Fixpert

Hi all. OMGosh, I know, I know, I haven’t posted in friggin’ AGES! Let me get you up to speed on what I’m up to, and what’s up with Fixpert.

Living in San Francisco

If you follow the site, you already knew that I moved up here in March 2008. I LOOOOOOVE it up here! I must say, a much better fit for me in LA. I’ve been asked “Fixpert, what do you miss about LA?” The only thing I can think of is the good people that I met and spent time with there. Other than that…um, nothing — no offense, the place just isn’t for me.

Senior User Experience Designer

While I don’t like to mentioned my employers on my personal web site, I can tell you I am the Senior User Experience Designer for a smallish startup in the City. Yes “the City” with a capital “C” that’s how we do up here. I’m really digging the work I’m doing.

Startup life is much busier, more demanding overall, and moves much more quickly than my behemoth corporate life of yesteryear. This has its obvious pros and cons. I get great satisfaction actually seeing my work go live and seeing the influence that I can have over the product in a small company. That said, I haven’t updated this site the practically entire time I’ve been working there so…there’s that.

I’m Drawing More than Ever

I love drawing. Maybe more than I love cookies and puppies. Well, maybe not puppies. But I can (and do) draw puppies eating cookies and get to put together the greatest things in the world in one clump on a piece of paper.

I’m doing a fair amount of freelance illustration when I have time (haha!) and I’m really enjoying it. I’m also drawing quite a bit at my new job.

Segue of the Century

Now that I finally fixed the broken layouts all over this site (which was really easy using YUI grids) I plan on posting many many more drawings, and/or just starting a separate site dedicated entirely to my illustration work. If I do that, I’ll certainly pimp the heck out of it here on Fixpert.

Good day!

I don’t have much time for tweaks tonight, but we’re using YUI at work so I’d like to use it on Fixpert too. I’ve just added the YUI Reset CSS and you can see the effects. Purty ugly so far, but prettiness will come soon. In the meantime, YUI is doing it’s job.

Holler!

Do I have the ‘nards — or in my case, the ‘ovs to start fresh with a Sandbox bare bones WordPress theme and just little by little design up from there? Let’s find out!

Ok, ok, omg, I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy. I swear. What, with all the, you know, having to eat lunch and get sleep at night and things like that, things have just been bananas! No really, I’ve been quite busy since moving to San Francisco. I’m almost settled in now, it’s been about two and a half months. I must say, this place fits me like a glove! I hope to get back on track with updating Fixpert regularly now — thanks for your patience!

The State of Fixpert.com

Alright, so what the F’ is up with the site? Right?! Well, last week, I foolishly upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 without looking into whether or not it would break my custom Fixpert theme that I’ve been tweaking through the years. Well, it did. Upgrading broke it. It broke it real hard.

The site was totally down for a day, then I found the root of the problem and immediately had to jump on SandPress, which is a flavor of SandBox for a quick-and-dirty fix.

What Happens Now?

There are so many things that I’ve been wanting to do with Fixpert for so long, this breakage is a nice kick in the rump that will get me started. Here are some things that are in the works:

• Redesign of the site (duh!) - I’ll be starting with Sandbox and building from there. It’s a really nice bare bones theme that is extremely extensible and has a lot of nice features like dynamic class names.
• Ads on Fixpert - I’d like to play around with different ways to make money. Sorry ya’ll, I hope it’s ok. I will never do any pop ups, any animated anything, just text ads, maybe Amazon referral shtuff, that kind of thing. Mostly I’m curious about making it an experiment and seeing what works and what doesn’t — with the idea that I’ll post my findings as I go.
• Web Comics - Let’s face it, I need to put a lot more of my artwork on here. My redesign is going to focus around supporting a regular comic or illustrative vignette on the homepage. Whether I have time to post articles or not, hopefully I’ll be posting polished artwork on the regular.

Well, I’m moving to San Francisco.

SF Money Shot

Yes dear friends, it’s true. I’ve got two weeks of work to finish up here in LA, then I’m headed up North to search for apartments. Once I’ve secured a place, I’ll come back down, grab my stuff and hit the 5 North, past Cowschwitz, and on into the Bay Area.

Speaking of BAY AAAREAAA! I’ve been listening to a lot of E-40 to indoctrinate myself. I’ve already adjusted the gearing on my bike for the hills, so between those two things, I’d say I’m ready to roll. I start my new job March 3. Stoked.

MASH dude Demarco slays the China Banks