On being happy.

I was originally going to title this post “On following your passion,” but that wasn’t entirely correct. That’s because this post was inspired by a new blog I stumbled across, Study Hacks, written by Cal Newport. The post was “Can I Be Happy as an Investment Banker? The Difference Between Pursuing a Lifestyle and Following Your Passion.” I know. Long title, but it’s a good article.

The fact is that most of us do pursue a lifestyle rather than following our passions. I did it without even realizing it. Of course, my lifestyle choice was stability for my family. But along the way that also included a big house, two cars, big screen TVs, game systems, and all the usual trappings of a modern, 21st century American lifestyle. And I sought out jobs that afforded me those comforts.

I’ve always said that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But that might be a lie I’ve told myself for the last twenty years. That’s a hard truth, isn’t it? That you’ve been lying to yourself for two decades.

I love writing. And I love comedy. I enjoy design and, to a lesser extent, programming. I crave learning new things. It’s that craving that’s let me park my career in idle for the whole of my 30s because my jobs have required me to constantly learn new things. I’ve reached a point though where that’s just not enough anymore.

What does that mean? I don’t know. Addiction to a lifestyle is like any other addiction. The first step is to admit that you have a problem. That’s all this is. Me admitting that I have a problem. I don’t know what comes next.

Thoughts on SXSW 2012 (So Far)

SXSW was wet, then hungover, then wet again.

I have to preface this post with the fact that I missed Friday because I stayed home with strep throat. I didn’t want to be patient 0 and ruin SXSW for God knows how many people. And, because I have strep, I’m on antibiotics, which means I can’t drink. I know most of you would still go to the parties, but I’m what people call a “social drunk,” sometimes known as a sober introvert. So even though I made it to Saturday, I went home after the last session to put my son to bed after watching an episode of Dr. Who with him (the Library episode with River Song).

There are some advantages to not going until Saturday. It took me less than 10 minutes to get my badge and my bag. I had an extra day to look over the schedules and bookmark interesting sessions. I wasn’t at all hung over Saturday morning. And… that’s about it.

I always run into local friends that I haven’t seen all year. I have just as many non-local friends in town, but I always have the hardest time finding any of them. Today it was Matt Fangman. He and I are both interested in storytelling this year. Luckily, there seems to be a lot of sessions devoted to that. Visual storytelling, storytelling for your brand/company/marketing campaign, actual storytelling, talks with storytellers, well, you get the drift.

I ended up looking at the wrong day and missed “Does Your Product Have a Plot.” If anyone went to that and sees this, please send me your notes! (A good nights sleep apparently wasn’t that great of an advantage.) Baratunde Thurston’s keynote “How to Read the World,” was good. I would summarize it if I could, but I can’t. You had to be there.

Looking forward to tomorrow. Not sure what I’m going to yet. I might start out with the Yoga though. It might just make me alert enough to look at the schedule for the right day.

My iPhone 4S purchasing odyssey

What I went through to order my iPhone 4S:

First, I wasn’t eligible for the upgrade because the account was past due.
I logged into AT&T to check.
Called my wife to confirm she hadn’t made payment.
Made payment.
Went back to Apple to purchase iPhone and was eligible.
Went through several screens and it changed our plan.
Went to AT&T website to purchase instead but iPhone was gone.
Logged out and back in.
Got the iPhone purchase screen and followed the prompts.
Discovered the plan changes were required by AT&T.
Couldn’t find explanation of whether it would fuck up my family plan. It probably will.
Went back to Apple because I trust them more.
Went through the purchasing prompts.
Debit card was declined.
Tried again.
Debit card was cancelled.
Remembered that AT&T called me yesterday because they shipped me a new card because my existing one had been compromised.
DROVE HOME.
Picked up the new card and activated it while driving back to the office.
Tried to purchase iPhone 4S AGAIN.

And I finally placed a successful order.

A free cup of coffee

It’s the little things that count. I drove to Starbucks this morning, waited in line for a while, got up to the counter to order my coffee…and realized I didn’t have my wallet on me. I asked the barista to hold my order while I checked my car and, when I didn’t find it there, I drove straight home, panicking that I might have lost it somewhere.

At home I found it on the nightstand, right where I left it the night before. Kissed my boy on the head again. Kissed my wife again. Left the house and drove to Starbucks again.

When I got there, the barista was so happy to see me because, on my first visit, she had sensed my dismay and made me a cup of coffee on the house. And when I drove off she wasn’t able to give it to me.

That made my day just a little bit brighter.

Behind on my reading.

Below is a list of books that I’ve bought but either haven’t read or haven’t finished reading. The majority of them are Sitepoint books. That’s because Sitepoint occasionally runs ridiculous deals where you can buy their books dirt cheap.

One day I hope to have time to read some of these.

Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design

The Art & Science of CSS

Create Stunning HTML Email

Don’t Make Me Think

Fancy Form Design

JQuery Novice to Ninja

365 AIGA Year in Design

Online Marketing Inside Out

Photography for the Web

Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes

The PHP Anthology

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

The Principles of Project Management

How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer

Sexy Web Design: Create Stunning Web Interfaces

Simply SQL

New Years Resolutions, 2011 Edition

Project 365
Post an image to Flickr every day for a year. I posted the rules for this resolution over the weekend.
Get in shape
I’m going to deliberately leave this one vague. In the past I’ve had goals to gain weight or add muscle, but I’ve never been so completely out of shape. Karina and I are starting yoga with our friend this week and we’ll go from there.
Work/life balance
Last year I had becoming a better project manager on my list of goals and I achieved that goal. This year I want to focus on managing my design team and cutting my hours back to 40 a week (while still getting everything done).
Spend more time with my family
This is the real reason for seeking a better work/life balance. I want quality time with my wife and I want to do more stuff with Ashton.
Create personal projects
Again, being vague. I don’t want to limit what I work on but I definitely want to do some interesting things outside of work this year to stretch myself creatively.
Do some writing
I’ll eventually sort out my blog and make it work for the kind of posting I want to do, but aside from that, I want to write some fiction. I’m not sure if I’m going to to do that during NaNoWriMo or not, but I think I’d like to try the Cory Doctorow 250 words a day plan before November.

That’s it. A short but open-ended list for the year. What are your resolutions?

Project 365, Take 2

New Year's Eve Fireworks

This is my second attempt at a Project 365. I hear that’s normal. Rather than having to take and post a picture every single day for a year, which would not only be tedious but nearly impossible with work and family, my goals are more modest this time around.

I want to post something every day for a year.

It will usually be photos and they will usually be posted within a week of being shot, but I might also throw in sketches, wireframes, moodboards, design comps, etc.

The goal here is to be creative, hold myself to a publishing schedule and not otherwise limit myself.

Ping (and Apple) Want to Invade My Privacy

I wanted to check out Apple’s new social media thing, Ping, so I downloaded the new version of iTunes and installed it. I turned the service on and it brought me to an account setup screen that displayed my first and last name in form fields with the message:

The name you enter is also the name associated with your account’s billing information. Any previous reviews that you have written with a nickname will now display the name you list here instead of that nickname. To remove any reviews you have written from the iTunes Store, go to your account and click Manage Reviews.

Not only is it eroding your privacy and forcing you to use your real name for things you had previously done under a username/pseudonym, but it’s retroactively pinning your real name to things you had previously done under a username.

That’s not acceptable. Anybody who wrote a review did so with the understanding that their personal information was anonymous. In my case, the two are close enough that it doesn’t really matter one way or the other, but for a lot of other people it does.

And look, I get that Facebook uses real names and everybody wants to get on the Facebook bandwagon and, OMG, you could attach a much higher dollar value to my profile if you could associate it with me the person instead of me the random anonymous user. But you know what, fuck you. I’m not here to service your bottom line.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I probably won’t be using Ping.

p.s. This is my instant reaction. I reserve the right to calm down later but I doubt I’ll change my position. I’m just getting fed up with companies constantly trying to extract more and more of my information for their use.

My Poker News Aggregator

My obsession with poker has returned. I had quit playing for about a year-and-a-half because I had gone on life tilt from the game. (If you don’t play poker, tilt is when something unbalances your game and makes you play poorly. Usually angrily.) I’m a smart guy and I thought I should be a winning player against the average small stakes player and I wasn’t. So I stopped.

Enough time passed that I had calmed down. Having a toddler will teach you a patience that playing a game never could. I was drawn back to the game. Initially playing only about an hour a week. Then two nights, then more. I was still a losing player but a trip to Vegas helped me sort that out (honest!).

But simply playing the game isn’t enough for me anymore. I’ve always wanted to combine my love of the game with my skills as a design technologist. As a result, I’ve begun to roll out my own poker news aggregator:

Chat's Poker: a Poker News Aggregator

Right now it’s a single page site inspired by Type Daily which, in turn, was inspired by POPURLS.

I rolled my own code to pull most of the feeds and add them to a local database for speed purposes and I set up a cron job to update the oldest feed every five minutes. This ensures fresh content and a quick page load. Over the coming weeks I’m going to explore better code options, like this one called “Building your own Alltop or PopURLs” from Delic. (I wish I had found that sooner…)

I’m also going to add more feeds, including hopefully more videos, some images, an Amazon bookstore, and maybe some other stuff. I’m going to build out a few other pages to break down feeds by news, instructional posts and pro blogs. And because I’m not an entirely altruistic person, I’m also going to add affiliate links to the various poker sites. I already have the top three on there: Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker.

If you want to play online poker, feel free to sign up through one of those links.

Edit: Oh, hey. It’d probably be cool if I linked to the poker news aggregator. I also linked to it upstream in the post.

The Times They Are a Changing

I think my time with Project 52 has come to an end. The idea was noble: get a bunch of people to commit to blogging at least once a week for an entire year. However, the project itself seems to have fallen down on the job.

Writing is a personal goal of mine and one that I will continue, but the artificial nature of the once a week construct has inhibited me. I structured the blog around the concept and the way I feature the current post dissuades me from posting shorter content that my time allows. At the other end of the spectrum there is some longer form content I’d like to write that simply can’t be completed in a week.

It’s also hampered the other goals I set out for myself at the beginning of the year and, I suspect, making progress toward those goals will provide plenty of things to talk about. At the end of the day I simply don’t have much time to devote to my personal projects so if I pick one it’s at the expense of the others. Between my job and my family I struggle the way most everybody else does, but sometimes it feels like I struggle a bit more.

I’m Very Comfortable With Who I Am

The following conversation took place between Twitter, Facebook, email and in-person.

Me: The iPhone should be able to play random songs for ringtones. For confident people who aren’t afraid of ABBA’s Dancing Queen popping up.

Myshell: You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen
Dancing queen, feel the beat from the tambourine
You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queen

If I was still just on the other side of your cubicle I’d totally sing that to you!

Me (to Jake & Ashley): Because she cares…

Ashley: Um…. I never really knew her, but dancing queen? Please tell me that’s some inside joke?

Me: I like ABBA.

Jake: You know how I know you’re gay?

Me (to Elaine): Hey, did you see GLEE??

Me (to everybody): Dancing Queen used to be my ringtone and I can’t wait for So You Think You Can Dance to start back up on the 27th.

I’m like the Transformers: more than meets the eye. Oh yes.

Jake:

Image by niebuck

Nothing to see here… Today.

No post today other than this update that I won’t be posting.

A tweet from a friend that I disagreed with spurred me to create an infographic. I got it halfway done before I was sidetracked by yardwork, my wife, my son, a visit to my mom’s house, some deconstruction, and sleep.

The infographic in turn spurred me to want to create a post page that doesn’t have a sidebar so I can embed the graphic without having to shrink it down. Before I could do that though, I had to fix some of the rendering bugs the site has from when I launched the new theme without any browser testing. That in turn led to me drafting a post about some of the suck that is Opera 10.5.

Hey Opera, thanks for adding rounded corners and completely hosing form fields whenever I try to, you know, round them. (Protip: you can fix the bug by adding a border to the fields.)

I should have posts up this Wednesday and Friday.

Upcoming topics over the next month or two will include some infographics, me weighing in on the Adobe/Apple fight, a lesson on the stupidity of crippling browser functionality and images in order to “protect” them, samples of things I’m working on, a look at some WordPress plugins, and a few other topics. I’ll also undoubtedly weigh in on a few discussions as they’re taking place. Real-time web FTW.

Phototuts+ “Memories” Contest

Phototuts+ is running a contest this week called “The ‘Memories’ Photography Project,” and they’re giving away a Canon EOS 550D camera to the winner! You can read all of the contest details on their site but the short version is:

Upload up to three pictures that represent “memories” to you. Include 150-350 words describing each photo. Afterwards they’ll post the entries for people to vote on.

Here are my entries and the accompanying copy I wrote for each one. I don’t know how the photos will be presented so I had to write each description so that it could stand on its own. That means there is some redundant copy. Sorry about that.

Superhero Ash

This is my first and only son, Ashton, a few months after he turned two. Every photo of him represents a memory I cherish. This was the first day of summer. Not the official first day of summer, but the first day the pool was open, which everybody knows is the real first day of summer. He put his goggles on at home long before we went to the pool and refused to take them off.

This is superhero Ash.

I’m not a professional photographer. I’m not even an amateur photographer. I’m a neophyte. I don’t own a great camera. I own a cheap point-and-shoot. Having a real camera would mean a lot to me, not the least because it would help me capture more memories like this.

Note: I removed the bird poop from the submitted version.

This is my first and only son, Ashton, when he was about a year-and-a-half old. On a typical sunny afternoon at the park I was lucky enough to capture this shot of him and he was exploring a playscape. I love the inquisitive look in his eyes. That’s something he hasn’t lost with age.

Every photo of him represents a memory I cherish.

I’m not a professional photographer. I’m not even an amateur photographer. I’m a neophyte. I don’t own a great camera. I own a cheap point-and-shoot. Having a real camera would mean a lot to me, not the least because it would help me capture more memories like this.

Photographer: Ashton Clussman

Don’t dismiss this photo! Read this description first.

This is something that I think will be unique in the competition. When my wife and I bought a new point-and-shoot camera last year, we gave our old, 4MP digital camera to our son, Ashton.

He was two years old when he built and photographed this block of Legos completely on his own. He had already learned how to turn the camera on and off, zoom in and out, move close in or back away from his subject. He can switch the display on the camera to preview his pictures and he can even hook the camera up to the computer.

This picture represents a memory that he cherishes.

He has a natural talent and taking pictures is something he loves to do. I want to nurture that love. Winning this competition would mean the world to both of us.

I’ll post again when voting opens up!

Summer Reading

I have a lot of books I want to read.

I always have a lot of books I want to read. But I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret: I tend to buy them and not read them. I want to. I just don’t. It’s for a variety of reasons: I have a toddler, I work at a startup, I have personal goals to achieve in those rare moments that I have time to myself, and the list goes on.

A side effect of this is that my summer reading list involves a lot of books that I already own, including: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler, Online Marketing Inside Out by Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley, and The Principles of Project Management by Meri Williams.

In the category of books I don’t already have languishing on a bookshelf or nightstand: Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way by Bruce Campbell (I’m a fanboy), On Writing Well, 25th Anniversary: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Knowlton, Marvel Zombies vs. Army of Darkness by John Layman (okay, seriously, I’m a fanboy—don’t judge me), Website Owner’s Manual by Paul Boag, and Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug (yes, I know, it’s embarrassing that I never read this). I’m also considering Rework by the 37signal guys.

This post is my first Weekend Assignment. If you’re really interested in writing but the blank page is staring back at you menacingly, the Weekend Assignment might be just the thing you need. Ever weekend they put out a new topic for you to write about. Working within the constraints of their assignment makes that blank page much more manageable.

This week’s assignment comes with extra credit:

Extra Credit: Okay writers, get to work! Write me the opening paragraph, just (1) paragraph of a summer read you would like write yourself. Again, any genre works fine, have fun with it!

So here goes:

When John woke up he had a splitting headache. He had been drinking again the night before. So much for AA. His sponsor wouldn’t be very happy with him. It was the third time in as many months that he had fallen off the wagon. Where was he? A seedy hotel room somewhere. A pack of cigarettes was lying on the dilapidated nightstand next to him. He reached for the cigarettes and that’s when he noticed the girl’s body lying in a pool of blood. He was going to need another drink.

Flying by the seat of my pants

I really wanted to launch my new design before SXSW but life, job and sleep conspired against me. Now I’m at SXSW and I can’t get VMWare to recognize my local OSX web server. So… I’m just going to put the new design up there and debug it live. How exciting! If things look fucked up. This is why. Please bear with me.

New site design

I’m redesigning my site. If you’ve been around here at all, you’re probably thinking “but Chat, you just did that in December!” Well, yes, I did. But that was more of a triage. Taking a broken website and fixing it so that it had the bare minimum usability.

One thing I’m very proud of with the triage design: total images for the entire site (not counting any images I add for specific posts, like this one) are about 3.7kb. You read that right. 3.7 kilobytes. Not 370 kilobytes. Not 37 kilobytes. 3.7.

The new design will be a bit heavier than that, but I’m going to try to stay true to the principles of lean and mean. I’ve spent months trying to come up with a design that reflects me. Months before the redesign I was trying to create a new design. One road I went down was a three dimensional wall look. Another had me trying to creative an illustrated look. That second one definitely isn’t me but I wanted to grow who I was as a designer.

I’ll keep working on the growth thing but, in the meantime, the new site I’m designing represents who I am right now. And that’s a minimalist designer with a love of iconography and type. I’m including a mockup of the new homepage here.

Mockup of new homepage

After trying to come up with something for six months, when I finally let go I designed the new homepage in two hours.

SXSWi 2010: T-minus 12 Days and Counting

I’m getting more excited about SXSWi with each passing day. My wife pointed out to me yesterday that I’m now counting it down in days rather than weeks. We’re under two weeks now so I’m going to defend my geekness. Daily feels right. T-minus 12 days and counting…if you’re wondering.

Twitter is starting to swell towards critical SXSW mass. I’m clearly not the only geek who is having a hard time focusing on anything else. I’m also not the only geek who misses ye olden days of “south-by” when it was just us geeks. I work in a marketing department. I’ve worked in an ad agency. But I wish the marketers would have stayed away.

The hype, the spiels, the venture capitalists, the wannabe venture capitalists, the wannabe entrepreneurs (real ones are okay), the new celebrity culture… You’ll here a lot of this from folks like me over the next few weeks but the festival just isn’t what it used to be. Everybody has something to hawk now. Everyone has something to sell.

The geeks will still be thereâ€”I’ll be thereâ€”but it’ll be a little bit harder to find them in the crowds this time. Just like it was a little bit harder last time. There are a lot of great apps to help people organize though and the panels you pick offer their own kind of organization. There probably aren’t that many marketing types sitting in on JavaScript sessions. So there’s hope!

Browsing through Twitter this morning, here are few SXSWi quick hits to help with your organization:

The SXSW Interactive Mobile Thriving Guide (iPhone)
Want to ditch the laptop this year? The IMTG offers advice and a collection of iPhone apps to help you.
South By Texas State
The tagline for the site is “New Media Students Chronicle SXSWi 2010″, which looks to be a fairly accurate description of what they’re doing. So far they’ve written up various top five lists and several individual panel previews.
SXSW 2010 Guide: Balancing Film and Interactive
If you only have a Film badge or an Interactive badge but want to be more involved in the other part of the festival, these guys did the legwork for you and found out which events of the other track you can cross over to participate in.

As it turns out, when I actually looked at the film panels, I found a lot of stuff I’d like to see. My company pays for my interactive badge but I’m considering paying to upgrade to a gold badge. And not just so I can go to the premiere of Kick Ass. Not just for that reason. There’s also the panels.

My wife and I are both fascinated by title sequences. They can be amazing works of art in their own right. This year there are least two film panels entirely devoted to them.

I most likely won’t pony up the $200 though. We’re trying to be good and save, to the point where I’m even considering putting off purchasing an iPad for a few months. (My wife was duly shocked by this pronouncement.) Then again, it’s only $200…

2010 SXSW Interactive Schedule

I’m doing something a little different and self-serving today. I’m posting the list of SXSW Interactive panels that I’ve bookmarked for consideration. I’m kind of all over the map this year. I knew going in that I would be interested in all things iPhone and iPad this year. I have ideas for two different apps I want to build.

I surprisingly found myself bookmarking lifehacking sessions. Things like improving my memory, using social media to live cheaply, and building your dream life.

I’m also apparently still very interested in improving my design process and how I manage and work with project owners. And I apparently I want to become a professional blogger, except that I don’t, so those panels might get the axe. In theory I really like publishing content. In reality it’s damn hard work.

As usual some timeslots have half-a-dozen panels I’m interested in while others have none or maybe one.

Are you going to SXSWi? What panels are you going to?

Friday, March 12th

TBA

How We Built the SXSW Mobile App
iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators

2:00 PM

Beauty in Web Design
Social Media Marketing for Your Business
The Broke Diaries: Using Blogs And Twitter To Live Cheaply

3:30 PM

Battledecks 2010
Jacks of All Trades or Masters of One?
Making Genuine Connections: Putting Passion Over Process
Memory Matters! How Do Elephants Do It?

5:00 PM

Networking at a Multi-Day Conference
ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
Simple Steps to Great Web Design

Saturday, March 13th

9:30 AM

Add Some XBOX to Your UX
Pain Free Design Signoff
Web Fonts: The Time Has Come

11:00 AM

Building A Bulletproof Personal-Finance System
CMS Admin. UX Gateway to Heaven or Hell
Online Advertising: Losing the Race to the Bottom

11:40 AM

Web Evolution: The Rise of Mobile, APIs and Runtimes

12:30 PM

Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas
Designing the First Fifteen Minutes
Shameless Self Promotion Without Looking Like an @#$%^&!
The Right Way to Wireframe, Part 2

12:50 PM

iPhone Application Development: Myths and Facts

02:00 PM

CSS Framework Shootout

3:30 PM

BBC Digital Planet Live at SXSW
CSS3 Design with HTML5
From Blogger to Social Media Guru to Professional Speaker
Is WordPress Killing Web Design
That Game Feels Nice: Tomorrow’s Touch Interfaces
Ze Frank Conversation: The Creative Lifestyle

5:00 PM

CSS and Fonts: Fluid Web Typography
Keeping Sane While Working From Home
The Ten Commandments of User Experience

Sunday, March 14th

11:00 AM

Accessible JavaScript Techniques
Extending Your Brand? There’s an App for That
Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work Into Play
Why You Aren’t Done Yet

12:30 PM

Anything But Typical: Learning to Love JavaScript Prototypes
Coding for Pleasure: Developing Killer Spare-Time Apps
Cross Device Accessibility: Is This For Real?
Ditch the Old to Build Your Dream Life

2:00 PM

HTML5 Accessibility
Your Design Process is Killing You

3:30 PM

HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches
Turn Your Idea Into a Business Leveraging Interactive

5:00 PM

Wow, That’s Cool… Fun With HTML5 Video

Monday, March 15th

9:30 AM

ANYONE Can Create a Video Game!
The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions

11:00 AM

R.I.P. Content Management System
Scoring a Tech Book Deal
What Coworking Tells Us About the Future of Work

12:30 PM

ExpressionEngine 2.0: Total Domination!
Make Me A Damn Good Manager!
Slow Twitter: Users Who Take Their Time Tweeting

2:00 PM

Evan Williams Keynote Interview
Tapworthy: Designing iPhone Interfaces for Delight and Usability

3:30 PM

Beyond the Desktop
Choosing Offline Activities in a Time-Deprived Lifestyle
Forging Your Ideal Career
Mobile Development with the Flash Platform: iPhone and More
Visual Note-Taking 101

5:00 PM

Hold the Cocoa: Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Visual Problem Solving: 5 Diagrams in 15 Minutes

Tuesday, March 16th

9:30 AM

Design for the Dark Side
Prototyping Web Apps – Nobody Loves a Wireframe

11:00 AM

Effective Dashboard Design: Why Your Baby Is Ugly

12:30 PM

Balance is Bullshit
Getting Better: The Designer’s Path From Good To Great
Love AND Money: Can Fansites Pay the Bills?

3:30 PM

Can Web 2.0 Kill the Real Estate Industry?
Interactive Infographics
Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design

5:00 PM

Brilliant Second Acts You Must Steal Tricks From
Bruce Sterling Presentation

If you’re going to SXSW Interactive and you have an iPhone, you should grab download this years apps. There are two of them: my.SXSW for browsing the conference schedule and building a schedule and SXSW Play for discovering music and film media.

What This Blog is All About

I’ve given a lot of thought to why I haven’t blogged more in the past and what I should be blogging about now that I’ve made a commitment to do so.

It wasn’t for a lack of things to say and I can’t even blame it entirely on a lack of time. The biggest reason why I didn’t blog because I didn’t know what my niche was. There are better visual designers than me. There are certainly better programmers than me. There are better copywriters, marketers, search engine optimizers, and small business owners.

But there are very few people who have some degree of competency in all of those areas. And that’s my niche. A shallow depth across a wider sea of topics. In some areas the sea may be deeper than in others. We’ll set sail and see where the waters take us. (See what I did there? That’s a lot of metaphor for a little paragraph.)

I think there are a lot of small business owners that try to go it alone and build their own website the same way they do pretty much everything else. The niche websites that delve deep into topics can be overwhelming and scary. There are also a lot of web designers who would like to dip their toes into other areas but, like me, just don’t have a whole lot of spare time. With luck I can find the time to write the odd tip or two that might be of benefit to them.

Goal Update – Week 1

Writing up a goal plan, (re)creating a WordPress site, and writing down some content ideas sure is easy when you have two weeks off during the holidays. Not so much when real life comes crashing back down on you.

I had a lot of late nights at the office this week. We hired a new web designer to help out, which effectively doubles my previous staff of, well, me. Expectations easily tripled. From providing more comps on everything to doubling the number of projects and shortening deadlines, things didn’t get any easier. That’s a start-up for you. The pay is good and I believe in the product so there are definitely worse things in life, but I’m committed to my personal goals for the year too.

I just need to find a way to carve time out for them.