kartooner

It’s been sev­eral months since I’ve writ­ten on here, since August of last year in fact, which equals to roughly 5 years in Inter­net time.

What have I been up to since I last mashed my fin­gers across the key­board and pub­lished some­thing of worth? Well, I was offered and accepted a posi­tion with AOL/Weblogs, Inc. as a designer for their net­work of sites. My first thought was; they pay peo­ple to design blogs? It’s become more than a dream job for me and I couldn’t be more thank­ful for the friend­ships I’ve formed and lessons learned.

There’s that, on the job end of things, and as a far as my per­sonal life is con­cerned we’re plug­ging along quite nicely. My daugh­ter Zoe just turned 4. For those of you who’ve fol­lowed this site for the 4+ years I’ve been main­tain­ing it this is a huge mile­stone. My son, Quinn, is now 2 and between the two they man­age to keep us busy, thanks in part to how often they annoy each other. We are expect­ing another child as well so there are more adven­tures to look for­ward to.

Speak­ing of which, this site, my favorite pet project has become more stag­nant than ever. You could search the archives… oh wait, no you can’t because that’s yet to be fixed, but hey, if you could you’d find plenty of posts describ­ing some sort of post-mortem. Mov­ing on from here I’ve finally decided to use Expres­sion Engine to use as the engine of this site. One rea­son for set­tling on EE is because I’ve used it spar­ingly in the past for projects and the road map of fea­ture addi­tions & inter­face enhance­ments (as show­cased at SXSW ’08) looks pretty fantastic.

The other rea­son is I had din­ner with Michael Boyink, recent hire of Ellis Labs (the team behind EE), and through his own artic­u­la­tion and excite­ment I myself became utterly con­vinced this was for me. He’s also the man behind Train-EE which is both an incred­i­ble and infor­ma­tive resource on all that is Expres­sion Engine, oh, and he offers train­ing course ware on it. How cool is that?

It’s been awhile and I real­ize that and it both­ers me, but, it’s clear to me that the pro­gres­sion of this site is to become some­thing more than a blog, but also it needs to be fun again for me.