It was lovely getting out of the city for a few days.

It’s been quite a busy week.  I’ve been bouncing between two desks at work — features and online — and it was getting to be a bit too much.  Next week, I’ll officially transfer to the online desk, to help train reporters in basic multimedia skills, and to develop new online features for thejakartapost.com.

I’ll miss going all over the city for reporting, but it will be exciting to get to spend more time thinking about multimedia and interactive features. We’ve started putting up a few simple flash interfaces — like this one on the Presidential Debate — and they’ve gotten a good response, because even though they’re pretty basic, it’s still a new and exciting use of technology for a newspaper in Indonesia.

There’s a longer post, for sure, to be written, about the challenges of trying to develop multimedia content when you know the internet infrastructure of the country isn’t good enough for most readers to stream video or audio.  Perhaps I’ll try to write it next week, after I’ve spent more time getting to know the back end of the paper’s website.

But I write now, because after a very long workweek (complete with two well-past-midnight crunches in the office), I’m taking a weekend completely off, and travelling to Bandung, about two hours from Jakarta by train.  I will be, gasp, without a computer.  But I’ll take lots of pictures, and post them after I return.

In the meantime, for your reading pleasure:

My articles on Max Kisman’s graphic design and another on an arts collective in South Jakarta.  Both, I’d like to add, written after very long nights dealing with flash.  And the first with a few hundred words chopped out.