03/03/06
What I'm doing at the moment
I keep being asked why I’m so busy, so I here’s a quick summary of what’s going on at the moment:
First of all, what I’m not doing…
- I’m not writing a book. I’ve been toying with the idea of self-publishing for a couple of years now, but it’s come to nothing.
- I’m not preparing to speak at any conferences (although I am on a panel at @media). It has to be said, speaking is not where my skills are.
- I’m not redesigning my branding and site, although I desperately want to. I have various ideas, but after sitting on them for a week or two, I always reject them. Then everytime I see another leaf logo, I get embarrased that I haven’t done anything about it yet.
Now, what I am doing…
What I am doing is working for Attap (which stands for ‘All things to all People’). As well as Riffs (which I worked on) and PersonalDNA (which I did a little work on), with another site to follow, as well as the biggie project LifeIO. My favourite part so far was the Attap ‘wee guy’ logo as he/she is affectionately known. It came together very quickly (once I’d turned the ‘a’ on it’s side).
I can’t say more about LifeIO than what the holding page does, except that I’m very excited to be given the chance to a project like this. It’s design is something to really get my teeth into. I know the amount of web apps being released is getting past silly, to the point where apathy is setting in. Barely a day goes by without another ‘Sign up, and we’ll tell you when we’re ready to Beta test’ goes by, or someone else drops the last vowel in their name. Its a harder market to release apps into than it was when Basecamp or Flickr started. This doesn’t put me off though, it just makes it more a challenge to do the best job I can on LifeIO.
I am also getting psyched up for another SXSW. I fly out next Thursday with other Britpackers, and I am so looking forward to it, despite my usual find-it-hard-to-leave-the-family-behind sadness. If you’re there, please come and say hi!
I’ve also been trying out Feedlounge and Wordpress (not as a replacement for this site, but as a CMS for a new site). More on those soon!
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brian warren said 918 days ago:
Jon! Hey I’m looking forward to seeing you in Austin. I’m lamenting having to leave my wifey behind when I head to Austin. No kids yet to pull at my heartstrings.
Euan said 918 days ago:
Sounds good – I’m now curious to see what Life IO is all about!
Denis Radenkovic said 918 days ago:
Heh, never realised that, great! :-)
kez said 918 days ago:
Not sure if you’re fully responsible for the PersonalDNA site design or just the logo, but it could do with a bit of “body background = white” love!
My default background is a light gray which makes everything underneath the fading text not have a white background.
kez said 918 days ago:
Same on the attap site. (Apologies for double post!)
Robert Ellis said 918 days ago:
I never thought I would leave Textpattern, but I’ve recently moved Futurosity to WordPress and I’m thinking of moving Mystics of the Ordinary to WordPress, too. I think Textpattern is more intuitive, but WordPress has a lot of advantages on the details: it doesn’t muck up your Amazon image links, you can preview posts with styles, and the WYSIWYG editor is great if you’re going to have newbies posting to your blog (a friend of mine has just started contributing music reviews to my sites).
LifeIO. Great title! Can’t wait to see what this is going to be about.
Oliver said 917 days ago:
If it’s a CMS you’re looking for, have you come across MODx?
It’s kinda Web 2.0 done right: AJAXified where it should be for easy editing via the front editing, fully CSS driven, standards-compliant and table-free. Nice touches like the Lightbox modal window technique abound, and you can drag and drop elements into position.
It’s not perfect, and it’s only at v0.9.1 (but see what I mean about it being Web 2.0! Still in Beta!), but it’s more than stable enough to build a site on, and I can’t wait to see where they go with the next iterations.
Jon Hicks said 917 days ago:
“If it’s a CMS you’re looking for”
Its not really. I want to keep using Textpattern on this site, but I have a side-project that really suited using Wordpress. I’ll take a look at MOdX though – thanks
Allan Reyes said 915 days ago:
MODx is indeed very promising and worth checking. Looking forward to what LifeIO has to offer visually and function.
Erik said 910 days ago:
Symphony ( symphony21.com ) is also mentionable. At least I like it :)
Yep, like it very much.
Russ Wittmann said 908 days ago:
I really wish you would write a book on design Jon.
Peter said 900 days ago:
Sounds good, great news! I wait to see what this is going to be about..