I’m working on putting together a Flash-based portfolio - so keep a look out for that.

Until then, if you’re looking to see any of my previous Flash work, you can find them on my school portfolio site here. I’m not working as many evenings or weekends, so I hope to have a better portfolio online soon.

I couldn’t take it. I have too many projects that I’m working on, and too much school work… that I need to get started on. I found a fun theme that could hold me over for the moment until I had time to finally break down and decide on an idea and stick with it long enough to create my own theme. It doesn’t have the Journal stripped out of the main page, and /journal doesn’t work at the moment, but all the content is easily found for now.

Enjoy!

P.S. Sorry!! The forum’s still broken. I’m in the middle of mapping out the database tables between Vanilla and bbPress to see how that works out…

Things are going really well. My brother appears to be settling in well in his new place far from “home” and even making friends. His job is sounding like it’s requiring less travel, stress, and hours, and he’s even taking kung-fu classes!

My job changed, and I should be getting the full details of my projects tomorrow - I’m very excited. No more on-call. Yay! I have a life now. Yay again! I’m getting out and walking with the dog (it’ll be more often once it gets warmer outside). I’m working on a website with a friend for our favorite local restaurant in exchange for food. I have a growing list of design projects for another company to work on. One of the projects is a new logo design - and I think I’m finally on to something that will fit well. These projects will also help finally pay off some debt. Our taxes have been submitted and accepted - and are really nice this year because we bought the house. That should help give us a small buffer as well as catch up on a couple of things. I’m also actually making decent progress on my school work as well!

It’s amazing what some “spare” time can do.

Now to make progress on redoing the master bedroom. Ha!

I’ve been resurrecting a couple of older “sitelets” from my ancient website backups.

Make-URL lives again (and with its own domain)! I still have a bunch of “features” and checks to it, but it works. Mostly. Keep checking back.

I also brought back my little site dedicated to the progress of my design classes. I still like the overall look and feel. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s nice and uses a bit of PHP for the snazzy side menu, navigation, and setting the page titles. I’m just updating the content and doing a bit of housecleaning on it. I hope to at least have this one done before the end of the weekend. The Make-URL site will probably be several weeks before I consider it “finished.”

As part of my New Year’s resolution, I’m going to finally make good on all of the websites for local stores/restaurants that I’ve been wanting to do. I have all of these great ideas. Hopefully they’ll feel the same way and take me up on my offer.

So far I have my favorite restaurant - the owner has been wanting a web site for ages. I tried to approach him about it when I was unemployed - er… freelance? - but he already had a designer (who, 3+ yrs later has yet to produce anything as far as I can tell). Not like I’m much better. We’ve been talking about doing a website for him since… November? But then we found the house and started stressing out over getting the loan. Then DST.

Now is the time. I need it. I need to be more creative before IT burns me out or something.

I also just got an email from an old client. He was great to work for and would love to do some more work for him again. I just hope this time around I don’t end up having my day job completely suck all of my free time away from me again so I can actually complete his projects in a timely manner.

Anyway.

I just found out that there’s a tutorial to integrate Wordpress and Vanilla. I’m going to try to implement it in a dev area to see how much I like it. Especially since there’s a new version of both scripts out now. I’ve been wanting to find one CMS to manage my entire site (journal, forum, static pages, etc), but have been unhappy with any of the solutions that I’ve looked at so far. Either their GUI completely sucks, it outputs html full of tables for the layout design (yuck!!), or it’s great - but far too complicated to try to figure out how to implement / template…

I think I’ll try this first. If I don’t like it… I’ll neglect my site for a bit longer while I work on client projects and revisit it when I get inspired again.

=)