I just launched the Colbert Nation store. Cover your dorm wall and man-teets with some sweet ultra-conservative schwag!

The Colbert Nation - Eagles-nest

Last week we were thrilled to see that we nabbed a City Paper Choice Award for our work on ColbertNation.com. Here’s what they had to say: Best Surfing the Zeitgeist
“Was there a bigger star in 2006 than Stephen Colbert? The answer is no. And when Colbert ordered his army to www.colbertnation.com, whose handiwork did they see? Yup, the mad html skills of Megan and Mason Wendell at Canary Promotion + Design provide the interweb face for the America’s favorite fake conservative pundit.”

Thanks CP! So Mason and I popped into the CP Choice Award party Thursday night to say thanks and to chat with some of our favorite CP writers - Pat Rapa, A.D. Amorosi, and former staffers Juliet Fletcher, Jenna Portnoy and Lori Hill. (Sorry we missed CP’s talented photog Mike Reagan.) Much love to City Paper, but I was a bit flummoxed by the sort of freaks-on-parade-circus theme they had going on. I think the girls dressed like trees, the guy on stilts, and the many shirtless dudes were at a different party than we were. I feel like the paper’s editorial staff are so down-to-earth and approachable, not to mention that they produce really smart writing, so the party seemed at odds with the paper’s identity to me. Mason said it reminded him of Lollapalooza ‘92. I’m pretty sure we saw Mister Lifto talking to Michael Nutter.

This has been a very busy and exciting summer for us, and probably the best example of that for me happened last month when we launched ColbertNation.com. As you might know, the site is the official fan site for The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. The show is insanely popular and I knew it already had a huge audience. That means there’s a lot of eyes watching as we launch and that there’s not much room for error. So of course since I was confident that everything I could control was all set, there would be problems with things out of my control.

Knowing this, I had double-checked all the code and server settings, and scheduled the launch for a time when we’d have the least traffic. It coincidently coincided with the week that Stephen Colbert’s face was staring out at me from my desktop page-a-day calendar. I’ll back up for a second: This year I’ve been enjoying America the Calendar, which is the calendar version of America the Book written by John Stewart and the Daily Show writers. I’m a huge fan of the Daily Show and of course Colbert, and the calendar is filled with jokes about politics and media. But for the week of July 18th there was a week long gag demonstrating the different TV Journalist expressions. It’s funny on it’s own, but his expressions from that calendar were a day by day reflection of our launch status.

The punchline for me is in the timing. It all had to happen simulatneously, my launch, the heatwave and power issues at the host, and then these calendar pages staring out at me as I’m dealing with each issue as it comes up. That’s what makes it surreal.