I haven’t been writing much here, now that most of my effort has been on pieces for Signal vs. Noise and our new Design Explorations series. Here are a few recent articles in case you missed them:

• Exploring the Basecamp Account (Upgrade/Billing) screen
• Highrise Edit Contacts Screen
• Work in Photoshop, don’t save in Photoshop
• “Good enough” instead of “absolutely perfect”
• Design Decisions: Redesigning Basecamp’s global milestone view
• Working at 37signals

I’ve been working on some really great new features in Basecamp that I think you’ll like. Keep an eye on SvN and our Product Blog for updates.

As I wrote previously, ESPN page 2 writer, Paul Lukas, recently proposed a contest to design the uniforms for Oklahoma City’s yet unnamed NBA basketball franchise. I immedially whipped up a concept based on a little spoof piece I had done a few days earlier. The results were posted to ESPN.com today along with a nice mention of my entry. You can see it and the full list here in Lukas’s column:

Meet the Oklahoma City uni finalists

Just a quick reminder that I will be presenting at tonight’s Refresh OKC meeting. The topic is Typography Techniques for the Web, A practical guide to tips, tricks, and best practices for achieving elegant type in HTML and CSS.

The meet-up is this evening, August 21st, 2007 at 6:30pm. We meet at the downtown library in Oklahoma City. If you’re in the area please stop in — it’s a great little meet-up and refreshments will be served. More info at www.refreshokc.org.

Hope to see you there!

At it’s core, Jaiku is a twitter-like app that allows for short IM-like blog posts. But the real beauty is it’s capability to read and splice most any RSS feed into your personal stream. And I might add, it does a marvelous job of auto-discovering these feeds. All you have to do is point Jaiku to a URL and it will find any associated feeds. Very slick. So the end result is a combined feed showing a large portion of my online activity. If you want to know what Jason is doing online (not sure why you would) you can see it all on Jaiku. The feed combines my Jaikus, tweets, blog posts, Last.fm tracks, mog tracks, upcoming events, Flickr photos, and my links from del.icio.us and digg. Its everything!

So tonight, I replaced my blog feed with the combined feed. This should show a lot more activity and really better represent me. If it gets to be too much, though you can still get the classic blog-only feed here.

So, if you’re still subscribed to the Moblog feed – thank you! And you’ll see photos exlusively from Flikr for the time beging. However, those photos will now be automagically shown in the main feed so why not just use that one?

Later on I’ll integrate this all better with the site. I’d like to display the Flikr content in this template as well. I am also contemplating a move to Word Press or some other ready-made system.

That said, it is a tremendous relief to have finished up a couple of large projects (and many smaller ones) and start thinking about life again. It is fascinating to me how an inbox full of mail, a desk full of papers and magazines, a news aggregator full of unread posts, and a ever-expanding list of household projects can really add to the stress.

So now it’s time to come down, a get back to normal life. For me that means: Catching up on information (blogs, mail, messageboards, etc.). Finally getting to play World of Warcraft. Taking a little time off and spending it with the family. Working on my long-neglected personal project (like this blog). Restart the book on my nightstand.

It’s good to have the weight lifted.

I have spent years coding sites and maintaining this site, keeping up with the latest techniques and technology. Now I have a chance to really push these skills further. And yes, standards fans, web standards and XHMTL/CSS are going to be a big part of the work I perform for Element Fusion’s customers.

But that is just the start of it. Element Fusion also offers me the ability to work for tons of great clients; quite a change from the corporate internal work I have been doing.

This is quite an exciting time for me. Oh and if you’re are looking for a great firm to work on your next web project, check out the best in Oklahoma.

• Surgery. I had my wisdom teeth out on Friday and a minor outpatient wrist surgery tomorrow.
• Job News. I have a big announcement to make here and a process to discuss.
• Wireless Woes. My struggle to deal with buying and setting up a simple wireless home network (oxymoron)? Oh and did I mention rebates? Grrrr.
• And of course the holidays and the stories that are sure to come from that.

Stay tuned…

But all that is about to change. I finally got around to coding a comments system. Astute readers might have already noticed the comments link at the bottom of each post which can be used to read and add comments to each. I have done some limited testing and everything seems to be a go, but I’m sure some bugs will creep up here and there. So comment away, and let me know if you break it.

Coding the function was easier than I expected and only took a few hours. I was pleasantly surprised that PHP made many of the things I was unsure about how to implement (like stripping HTML from posts) a breeze. I still need to code the admin side which will allow me to stifle the free speech of those who would make an inappropriate comment or otherwise abuse the system, but I suppose I can delete from the database for the time being should anything like that occur.

All said, coding my own weblog and content management system has been a great learning process and I am really glad I decided to take this road rather than implementing a stock solution like Moveable Type. I will say it again, I have no doubts that MT is a great product but I felt and still feel that my time was better spent learning to build what I needed from scratch rather than learning how to use someone else’s software. And much of what I learned has carried over into my clients’ sites. Very much a win-win.

Future plans? There is not much more that I want to do with the system at this point but there are a few things I may try down the road for the purpose of challenging myself if nothing else. I think categorization of the posts would be nice and probably not very difficult. Additionally, some more robust GD tools would be nice for uploading images to the portfolio section, and along the same lines, tighter integration between the moblog and weblog—perhaps even a full combining of the two. I also have this need to try a Flash version. The goal would be to use the same database (and images in the case of the portfolio) to display the same content via a Flash interface. Theoretically, it seems possible but I haven’t tried it yet. The last thing I would like to try would be a full optimization of the code; creating re-useable functions, making it more easily configurable and installable so that I could distribute it.

I think it is worth a shot.

• 6:30 A.M. – get up drive to work by 7:30 – 7:45 A.M.
• Work all morning, after scanning the news and various blogs via RSS and NetNewswire.
• 12:00 P.M. – Lunchtime. I try to escape the office, weather permitting, with either my sketchbook, some reading material, my camera, or just a short walk in mind.
• 4:30 P.M. – Usually the end of the work day. Hometime.
• 5:30 – 8:30 P.M. – Family time. Dinner, movies, games—with the kids. And then snuggling them into bed.
• 8:30 – 12:00 P.M. or so. – Back on the computer for some freelance design time. To all of my clients, this is when your projects get done.

Its a long day, and quite a shock to my system after two weeks of staying up late, sleeping in, and generally lax days. But that said, I’m slowing getting back to work. 2004 looks to be a busy and exciting year for me and I hope to keep you up with my doings here. Stay tuned.

(Now I’m off to the watch Steve Job’s MacWorld keynote. Is this the year they finally break me and I buy an iPod?)