All Quiet On The Payphone Front

Lack of content updates at The Payphone Project site belie activities going on behind the scenes. A variety of other pursuits, some payphone-related and others not, have absorbed most if not all of my overextended mental and temporal energies the last several weeks. After much consternation (induced by generally bad planning) a long-anticipated change to a new publishing system was finally executed, moving from a beloved but virtually orphaned platform to the more actively developed WordPress. I am no stranger to WordPress but I’ve never had reason to fully dive in to the vagaries of its chaotic “documentation” — the best and most current of which often resides deep in the bowels of comment boards.

I am not sure I like this new look so much, and it may change frequently in the coming weeks. If I could I would probably throw it all out and start over but time marches on. I typically roll my own designs for web sites, no matter what content management system is in play, but I took a pass this go-around simply for efficiencies of time.

I would not go so far as to say that it went against every fiber of my being but it was with genuine chagrin that I developed this new format with purchased and free templates developed by other designers. I am no web designer by any estimate, but I can cobble together a reasonably cohesive and logical navigational scheme if I put my harried mind to it. These days I just don’t have that kind of time, nor am I blessed with a budget to hire qualified designers at the rates they deserve. Still, despite sound logical reasons for using them, I find that purchasing ready-made templates makes me feel I am contributing to the death of independent web design.

My favorite element is the top images, taken from my collection of People Who Still Use Payphones. As you move through the News section of this site you’ll see randomly chosen images from that collection, showing the faces of today’s public telephone customers in New York City. If you listen only to the Internet you’d think that payphones and public telephony have been utterly and completely abandoned, but in New York City (as my pictures attempt to prove) this is simply not true.

The Payphone Project is now also on Facebook, with over 1700 “Likes” at this writing) and Twitter (with about 300 followers). Recent postings to the Payphone Project’s Facebook page presently appear at an anchor tag near the middle of the home page, but this content might move to its own page later. The Payphone Project Facebook page is essentially a curated selection of interesting payphone images spotted around the Internet. Most images lately come from Instagram’s amazingly talented user base, but other sources are mined as well.

Over at PayphonePictures.com I continue to add to my collection of what is probably the Internet’s largest collection of New York City Payphone Pictures, numbers, and locations.

I also folded a long-percolating project in to my SoundCloud Payphone Page. Here I post sounds of the city (with a focus on subway buskers) as heard through the rugged, raspy, monochrome sound of the landline. If I am in a subway station and I hear musicians playing I pick up the nearest payphone and call it in to a voicemail box. It doesn’t always work but when it does it sounds pretty sweet:

Tweets from The Payphone Project on Twitter appear at the top of the right column of the News section. That content should include links to anything relevant to the world of public telephones and landline communications, with retweets of interesting images of and amusing comments regarding phone booths, payphones, and the like.

I’ve also endeavored to link out to what’s left of the payphone industry as represented on the public Internet. Many surviving payphone-related companies have no web presences, but I file what I can find under “Payphone Service Providers, Associations, and Parts Suppliers” in the right column. This set of links might move to its own page if it gets too long.

Certain design elements are a little unwieldy, and will probably be re-arranged, but for now the focus moves back to content and not layout.

I ventured in to social media with some skepticism, as it goes against my misanthropic nature. Having navigated the social world for a few months I find that my skepticism of its value is unchanged, but it’s all in good fun.