Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Steven Frank of Panic fame has managed to capture my feelings perfectly in his post about blogging. Almost daily I alternately think that I should write a blog entry, or that I should blow the whole thing up and make a simple portfolio site.

Much like Steven, I ponder if I should be writing about what generally boils down to either a) personal matters or b) trivial matters - both of which would be better suited to places that aren’t my personal website. Still, other days I think that without my website, I would have probably not have learned as much about web design, nor would I have had as much fun going thru the old entries seeing what I had to say, what others had to say in reply, and generally just shaking my head wondering what I was thinking. Surely one day I’ll look back at this post and do the same.

Twitter’s existence certainly has complicated things for me as well, as Frank also notes. Not that I really churn out much good content anywhere, but Twitter does suck up all of those little ideas that could certainly grow into longer winded blog posts down the road. Dumping them onto my Twitter page allows them to die the short, painless death that is probably for the best in the long run. In any event, most of my ideas for blog posts (generally about something relating to a website or user interface that bugs me) gets sucked into that vortex and goes away, thus leaving my material for this site much thinner.

Ah well. As long as it’s still fun in some weird or small way, or as long as someone still stops by and reads this thing (surprisingly, a lot of folks still do), it’ll be worth my while.

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Posted on July 8th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

I know, I know - it has only been a few months since I launched the SquareOne Web Design website, but as is my custom, I get bored and feel the need to redesign. So, I present to you version two of the site. I’ve moved to a much lighter look and feel, and after publishing the first version, I wasn’t too thrilled with it. This one works a lot better in my mind, but I still do have some work to do.

One of the main things that I wanted to do is spend more time making the site easier to update. I rethought how I actually coded the pages and came up with a much simpler, template-based system that makes updating almost any aspect of the site a breeze now. Additionally, I’m much happier with the color scheme. I’ve always been a big fan of earthier colors - browns, greens, etc - so this works a lot better in that regard.

There’s a lot of little tweaking left to do (notably having each page have it’s own ‘banner’), but these things will come in due time. Hope you like the new site!

Posted on June 29th, 2008 | No Comments »

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

I’m sure you all thought the same thing when you read that. That’s right, WTmcgee.com is expiring this week, and I plan on letting it die a death that’s as quiet as possible. From it’s humble beginnings, this site has come a long way, yet still is as irrelevant as it was over 5 years ago. I was going to start up another blog that would invite more participation, but I’m just not sure I have the motivation.

So, with that said, we wish Bon Voyage to the WT McGee moniker and all that is carried with it. It was a good 10+ years (according to some), but it’s been time to nuke that name for quite some time.

Posted on June 3rd, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

WordPress 2.5 has been released, and so far I am quite impressed. What’s new, you ask?

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

The Happy Cog folks were responsible for the UI refresh to the backend and it’s quite impressive. It seems that every little detail was re-thought from a user’s perspective and they have gone go great lengths to make the simple things like writing, editing and managing your blog much simpler. The administration panel is a lot cleaner now, with fewer options jumping out at you from the start.

On top of those features, one of the things that I’ve been most excited about was the now-functioning MarsEdit integration that allows me to set a post as a ‘draft’ and it sticking on the server. And my dear lord, is the auto-updating plugins feature amazing or what? No longer do you have to download a plugin to your desktop, upload it, log in to WordPress, and activate the plugin. Now, the software tells you there is an update, and you click ‘update’. Done.

If you are a Wordpress user, I highly recommend the 2.5 release. They knocked this one out of the park – not only from a design standpoint, but from a usability and ease of use angle as well. As a side note, the SquareOne blog and this blog now are on 2.5. Let me know if you see any visual oddities.

Ok, end blog nerdery … now.

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site-news, software, wordpress, wordpress-2.5

Posted on March 30th, 2008 | No Comments »