish list for embedded media field is the ability to integrate this content transparently in the background (see Vox’s media features). Using something like PingVision’s Drupal Markup Engine and a WYSIWIG editor might get us most of the way there. It’s an API that lets you specify custom tags - mostly these can be used to add images, video or blocks inside a node, but there are dozens of uses that have not been invented yet, I’m sure. If the editor can have plugins written (Kupu is the editor of choice for Acquia’s Carbon). I don’t think it should insert raw HTML, but a custom tag so we can abstract the method of storage - just something like [image:13456] or [video:13456] or [audio:13456] or [gallery:13456] at least until HTML5 gives us a standard for implementing this.

One reason why the Embedded Media Field is so great is because if YouTube changes the player, or if they introduce the option to turn off the related videos at the end, or even if you come up with your own .FLV wrapper, like a deep-tagging service, all your calls to videos are made through this tag - it’s an API for HTML code.

If we get an editor that supports this sort of stuff and a module/plugin for major CMSes and platforms, those can all live in one place. Wordpress has support for TinyMCE or the plain-text editor, but it must support others, yes? Another editor that would be high on my list is the YUI Rich Text Editor.

I could probably go on all day, but I think I’ve gotten a decent explanation for this cluster of projects out there.

Blogging Fringe 2008 April 15, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Site News, Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, Events, Trends, Web Sites, Contributors, OrlandoScene, open source , 2 comments

My Friends,

As you all know, I’ve done this Blogging Fringe thing for the past two years. Sadly, this year looks like I’ll be pulled in more directions than ever before. I’ve been up until 2AM every night for weeks on end and I’m not sure when this will stop.

At the same time, I really love the opportunities the Fringe Festival presents to show off some great groups in Orlando and Internationally, and introduce the world to our potential.

At this point I have received dozens of press releases from faithful producers who would love a mention on the blog. I’d love to contact them, conduct interviews, post them to the site, get everyone excited and oh so much more, but that’s not going to happen.

Some of you have contributed time to this project before, others are simply friends, but you are all tied to the theatre community and you have proven your interest in making our community something special.

My plan for Blogging Fringe this year is to write a small number of posts on my personal blog and have them automatically re-posted to BloggingFringe.com, and I’m going to open that up to everyone in the world. All the content on the site will be release under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone will be free to re-post and re-mix the work in any medium for non-commercial purposes This includes all archived content on the site as well.

Getting your content posted is simple. We’ll agree on a keyword, something like “bloggingfringe”, or “Orlando Fringe”, something you will only write on your blog if you’d like the content to be seen, and those posts will be re-posted with a link back to your blog. An example of this is on Liberatr.net where all the posts link to the original home instead of inside the site.

This project has never been about my own personal gain - I’ve sunk hundreds (thousands?) of dollars of my money into creating an environment for patrons and artists to have a conversation, but I believe I’ve fallen short of the mark up until now. Beth will be the first person to say that the Fringe website is not the place she’d like this conversation to happen - that’s one great thing about a site like ours.

All the editorial content on Blogging Fringe - the reviews, videos, audio podcasts, will no longer be called Blogging Fringe, but instead Ryan Price Media, Orlando Scene TV and Florida Creatives. These three websites will just be other first-class citizens of the community like anyone else in the world. If I end up being too busy to post many videos, podcasts or blogs, that will show, because they’ll be lost in the ocean of posts created by the blogging Fringe Faithful.

If I have to I’ll paint the administrator password to Blogging Fringe on a canvas and submit the artwork to Visual Fringe. That’s how open this should be. Anna, what’s the entry fee again?

More news on exactly how to get your blogs re-posted to a public, highly visible website for free coming soon. I hope the Fringe itself, the Orlando Weekly, Elizabeth Maupin, Orlando Arts Blog and others will be proud to include their blogs in the list, because the point is visibility, not exclusivity.

The contents of this email are posted at bloggingfringe.com/2008/04/15/blogging-fringe-2008/ in order to make this information as public as I possibly can. If you’d like to contribute, you can start by posting a link to your blog in the comments! All serious submissions (and some not so serious) will be accepted.

Peace,
Ryan Price

321-441-3964
BloggingFringe.com
FloridaCreatives.com
OrlandoScene.TV

Giving the client what they need, not what they ask for April 10, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Markteting, Cervo, Reviews, Trends, Books, Design, Restaurants, Web Sites, Teaching, Storytelling, Programming, Freelance , 2 comments

Just now I was buying a new domain name because of a misprint in my AXIS interview - it’s probably a common mistake, so it was worth the $7.

Anyway, there was an ad for some wannabe-posh restaurant on I-Drive - “Bola”. link

OK, seriously, who has a flash website that plays music? With late-90’s slideshows?

I also love that when I link to the “blog” - check out the design they chose for that. All of the posts on said blog have this huge text right below the title and right next to the very stale and infrequent date of the posts - “No Responses”.
No Responses

Way to go on the authenticity, D*****bags! It’s not the designer’s fault, there was a breakdown in communications. Somebody has also dropped the ball on doing a follow-up with the client once the dist settled.

If you really want to create a compelling experience on a website these days, I think the only option is to use video. If your restaurant is so “high-end”, hire a damn video crew to come out once in a while and throw THAT on your site - or maybe even your non-blog.

Check out some of the stuff MindComet is doing, for example. They don’t mess around. I can’t say I always love every site they put out, but they know their strengths. I definitely appreciate the need for experienced marketing folks working along side talented designers and developers. I don’t slight the person who created this project, they just had too many things to think about all at once.

I’ve recently been re-reading a book by one of my role models - Hillman Curtis. It’s called MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer.

I actually had “New Media Developer” printed on my business cards for a while, and people would ask “What does that mean?” I’m sad to say I didn’t have a story for them at the time, but now I think I’d have a thing or two to say about it.

In MTIV (Making the Invisible Visible), Hillman, who is a world-renowned designer with clients like Adobe and bestselling bands on his client list, tells you how he gets his work done. In fact, all of his books are like that - he goes through his creative process. He’s got some steps, he identifies the goals at each step, and he gives lots of anecdotal support. He’s clearly been working at a very high level for a long time.

People who have read this book and really understand it would have never designed that site for BOLA - at least not in the last 18 months or so.

MTIV Here’s lesson 1 (implied) from the book for me: separate the technical requirements of the project from telling the story. As a team of one, when I go into the job, I always know I am going to have to turn around and implement these ideas once I get back to my text editor, so most times when I’m in a meeting with a client, my brain is already downloading Drupal modules and clicking checkboxes. At my new job, this isn’t so much of a problem, because my role during those meetings is to translate what the editorial folks or the PMs are asking of me into technical requirements, identify sticky points, and give them an estimate of how long this new awesome feature will take.

However, even at a job I had for a couple of weeks managing an online store for a print shop, I not only had to put my propeller hat on, but my marketing/customer/business hat on, and normally the propeller hat gets priority. That means I’m donating 40% at best to thinking “is this even a good idea, does this communicate the message, will visitors understand the story?”

Then a few weeks later, I’ve started writing code, laying out the homepage, or what have you, and it hits me - THIS SUCKS! Did I design this? Then I remind myself I’m “not a designer” (which is bollocks because I’m always calling myself a “front end guy”), and I come to terms with the reality of the situation. We’re not communicating effectively here, we’re masturbating and pretending the result was a web page.

How do we fix it? Drive back to Sanford, tell the client “I’m sorry Mike, I had my head up my ass when I designed this… will you pay me to fix my own mistakes?” Nobody is going to go for that! Sure, you can give them a spiel about ROI and conversions, and maybe wrapped in the warm fuzzy blanket of “SEO”, which might as well be voodoo and divination to most clients, you might even be able to convince them to spend 30% of the original budget doing what you really should have done in the first place, in 15% of the time, without your trusty subcontractors, in your spare time, just so you feel good about work that you’d already written off as “finished”.

No, you can’t fix it. Clients don’t go for maintenance contracts any longer. Most of them don’t even want to pay you for hosting, let alone support.

The ONLY solution is to do it right the first time. That means making checklists, getting your freelancer buddy support system to consult and make sure you’re not leaving any huge gaps (oh, you do have some sort of a peer support system, right?), and above all, making sure you understand what the client needs.

I’m only feeling the slightest bit hippocritical right now, and if you’ve worked with me in the past, and you’re quietly thinking I’m full of shit as you read this, consider this my formal apology for underdelivering. In most situations during my “freelance” (”slacker”) career, I didn’t put 110% to anything work-related, and it wasn’t until my “Tabula Rasa” day (Jan 17th, 2006), that I had even decided to push myself to improve, and it looks like it’s taken about 2 years and 3 months.

So, FullSail grads, budding New Media Designers and Developers, and folks that have been doing this “since the early days”, and are planning on making a concerted effort to create stunning work, every single time, even if it’s for half of your rent money, here are a couple of tips:

jQuery broken in Internet Explorer? Put your $(document).ready at the bottom! March 19, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, HowTo, Coworking, Web Sites, Programming, javascript, jquery , add a comment

Tonight at Cup-O-Code, David, Gabe and myself were troubleshooting a little issue with the product page javascript that Gabe uses to update the price as customers select various options. The code wasn’t working in Internet Explorer, but since jQuery should be browser agnostic, we had to go back to the drawing board. After David re-wrote my first draft of the code we’ve got there, we got the function back to a working state in Firefox, but IE was still eluding us, but not really.

We were actually trying to make the script work on two instances of an online store, Futon Planet (FP) and Futons, Etc. (FE). The first site’s product page was giving us no Internet Explorer trouble, but the second was behaving very strangely. Then we noticed that FE’s javascript wasn’t finding returning anything at all.

We used this code to help us debug and see if jQuery could find the value in question:
alert($("adjustedPrice").length());

Which returned a blank pop-up, when it should have been returning “$0.00″ instead. The script didn’t seem to be finding the value, and when the alert showed up, it was actually drawing the alert before you could actually see the rest of the page.

Apparently IE6 executes $(document).ready() at a different time or in a different fashion than Firefox, and once the javascript faults out it just stops everything.

We moved our $(document).ready() action to the bottom of the page, and everything was just fine after that.

Mission accomplished.

Welcome Back, Old Media March 13, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Markteting, Blogging, Podcasts, Reviews, Trends, Web Sites, PopSci, Magazine , add a comment

Here’s a quick follow-up to last night’s post.

Earlier today, Ryan Block asked:

Why should I be concerned? People aren’t coming to Engadget to read about gadgets from 2006, or 1996, or 1896 — they’re coming to read about what’s going on today. Still, I love that PopSci, so this is gravy!

Ryan is absolutely right. In fact, he’s pointed out to me that Engadget does not fill the same void as PopSci. People aren’t going to his site for the archive, but rather, the very latest and greatest, and so much so that most of the content on Engadget is exclusive and they are the first ones to post about it. They could probably delete all of their archives older than 3 years and nobody would be able to tell.

Mr. Block also loves that PopSci gravy, which means that it’s likely the audience can see those two sites as separate flavors and sample a little of column A, and a little… well, you get it.

I also like how Ryan responded to my post within 9 hours of my writing it. Maybe if I drop Megan Miller’s name in here a few times, she will notice it in her Google Alerts too and come check out the blog.

Actually, I really like what Megan Miller of PopSci has been doing with the 5-minute projects on the site. There is certainly some room for improvement, but she mentioned in this week’s podcast that PopSci is working with Instructables on these videos, though she didn’t say in what capacity.

Mmmm, meta-journalism, hot and fresh! I really feel like I’ve been writing a story about the story of PopSci these last few days. Both in my Twitter stream with Etan asking about the particulars of my new job, and Jeremy direct messaging me as I drove to the office this morning, and now these past few days on my blog. I’m not the story here, the magazine is, and Megan Miller is, and Jonathan Coulton, and Bonnier, a family company. As are Eric and Seth and Sway, and also the folks over at PingVision. I haven’t told the whole story, nor is it in the scope of these blogs to attempt to tell that whole story, just a story around the story.