If you follow me on twitter then you already know this news and if you don’t follow me, why not? The big upcoming news is that several weeks ago I was contacted by a local development company wanting to know if I was interested in coming in for an interview. Now I have been freelancing full time for well over two years and part time for awhile before that. I love working from home, setting my own hours, finding clients that I enjoy, etc. However, last year I started thinking about maybe moving to a firm. I had looked at a few but in the end just kept with freelancing. Being contacted by DigiMedia last month was an opportunity that just fell into my lap so I had to at least check it out.
I went for an interview and it went great. Met the other developers and got a tour of the place which was really nice. They are located on the 8th Floor of the Chase Bank Tower here in Wichita Falls, TX. In fact just down the street from where I live right now. All the guy there were great, they have a great setup and working on projects that interest me. The company started as a domain company with a huge portfolio of top level and mostly generic domain names (jerky.com, drum.com, etc). However, they are working on developing out some of those domains. Meaning it will be 100% internal work. I won’t have to deal with clients, invoicing and all that admin stuff that I hate doing anyways. Some of their recent two sites are FantasyFootball.com and MovieReviews.com.
I am looking forward to joining their team and finally got word last night that I will be starting this coming Wednesday. I will still be doing some freelancing part time. I have a few clients that I will continue to work with and of course plenty of personal projects to finish up. So, things will be changing for me but it looks like for the better and I’m excited about it.
I thought I would post a little update regarding my weight loss goal. As you know I have taken the steps needed to drop some weight and get healthy. We started with our eating habits and took out a lot of fast food (including my 4th Meals at Taco Bell). We cut my daily 5 Pepsi’s along with whatever other unhealthy food I could eat. This has been going on for about 2 months now. Then just over 2 weeks ago we joined a gym for me to actually get serious and drop some weight. Going to the gym has been great for me and I already feel more active during the day then I ever did before. I have enjoyed going in the mornings and doing some cardio and weights. Another plus is I’m finally staying caught up on the podcasts that I follow. I have noticed several things including feeling great during the day after the workout and that is I had to move my belt up a notch 3 days ago. This isn’t a big thing for some but I have tried diets before and was even a member of a gym before (long time ago) and didn’t stick with it this long nor take it this serious. So, this has been a huge step forward for me which I am loving. I’ve gotten nothing but support from family and of course those who follow me here and on twitter. The support from everybody has been a huge plus in sticking with it but I gotta say that I love the way I feel after a good workout in the morning even when I’m a little sore at times. So, to recap The Diet is going great as I’m not only dropping the weight (what little I have for now), I feel great at the same time, keeping up with eating healthy, and love the support from others. So, thank you to everybody who offered support and have asked me on twitter how it’s going, it means a lot.
On a site note; you should be prepared for a new design very soon. I’ve only been working on it for several months now and after trashing 4-5 versions I finally have one that will see light. Its a minimal design which will be great. Not sure when it will be ready but I hope sometime in April. Plan to start doing some more video blogs then as well. Just a warning.
I know the site has been lacking on posts the past several weeks and I do plan to get back to posting. For those who follow me on twitter know how busy I have been between work, looking for new clients, coaching my sons soccer team and still working on settling since the move. For some reason it always takes us months to get settled into a place. We have boxes that haven’t been touched still, nothing on any walls, etc. I have also been working on a new design to put up here for the past several months and its still not finished. Looking at it now, I don’t even think that I like it. Might just use a theme for now and set my goal for my design in January. I also haven’t forgotten about my OpenSource Projects either. 2532|Gigs is still an active project however development has been on hold for awhile. I talked with Nick (the other developer) and we have plans to pick back up on development in the coming weeks and release a new version very soon and shoot for v2.0 early 2008. FieldStatus is just about ready for its first release. I have been working on it the past few weeks bug fixing and putting the final touches on it. Its currently in use on a client site and works great. It will be released as an OpenSource script until January 2008 when it will be moved to a hosted app with several price levels. More details on this will come later this year. Thats about all I have for now. Things will calm down in November and I will be back to posting and developing some of my projects (and some new ones next year).
Is it? Maybe it is. However this is just a temp setup. Its actually a theme from PlainTxt. They are really simple WP themes. Basically a great starting place when creating your own themes. I’m currently using one called Simplr. This isn’t the one I’m currently editing but I kinda liked the simple one column layout (haven’t really used a one column design in awhile). I am working on my own design right now. Mainly getting together a color scheme and logo design. I already have the basic layout done just gotta do some styling. Coding WordPress Themes is actually a lot easier then it looks. Reading the docs on the WP site its a little much at first but the once you open another theme and start messing around its pretty simple. I know the site has been pretty slow the past 2 months as I’ve had several new clients and a ton of work however so far things are calming down so I’m going to be working on this site.
Update: I wasn’t liking the white bg and black text so I did a little styling to this theme. Its actually the colors I plan to use for my upcoming design.
