80x80

Monday, June 26, 2006

I said Friday but I meant Monday. Sometimes things take longer but in my case I just wanted to compete for attention the same day Digg 3 launched. All amusement aside I’d like to take the plastic wrap off my new site that I’ve dubbed 80x80.

It’s been a long time coming and I’ve finally got something I’m proud of. She’s still stretching herself out so if you notice any kinks let me know and I’ll call the masseuse. You’ll see the Lab grow soon into a dumping ground for prototypes and ideas. To keep things lively the artwork above will change as frequently as possible. You may notice the death of my tags, sorry, I opted for a clear set of categories. Portfolio is simple and should provide a glimpse of my contributions. Resume is, well, a resume.

That said, I’d like to say a few words on the nuts and bolts. I’ve parted ways with Rails. I enjoy Ruby immensely, it’s a beautiful language and I highly recommend it for those of you building web apps. However, while I wear many hats, none of them include web app developer. My largest hat is information designer. I spoon feed content to people in a stimulating fashion in hopes of planting a brand seed in their brain, thats all. After a few weeks of tinkering around I realized Django was my new muse. In less than a weekend I had a prototype for this site which allowed me to focus directly on usability, design and content while eliminating time towards an admin tool. Ruby on Rails made programming fun again but Django liberated me from back-end development.

I would like to give a big thanks to Jeff Croft, Wilson Miner, and those that maintain Django for their glowing examples clear documentation. If you’d like to learn more there are a couple great videos by Adrian and Jacob on Google. Thats all for now. I’m excited and I hope everyone else is too.