Jared W. Smith

One of my focus areas in the early parts of this year has been to extract some of my side projects, such as Serious Business and Charleston Weather, out from under jaredwsmith.com so that I could give them some room to breathe and take on lives of their own. This process has largely been completed for Serious Business, as I was able to move it to a Tumblr site (which has worked well so far). Establishing Serious Business with its own branded site and Twitter account have been useful in forming a stable audience.

Now that Serious Business is done, it’s time to give my weather efforts the same treatment. The work on that started very, very early this morning, culminating in a somewhat buggy rough draft of the beginnings of a brand new Charleston Weather site at charlestonwx.com. read more »

So I’ll set the scene for you:

Disgruntled College of Charleston fan, home after witnessing a loss to Elon of all teams, wants to sit down, sip on some Gatorade, and work on his Facebook “25 Random Things” meme post because seven of his friends have now tagged him and he just wants to END IT (and terrorize additional people with said meme).

So, he sits down and begins writing his post, when he wants to refer to a post on his blog for some of the answers. He finds a strange white space in his layout that makes zero sense whatsoever. He goes and checks the source code…and OMG. Keywords. Lots and lots of keywords. Viagra, tablets, medicine — you name it, it was there. Site: Compromised.

Oh, and that guy? That was me. read more »

Update: I completed the move last night (as you probably guessed by how much faster the site’s running). You shouldn’t find any breakages but if you do, let me know.

Access to jaredwsmith.com will be intermittent through the weekend as I’m transitioning over to MediaTemple for this and a couple other projects. I’ll discuss the whys of it at a later date (if you follow me on Twitter, you know why). The move will make things a bit hiccupy here as the transition is made, but once it’s done, performance should be a LOT better.

Thanks for reading, as always.

I’m a chronic overthinker. I tend to really overthink a lot of things and drive myself insane in the process. This goes for matters of my personal life as well as my professional nerd life — especially as it pertains to websites, including this one.

A couple Marches ago when I was frantically reworking this site, I decided to split the homepage off from the blog in an effort to have a “full” website — somewhere to point people at projects, biographical stuff, and the ilk. I also wanted the opportunity to feature posts on the site’s homepage in an effort to be something of a gatekeeper over my material.

However, in this latest redesign, I noticed that the “homepage” concept was kind of a bummer. It was actually limiting what folks could see right off the bat (I’d write asides that would never see the light on the homepage, for instance). Beyond the filtered blog posts, it didn’t offer much besides a tag cloud for said blog, Twitter status, and what was playing via Last.fm (which was later axed in favor of a FriendFeed sidebar). Basically, I was trying far too hard to have a gigantic website when, ultimately, it should all center around the blog.

Thus, today, the full, unfettered blog makes a return to the root of jaredwsmith.com, because it just makes sense for it to be there. The old “weblog” link simply becomes “archives,” which must look better now that it’s a top-level page. The rest of the site (about, connect) stays the same. Good times.

Now, for hockey. $5 at the Stingrays tonight — sweet!

Somehow I found the energy, the sheer will, and a requisite dose of insanity to release a major redesign of jaredwsmith.com this weekend. I call it Photographica, after the fun rotating photos that you’ll come to see as you browse through the new look.

A lot’s changed on the site, because a lot’s changed in my life. In 2005, when the orange/gray look took shape, it was a very edgy, turbulent time in my life. I was taking a great deal of chances, and it still held a hint of that youthful carelessness as I went about foraging a new identity. That identity’s since been foraged, and has been polished and evolved over the last three years. I’m now about to embark on yet another chapter in life; one that is certain to bring a whole new level of challenges along with it; but it’s also one that I feel I’m heading into on firm, stable ground. That’s what this look says to me; it’s got elements of that stormy side of life (as evidenced by the clouds that extend well beyond the frame of the main content area of the site), but it also brings a calm cleanliness as only Helvetica Neue and the less-loud blues and greens provide. I also think it captures an important element that I’ve tried to reinforce in my life: Stopping to smell the roses and take the world around me in — thus, the rotating photos of the world around me. This is a small set to start with; fear not, as there will be many more down the road. Photos are only a part of drawing a more complete picture of “the world according to me”; thanks to the FriendFeed sidebar widget, I’m able to show you a wider spectrum of my thoughts, likes, and dislikes, as well as what people think of those thoughts, likes, and dislikes.

Photographica evolved from a process that’s taken basically most of the summer. I pumped out at least ten mockups of what the site could look like before one night I was struck with a little stroke of genius. I began to template this out in static HTML; this process lasted several weeks and really enabled me to get it into WordPress quickly over this past weekend. It’s by far my most CSS-heavy design, and really shines on recent versions of Safari and Firefox. I take heavy advantage of WebKit and Mozilla’s pre-release implementations of the border-radius property, so if you’re on those browsers, you will see that rounded corners are pervasive throughout. If you’re not on them, not to worry — this effect degrades perfectly and there is no effect on performance at all. And if you’re still using Internet Explorer 6 for some reason, at least upgrade to IE 7 if you can’t switch to Firefox; you’re going to miss out on the image rotation and a few other items because IE 6 is just incredibly behind the times.

As always, Photographica is a living look and is a work in progress, as all Web sites are. There may be some bugs and some areas to iron out; I’ll fix them. For now, though, enjoy. I think you guys will like it.