ucantblamem

Smell that? THAT, my friends is the fervent scent of fresh blogging! Yes, spring is most certainly in the air here amongst the gums and boy oh boy am I excited by the prospect.

It has been a little over 3 months since my last blog-post, but it honestly feels like years. So much has happened in that time, which I will get into shortly, but first let me welcome you to the new blog which WILL be updated on a regular basis (promise!).

So, pleasantries aside, WHERE HAVE I BEEN?!?! *Takes deep breathe* Well, if you were a reader of my previous blog you will know that my plan was to take it offline as motivation to complete a redesign fresh for June. In fact, I did rebuild the site from the ground up using Ruby on Rails to the point where I was simply debugging the CSS and entering all the data. But then the self-criticism set in, motivation waned and finally I scrapped the idea of releasing what I had spent weeks working on. As a temporary measure I put up the coming soon page and focused more on my work than my personal ventures until about 3 weeks ago.

Few may know that I have been helping some friends of mine put together a website for their ministry called “Soul Alliance“. I had planned to implement the site using a powerful CMS that we use at work called “Joomla!“. However, this system has an intense list of requirements which I eventually discovered contradicted the hosting the site was planned to live on. So, after 6 weeks of stuffing around with different settings and options, I installed wordpress on the server and had the site completely skinned and running in around 3 hours (Joomla isn’t exactly standards-based anyway, so I consider it a blessing).

Wordpress has come A LONG way since I first used it for my blog way back in 2003 and really impressed me with its’ ease of use, configurability and short list of requirements! ;-)

So, I now have a fresh wordpress blog which I did a design for completely by accident and I can get back to writing about all the fun stuff I’m learning and building day to day. YAY!

With that out of the way, let’s see what I’ve been doing; I have been working at SM2 for over 6 months now and thoroughly enjoying it. SM2 is made up of some incredibly knowledgeable and talented people who all have an aspect of entreprenuership which has led us to focus more of our time on product development than “job-to-job” web-services.

No place of work is without its’ share of trials, but all in all my skills have been pushed hard and I’m really enjoying the journey. I traded all of my bulky PC gear and an iMac for a gorgeous little MacBook which I have nicknamed “McBates” - its’ got a whopping 2Gig of RAM which basically means I never have to wait for the computer to DO anything. It also means that I can use more of the 2 hours time wasted in transit every day to get things done.

There’s a lot to tell, but rather than over-fill this post with the past, let’s leave it there and allow the rest to be revealed over time.

How about you? What have you been up to the last few months? I heard that Joel is back in Toowoomba??? Oh and who else thinks that Ben Meares should update his blog? I say we put together a partition! ;-)

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 3:51 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.