Ok, so you may have noticed some design evolutions happening across the sites… nav bar up top here… nav bar and ad spot over at TasteSpotting… RSS feeds freaking out and not showing pictures… sites got extra slow Friday morning…. lets call them a quick burst of NOTCOT growing pains.

Contrary to what many may guess, its pretty much me and Dan (who, keep in mind has his ridiculous full time gig at one of the internet giants)… with a little help from our friends (ok mostly Linhchi for incredible illustrations and mockups)… who deal with our coding and tweaking and designing and user experiencing. And we’ve been doing a lot of that lately behind the scenes, and are just starting to test out and slowly roll out the parts that you will see. So Friday - new backend went up… you can now use the same username/password on all of our sites! (Single sign on, in the works… coming soon!). TasteSpotting got part one of the new ad spots… and you’ve already seen the thin top nav here… well those and a few other surprises in the footer are on their way as well.

While i have a moment - regarding ADS - they are part necessary evil (if we want to try to afford the luxury of being able to expand our little world here and make more fun new features and find more content instead of devoting those precious hours to doing work for others) - and part exciting benchmark to reach (we’re getting lucky enough to be approached by brands i’ve long admired - you can’t even IMAGINE how giddy i was when those Adobe ads started *swoon*)

So i’m really glad you guys are kind enough not to get too pissed with us for putting ads up (i’ve been scared). Its been a hectic last few weeks of trying to budget and figure out what it is going to take for me to be able to pull Dan on full time and finally give up that archaic day job thing of his (he’s got SO many ideas of features and fun technical ideas to take your user experience above and beyond… and i could just really use more help these days!). And trust me, you know we’re incredibly picky about all things visual, so we’re fighting hard to keep the ads as pretty as we can, while trying to transform this into something more (without taking outside money, unlike many sites who’ve started mingling with the VC’s, we’re not ready for that yet - we’re takin’ it slow).

OK - so just wanted to get that off my chest ~ and let those who wanted to know, in on what’s been going on over here. Currently i’ve been doing content, business, design, pr, marketing, and whatever else you can imagine, so we’re trying to figure out how to shuffle that around a bit - get this redesign up - and ease the load so i can go back to focusing on finding the fun stuff that i LOVE to post about.

SO consider me on VACATION (i needed to post this to make it real). I will keep posting, naturally. But i’m taking a break this week from all the emails, ims, business goo, the social networks, and will come back to thinking about it next week… Oh, and if i get a bit quiet on posts (like today) its probably because i got totally wrapped up in cleaning up graphics and tweaking CSS to no end on these mockups that should be live sooner than later.