It has been over a year since I designed and built the new Spotmagazine.net and it's been quite an edventure! When it comes to technology and data, I'm a huge fan of redundant systems. So one of my first goals was to create a recundency system for, well, myslef.

Vonnie, Spot's gal Friday volunteered as a willing victim student and for the last year I've been showing her the ropes of web design and online content management.

One of the great aspects of teaching is that you have to learn your material better than you would ever have to simply doing. The other great aspect was that Vonnie was an excellent pupil, and will make a superb webmaster going forward.

I forgot to yank the audio before uploading, so these include all of my horrible narration. It was early. Coffee had not been consumed yet. I recommend watching them on mute.

The first one is of all four dogs opening presents. Pearl, of course, is having a hissyfit about the proximity of the cats (like she couldn't just move).

The second one is more of Pearl facing off with the cats (which I think is hilarious).

Angel on my Shoulder from pdxjake on Vimeo.

Hard work and smiles at DoggiePalooza! Jayden with Jennifer McCammon in the background.

When I dropped by last weekend’s DoggiePalooza at the World Forestry Center I was blown away by all the Spot folks keeping track of the chaos of the Cover Model shoot. Over 100 photos of gorgeous pups were taken by David Childs in just a handful of hours. I’ve helped during past cover model shoots, and the operation on Sunday wasn’t the usual digital-camera-and-cardboard-background-setup. This was totally professional, with a line of puppy models waiting for their session! “Woah!” I thought to myself.  Then “I’m glad I’m not trying to keep track of all those photos.”

Our hero, Vonnie Harris, among models waiting for their chance at puppy stardom! No, that dubious honor fell to Vonnie Harris, who did double duty as photographer’s assistant and model wrangler. Of all the folks who showed up to help, from Eugene to Vancouver, she was our hero of DoggiePalooza. As with all big events, there were organizational lessons that we learned, but because of all the help we had - from master photographer David Childs to our Spot Walks leaders LeRae Hunt and Marnie McCammon - the event was a huge success. How could I tell? As hard as everyone was working we all had these cheek-to-cheek grins on our faces, telling the world just how much fun our jobs can be sometimes.

Just days after DoggiePalooza was "Truck Day," the day we get together and get Spot out to the wonderful community we are lucky to be part of. Mostly the Spot crew works apart from one another, on our own time. Besides the opportunity to connect without wires, our conversations on Truck Day move into development and strategy. It is in the strategic realm that I see us coming together more and more.

Hanging out during Truck Day at Spot HQ with my wife, Charity.Thanks to the amazing work of folks like Jenny Kamprath, account exec par excellence, we're getting to do more playing these days. The fact that we were able to evolve the Cover Model Search in 2 days to provide photo prints on the fly (okay, that part needs work - the last photos were mailed today, Nov. 2), the shift from emailing weeks later to working to send people home with photos shows the exercises in agility we're growing more confident and able to take on. 

Vonnie (the aforementioned hero of the photo shoot) has been learning the ropes of the website for the past six months. She's gone from novice to accomplished pro, and our "Jill of All Trades" will soon have earned yet another title: webmaster. It's thanks to Vonnie I've been able to hit "the kitchen" more, where I've been cooking up fun new Spot projects.

I'm not a fortune teller. Heck, most of the time I'm not even an optimist. But the growth around Spot — including the cohesion and agility of the team itself — hints at good things ahead. 

Around Spot these days, that spiral is turning tighter and things are really starting to come together. Looking back, it seems like this trend started over a year ago, when Jennifer and I started laying the foundation for Spot to come play in the internet.

It was a crazy time.

The website was put together in a month, which included a Facebook & Twitter account. We were still doing the Mutt Mixers, and to top it all off, the Top Dog Awards were just around the corner. At that point the gyre was at its widest and blowing like a hurricane. But we got through it. Things did not fall apart (thanks to our fearless leader) and we've been growing together as a team while Spot has been growing as a publication.

The Spot crew was gathered for Truck Day last month (it’s our monthly meeting/lunch/gabfest) and, looking at the month of our magazine’s anniversary, I started trying to figure out how long I’d been writing for Spot. Three years. It’s gone by so fast and yet it seems like a lifetime.

In many ways it has been a lifetime. Jennifer took me on as a very green writer - for some reason a degree in writing teaches students very little about professional writing - after I had applied for an assistant editor position. Ha! Assistant editor. So naive was I.

For the last year I’ve worn two hats at Spot: staff writer and webmaster.

As a writer with three years of NW pet coverage, and as Spot’s online handyman, I’ve long planned on writing the occasional blog so people can get some behind-the-scenes glances at what is going on, what web stuff is around the corner, and maybe a few musing about my own experiences as a pack member (four dogs, two humans and one more human on the way) and feline roommate.