New Year’s Resolutions 2012

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Last year I made some resolutions. I didn’t exactly follow through on all of them, so some of them might end up back on this list. I’m going to try and be a little more realistic this time around. (We all knew Project 365 was never going to happen).

Success

  • Update the Portfolio The entire website has been completely revamped a couple of times. The portfolio is (mostly) up-to-date.
  • Start something new I started Dsgn365. Maybe it was a little more than I could handle for an after-work project in the summer. It gave me a new idea for a way I can pivot this into something better than the original though. Moral of the story: Just do something. Nobody ever did anything cool just letting ideas bounce around inside their head. Working on new ideas always seems to generate more ideas for me.
  • Read more I started the year by reading more. I read a couple of design books, which were great. I even read some fiction. It slowed down when school started again in the fall and really died out when I started reading the Steve Jobs biography.
  • Crush it I am indeed laughing at the 2010 version of me. This year has been crazy. Not only have I gotten much more involved in Forrst, but I went to Facebook. Facebook. I’m looking forward to seeing what 2012 brings.

Resolutions for 2012

  • Write more I haven’t done as much writing here as I would’ve liked this year.
  • More web experiments I like learning about the web and, at this point, the best way for me to learn is by trying stuff. Along with writing more, I’d like to do more write-ups with demos.
  • Ship something There are a few projects now that I’ve started and have just fizzled out. I think I know where I’m getting caught up and have a pretty good idea of how to fix it. This year I want to attack that and ship a product.
  • Design more I recently got an invite to join dribbble and I want to be as involved in that as I was in Forrst in 2011. Hopefully I can more fully develop my design skills in the process as well.

Setting Up Demos

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I like making things as easy as possible, so every time I try to set up a decent “CMS” for doing demos on this site, I end up trashing everything a couple days later. I think I have something that’s useable this time though. It’s roughly based on Chris Coyier’s CSS-Tricks examples section. I think I’ve seen him talk about his method of posting demos before, but I can’t seem to find where that might have been.

Normally, I would turn to WordPress for my online publishing. With all the new features in the past year, WordPress can be form-fit to really anything you could need to publish on the web. I’m going a little simpler than that this time though.

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Google Redesign

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So apparently @sacca hates the gmail redesign. I love it. It’s exactly my style so maybe I shouldn’t be trying to convince anyone else to like it, but I’ll try to be objective.

I’m not sure what exactly he doesn’t like about it, but I feel like I have an idea. It’s like when Microsoft Office introduced “the ribbon”. People who had to use Office everyday hated it because they had years invested in learning how to use Office the way it was before. Why did they have to change it? The thing is, once they got used to the ribbon they realized that everything they were used to in Office was still there, just in a different place. Still, why did they change it? Right?

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Facebook Hackathon

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Last week I competed in a hackathon at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California and I feel like I’m ready to write about my experience here.

This started in late September. I had been hearing for a few weeks that Facebook recruiters were going to be on campus to hold a hackathon. The idea was intriguing, but I wasn’t all that interested in staying up all night to work on a “hack”. Facebook didn’t seem like the type of company I would like to work for and it didn’t really seem worth my time. Yeah… I was wrong.
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JB Shortener

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Almost two years ago I wrote about a new short URL system I started using on this blog. I’m finally releasing this in plugin form with a few additional improvements. WordPress has support for “short urls” built in and will even let you use the wp.me system if you have the Jetpack plugin installed. Instead of using wp.me, I like using my own custom domain. This plugin gives you an option to set the short domain that you’d like to use and includes the helper files to install on the short domain.
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