Dont Trust This Guy why not take my word for it? A blog by Jim Jeffers

For the past year and seven months I have been happily employed at Sitewire, an interactive marketing agency in Tempe. I spent my time there initially as their front end architect and flash developer but eventually fell into the role of lead designer. The experience has been great.

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In the process of redesigning this blog I’ve been stuck on the homepage. What on Earth should I feature on the homepage? Who cares what I put on the homepage? Who is going to the homepage?

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A week ago from today I was flown out to Boston to attend the UI12 conference held by User Interface Engineering. The entire experience was extremely pleasant. I saw many great presentations from speakers the likes of Cameron Moll, Luke Wroblewski, Scott Berkun, Gerry McGovern, and Jared Spool.

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Well it’s time. I finally will be buying a car that is not a Porsche 944! These cars are great fun as I have owned two since the inception of my driving career. This exact vehicle I have owned for the last four years and have used as a daily driver. The surprising thing about these little cars is that they just keep running strong if you put in the time to keep them running. The only bad part about this particular vehicle is that the air conditioning is out of service. And I’ve had more than my fair share of the heat this summer so I feel it is time for me to part ways and move on. If you are in interested check out my ad on Craigslist.

Why am I selling?

It’s time for me to move on. This car is great fun but it’s not really practical. I’ve been having to drive more and more now and I just need something a little bigger with more space for passengers. It’s hard for me to part with this car. I’ve spent a lot of time with it!

What does it have?

It’s a 1984 with Black paint and Black Leather interior. It has the highly desirable and rear black Fuchs rims which Porsche produced in the 1980’s. The interior has the optional wrap around leather sport seats which if I recall were made by recaro for Porsche. The windows, mirrors, and sunroof are power. It’s a 5 speed manual transmission. There are only 40,000 miles on the current clutch. All in all it’s a lot of car for under $3,000. The car has 206,000 miles on it now.

I’m asking $2995.

As I said I’m ready to part with it. Here’s a clean, working Porsche for the same cost as a MacBook Pro. For more info see the add on Craigslist.

Aw man…the second 37Signals workshop in Chicago for Getting Real has already sold out in only 19 hours… I wanted to go

The Ultimate Showdown is probably one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Kudos mad props to Sunny for sharing that with me.

Surprisingly my site got featured on Liquid designs a site showcasing liquid layouts. Very cool especially becuase this is only the half-baked concept. Thanks guys!

I saw the latest cartoon posted by Sam from exploding dog on Signals vs. Noise. It’s called In the future I will get things done. So true…

Considering I’ve been sort of in a slump the last three weeks when it comes to work this really hits me because it’s what I’ve been saying to myself all along. Procrastination is killing my personality. My new goal for 2006 is to manage my time and money better than in 2005. Oh and no more motorcycle accidents. Let’s see how long I can keep this one going.

Yeah I messed things up. Now I’m too tired to finish. So much for live testing.. oh well it’s a personal site I can do whatever I want.

I lost a couple of comments today but thought I’d give my blog a Christmas present by updating to the latest build of Wordpress 2.0. Unfortunately, the upgrade script did not work as planned so I did a lazy dump, dropped all of my tables, and reinstalled wordpress from scratch. Here are a couple of key improvements I’ve noticed:

h3. AJAX in the Admin

The new administrative interfaces breaks the nicely styles Tiger Style Interface plugin developed by “Steve Smith”:http://www.orderedlist.com . However the AJAX widgets and new stylesheet for the default worpress admin are a welcome addition.

h3. File uploading given some detailed attention.

You can now upload files directly in the post:

A nice AJAX file upload block beneath the content window allows you to manage and upload images for your post. You can even drag the image into the content window.

The image management is actually incredibly robust automatically generating a thumbnail and then allowing you to delete, or browse any photos uploaded in the system during the editing process. Even cooler, clicking on a selected image brings up the option to insert it as a thumbnail that is linked or not linked to the image or the content page automatically generated for the given file. It’s something you’ll just have to try out for yourself but I’m very impressed with the techniques used in the administrative area of wordpress 2.0.

h3. Squible doesn’t break on WP 2.0

It looks like the install of Squible 2.5 is running without any modifications needed after upgrading to Wordpress 2.0. So there is certainly no harm in installing Wordpress 2.0, especially considering they have written documentation for upgrading your customized themes.

h3. Wordpress the benchmark for CMS?

I think Wordpress is definitely the benchmark for how all other CSM apps will be judged. The community and features supporting the system are astounding. It should be very interesting to see how Typo developers in the Rails community as it already has an AJAX derived interface but lacks some essential file management that Wordpress 2.0 has just launched. Also the plug-ins and community for Typo still is much smaller so it’s doubtful you’ll find a Google-Analytics plugin for Typo the day after google announces it. Never the less slowly but surely it’s getting there as well.