Felicia Day

Feast your eyes all: This is the new feliciaday.com. Sleek, sophisticated, flirty, and stylishly accessible. If only I could be so cool in person. Can you tell I’m gleeful?!?!

For many years I’ve lived a life of website envy; bookmarking sites I loved, trying to tweak premium WordPress themes in imitation (mostly ending up with god-awful backgrounds and NOT well-designed eye-splitting colors, LOL). With the 2009 New Year I resolved to blog more, but realized my website was one of my big limitations in motivation: It didn’t encourage interactivity, and basic information wasn’t accessible to the casual browser. A few weeks ago I Twittered my frustration about getting a better website and got a lot of wonderful responses that happened to include an offer of skills from a wonderful designer Dane Hesseldahl. I clicked on his site and totally fell in love with his work: Simple, clean, stylish. Yes, please!

After we started corresponding, Dane came up with several brilliant designs for the site, all of which blew me away. We settled on a design I believe he referred to as “Southern girl takes LA/modern but old-fashioned feel” that was based a lot on my love of Typography. I’m not sure how he did it, but it was love at first website sight!

Please browse around, every part of the site is brand spanking new. You’ll notice that the site is laid out quite simply, yet is packed with information. There are too many details to point out without causing you to glaze over, but I’d love to draw attention to a few items that I think are notable/unique:

-I’m still working on a WordPress platform. I can change anything about the site within the WordPress dashboard with no technical knowledge whatsoever.

-The site serves as a central hub to all my online social networking sites, but also integrates those sites back to here seamlessly through widgets and other featured areas. It’s a two-way street of information. Some assets, like my headshots on Flickr, were left elsewhere rather adding another website page. Why duplicate and clutter up the site?

-I already mentioned my love of Typography, so the site uses a bold header font everywhere. I believe it has something to do with Flash, but I’ll concede ignorance and just say it looks pretty. And what a difference a logo makes! Lovely!

-The main limitation in WordPress sites is the static sidebar. Dane included something pretty unique which I now feel should be required of EVERY WordPress blog: A dropdown menu to choose different widgets for each website page. Each page on the site has different widgets and I can add/subtract at a click of a button. It makes it feel much more layered and deep and makes the WordPress blog engine a true CMS. So wonderful!

-To keep the look unified, Dane tweaked and customized several of the sidebar widgets; for instance, the Last.fm one on the About page. Also with the ability to change the sidebar on each page we added some interesting widgets, like an RSS to a Google Alert on “Felicia Day” in the Press page, and The Guild playlist RSS on MSN on the Videos page.

I’d love to hear what you think and am so excited to have the site up and running! It will be so hard to keep from blogging now…I know it! Thank you Dane (@dane_hesseldahl on Twitter), I dub thee: “WordPress Wizard.”

You may have found your way here because of my acting work, my web video productions, or any number of other random reasons. At any rate, welcome to my website! This is the central hub of my internet life, so feel free to browse around, find more about me, then add me to your internet world! I’m active on any number of social networking sites, especially Twitter, and Google+ so just click the links on the bottom of this homepage to reach my various profiles!

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If you’re interested in seeing some of my acting work streaming on the internet, you can start with my reel. For full length works, I suggest you start with “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”, Joss Whedon’s hit Internet Musical, then check out the web show I created called “The Guild”. For my complete resume information, please go to my IMDB or Wikipedia entries.
And before you leave, please stop by my blog! I muse about working in Hollywood, producing web video, video games, and bad fantasy cover-art among other random topics. I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

There have been a lot of celebrity Twitter listings appearing in the news lately. Pardon my snideness, but what Britney Spears’ people are posting under her name isn’t that interesting to me. To round out the snarkiness, I WAS flattered by being included on a few of the lists, but for my own Twitter purposes if I’m following a stranger, I’m much more interested in what the more tech people and authors are doing. Personal preference. (If you ARE in to “celebrity” Twitterers, check out CelebrityTweet).

It’s relatively easy to find who the tech movers and shakers are and if they have a Twitter (of course all of them do). Check Twitterholic for the top followed users. Almost all are the “Techigentsia” of the web. On the flip side there are many authors are on Twitter but hard to find, because they aren’t as widely followed. The Twitter directories out there now are pretty sparse, because generally they’re listing people who self-submit themselves.

I recently Twittered and asked for people to send me well-known authors they followed and got a WHOLE MESS of recommendations! Thanks to all who sent me Tweets back! I went through ALL of them and pulled out authors who I have read, or are familiar with their work and am listing them here to help other people who are fans find them as well! By NO MEANS is this comprehensive, I’m just filtering it through my own knowledge base and the info I was forwarded (Clearly my tastes go towards Urban Fantasy, Sci-Fi etc) so feel free to post in comments with more info. That way I can add people to my list who I’m familiar with, and others can find more through your comments! Hope you enjoy!!

Fantasy/Sci-Fi Authors
Ann Aguirre@ann_aguirre
Elizabeth Bear @matociquala
Tobias Buckell@tobiasbuckell
Cory Doctorow@doctorow
Diane Duane@dduane
Warren Ellis@warrenellis
Neil Gaiman@neilhimself
Holly Lisle@hollylisle
John Scalzi@scalzi
William Shunn@shunn
Scott Sigler@scottsigler
Bruce Sterling@bruces

Urban Fantasy
Kelley Armstrong@KelleyArmstrong
Rachel Caine@rachelcaine
Laurel K. Hamilton@LKHamilton
P J Haarsma@thesoftwire
Sherrilyn Kenyon@sherrilynkenyon
Caitlin Kittredge@caitkitt
Richelle Mead@richellemead
Patti O’Shea@Patti_OShea
Tim Pratt@timpratt
Lilith Saintcrow@lilithsaintcrow
Jeri-Smith Ready@jsmithready
Lisa Shearin@lisashearin

Comedy
John Cleese@johncleese
Stephen Fry@stephenfry
John Hodgman@hodgman
John Lithgow@John_Lithgow

Fiction
Tasha Alexander@talexander
Jonathan Carroll@JSCarroll
Cherie Priest@cmpriest

Non-Fiction
Mignon Fogarty@grammargirl
Shannon Okey@knitgrrl
Phil Plait@badastronomer
Wil Wheaton@wilw

COMICS
Brian M. Bendis@brianmbendis
Ivan Brandon@ivanbrandon
Ed Brubaker@brubaker
Paul Cornell@Paul_Cornell
Valerie D’Orazio@ohsuperheroine
DC Comics@dc_nations
Andy Diggle@andydiggle
Danny Donovan@dannydonovan
Matt Fraction@mattfraction
David Gallaher@davidgallaher
Kieron Gillen@bremxjones
Adam Koford@apelad
Brian Lynch@BrianLynch
Marvel@Marvel
Bryan Lee O’Malley@radiomaru
Brian Reed@BrianReed
Rick Remender@remender
Ben Templesmith@templesmith
Brian Wood@brianwood

The Guild Episode #6: Blow Out is now posted! Please enjoy, and repost wherever you know people who might like the show! I’m especially proud of this and the last episode, they make me laugh quite a lot, and being able to weave the storylines together was very challenging in the short amount of time allotted in web video storytelling. I really hope it makes you chuckle .

I know this website has been a bit of a wasteland, I could make 1000 posts on how I completely burnt myself out the last 3 months of the year and how my computer phobia sent me into a paperback-reading binge that may have made me cross-eyed, LOL, but instead I will spread the good news of great things happening here instead!

A whole new site will be going up soon, along with a whole new blogging attitude from moi. Lots to post about that and the fantastic design and designer making it happen when it actually goes up, within a week or two. Be prepared to squeal with delight as I do. My whole approach to blogging will be changing too. I think having Twitter as my main source of communication on the web is great, but I realize it’s created an attitude in me where blog posts here have to be monumental in scope, long vast tracts of musings that take so much time for me to write that I put it off and end up not posting forever. I don’t think this should be the case, and am going to change that. So I’ll be posting more, linking to things I enjoy more, shorter entries, but hopefully creating a better dialogue with people who read here, because creating more communication is the key!

To that end, I will be phasing out the forums, because my neglect of them really makes my heart ache a bit, and since I simply can’t spread myself so thin anymore; consolidating places I need to go to communicate with people is my goal this year. I’ll still leave them up, but they will not be linked on the website as I want to drive traffic to this blog instead. The Guild Community Site is a great place to move any off-topic dialogues, as there’s a thriving number of groups dedicated to all subjects (Dr Horrible, Gaming, Guild, We Videos etc), and it has the ability to create profiles and meet more people. “Felicia-topics” (if I could call them that with a straight face, hehe) will be active here within my more frequent blog entries. If a topic emerges that the community wants to talk about I’ll make a blog entry about it so we can have more back and forth! Also, I will be making an effort to post on a variety of topics each week regularly; book reviews, web video production and acting to be the primary focus. So, that’s my solution and I’m sticking to it!

Hope you’re enjoying the new Guild Season, though it’s taken a lot out of me, when I watch the videos I’m wowed by all the hard work the crew and cast have put into them, and it makes all of the work worth it