March is definitely coming in like a lion for me, mostly thanks to work. I’ve been in the middle of two major projects this month:

* The Date our friends feature
* The TOC site redesign

I mentioned the genesis of Date our friends here, and it’s finally wrapping up this week. In retrospect, we should have planned dates in places that would be easier to film. The final video was posted today, and it’s so dark, it’s damn near unwatchable. So much so that I briefly flirted with the idea of running it as an audio podcast. In any case, lessons learned. Overall, I thought the feature came together well and it was a big hit for us traffic-wise.

The site redesign is good news, bad news. Good news is the site looks much better than it used to. The bad news is that we’re still working out some bugs so the post-launch stress abatement has yet to occur.

Said stress is also due in part to me heading to Austin this week for the annual South By Southwest music conference. I’ve been so focused on the site relaunch that I haven’t had much time to research my SXSW plans, so I took today off to do so. Yes, I took a day off of work because I have so much work to do.

Speaking of SXSW, I’ll be taking a hiatus from the OMIC Twitter from Wednesday through Sunday so I can send updates from my phone to the Time Out Chicago Twitter stream. This will be my first time covering an event via Twitter – though I’ll also be blogging at the TOC blog– and I’m looking forward to utilizing it as a reporting tool. (I thought about creating a Tumblr blog for it but my jaw still hurts from biting off more than I could chew during Date our Friends).