Sat, May 1, 2004
pH7media is now onebee
Serifs? Where we're going, we don't need serifs!
If you happened to read this site a week ago Friday, you knew something like this was coming. If you happened to miss reading the site that day, then last week's austere dandelion animation must have come as quite a shock. You can read Friday's entry for the May 1 Reboot details, I can't really go into that again. (In the last seven hours or so, I've gone from delighted with the M1R project for providing me with a solid deadline to hating M1R's guts for forcing me to stay up all night trying to complete an impossible task.) But really that's not the important part – that's just the part that kicked it into gear and made it happen today.
Onebee has been in the works for quite some time. Five or six years ago, my buddy Mike Rush and I were giggling at a particularly silly Jack Handey quote – the same one which adorns the bottom of this site's new home page. Being a stickler for the "perfect" web address (the right number of ascenders and/or descenders; six to eight letters; pronounceable and easy to remember), I immediately began salivating at the idea of onebee.com. The logo idea, gently inspired by Paul Rand's logo for IBM, also sprung to mind at the same time. Unfortunately, in those days onebee.com was in the hands of a British beekeeper named Martin Farmer, and he wasn't selling. Well, shoot.
For some reason, a couple of years later, once the dot-com world had gone belly up, I got the idea to look and see if onebee.com had come back on the market. It had! I was able to snatch it up for about a tenth the price I'd offered Farmer back in the heydays. Ha! It was mine!
As far as why it had to replace pH7media, it should be somewhat obvious – it's easier to remember, and easier to type. The one part of my seventh-grade typing class that I never mastered was managing to type the numbers without looking. I guess it was just too far to reach reliably, so I never managed to memorize them. Over the past six years, I've become pretty good at finding the 7, although I still type Y about a third of the time. (In fact, a recent freelance project forced me to type the word "physique" with abnormal frequency, and I typed "ph7sique" about half the time. It's in my brain!) With onebee, there are no numbers involved – what a relief! (Also, I no longer have to describe my email address over the phone as "ph7 – that's p-h and the number seven – media.com." Of course now I have to say "onebee – that's not 1B, its o-n-e-b-e-e," so that's a push.)
Once I had onebee.com in my hot little hands, I started plotting. I worked on the logo idea for about a month and came up with the current iteration. Then I had to decide when to switch over. Surely the site would need a wholesale redesign and at least a few functionality improvements. I wanted to do it for my birthday this year, since the revamped pH7media.com launched on my birthday last year, but then my mom gave me a golf shirt for Christmas with "pH7media.com" embroidered on the breast. My heart sank. How could I throw that domain away a mere two weeks later? (Also, how could I redesign the site in two weeks – I'd been slacking a bit.) Fortunately, by now I'm sure she's forgotten all about that. (Ssh. Mum's the word.) The good (?) news is that right before I got onebee, blissfully unaware of the impending windfall, I went ahead and renewed pH7media.com through 2007. So, really it won't die off until then. It'll just fade, sputtering, into the muck. It'll still point to this site during that time, but feel free to go ahead and update your bookmarks now.
A few kinks are still being ironed out – I had considerably less time to work on the site this week than I had planned, due to a killer flu which caught me entirely by surprise. But May 1 is May 1, and the show must go on. Once the rest of the goodies are in place, I'll have more to tell; for now, I have to grab some sleep. My head is still packed with God-knows-what, I haven't slept in 24 hours, and I'm helping Arksie move in about 90 minutes. I'm going to gobble down some Advil and fall into bed. Try not to click too many links between now and Monday – I swear it'll be in better shape by then.
© onebee · all rights reserved
"joe w" — Sat, 5/1/04 8:13pm
No reason it couldn't be both...
Joe Mulder — Mon, 5/3/04 11:14am
Can the mascot (bee logo) be called Beeie? (BEE-ee)
"matt" — Thu, 5/6/04 12:22am
please don't post this comment.