Archives

It looks like I update sometimes
2012 (17)
February - 2
January - 15
2011 (48)
December - 26
November - 22

Categories

Hurray for things!

blog

code

fun

music

When life gets hectic and stressful...

       

February 22, 2012 posted to blog & tagged: sally

At least I can snuggle up with this girl...

All this interviewing

       

January 26, 2012 posted to blog

I've recently started a round of interviews with varying companies here in New York. I'm a User Experience Designer and Product Manager so my job is to bridge the gap between creatives and developers and then bridge the gap between them and business mand management and then bridge the gap between all of them and QA. It's a fucking thankless job but I enjoy designing UIs and really get a kick out of User Experience as a professional and as a student of its theory.

All of this interviewing is making me remember all the times I've dealt with product that didn't work the way it was supposed to, developers that hated work and worked really hard to prevent work from ever coming across their desk and management that pushed back against anything and everything innovative and cut corners on rounded corners.

My favorite metaphor for one of the companies I worked for went something like this;

"If we were designing an umbrella, this company would make a great umbrella that prevented you from getting wet. However they would refuse to let the umbrella close and it would always have to remain open. Because why would you want to close an umbrella when its raining? What do you mean it's not always raining, then why have an umbrella?"

And that circular logic would make the round until I felt like jumping off a bridge. Obviously an umbrella's function is to keep you dry but then a good feature would be for it to close and become compact. And quite honestly an umbrella is closed more often than it's open so there's some logic in thinking the closed state of an umbrella is equally important to an umbrella that is open. Apply that logic to software that has a main function and is feature rich in all the obvious ways but lacks in support features that really tie everything together.

So that's what I'm reminiscing on. I launched a new website at verticalcomix.com. Currently Rokked has a 79% bounce rate. Which is awful but getting better evrery day. Troll Dad has a 41% bounce rate. I have no idea. I think it's really just the content and nothing to do with the engagement of the site. Vertical Comix is basically the same site as Troll Dad and has a 96% bounce rate.

So I have a bit of research to do and probably some side by side testing between the two domains. What I learn from the comic CMS I can hopefully apply to Rokked and beyond.

Making Rokked More Social

       

January 07, 2012 posted to blog

I need to start thinking of ways to make the site more interactive. Right now I don't have the content to really support a lot of users but I should start focusing on how I might intrigue potential users into staying on the site and interacting with certain call to actions. I don't mind the website serving as a one stop link click but I would like convert some users into some sort of action. I don't expect to be a reddit/facebook style hangout but I would like to be more than just a link dump.



Time to rack the ol' noodle.

Taking a couple of days off from development

       

January 05, 2012 posted to blog & tagged: update

I'm going to be taking a couple of days off from any major code changes in order to really just use the site and get an idea of some features I would like to add before proceeding. I need more content and I think in the next few days I should really pump as much as I can into it. I think the difference, I'm hoping, between this iteration of rokked vs other iterations of rokked is that since I'm doing all of the development, if I get burned out on development I can switch to content mode if I get burned out on content mode I can switch to development mode. I really want to re-tool the management sections and make things a bit more purty.

I'm happy for now. I can put anything that interests me up on my blog and hopefully it'll interest other people too.

I still want to do an update about the previous versions of rokked.

Taking down old posts

       

January 03, 2012 posted to blog

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. I have to take down the non-code/non-blog posts in order to create a new post style. Lots of dead content about to happen which will suck but will need to be done to better the site in the long run. Besides this blog has been through so many changes and lives that another decimation of content can't really phase it at this point.

How to remove dead files from Mac Sidebar

       

December 29, 2011 posted to blog & tagged: mac, apple, osx

Just a tip for anyone that might come across this. The mac sidebar can be annoying with how it caches files you drag over to it seemingly forever. Once you drag a file to the sidebar, it's there and it will not leave no matter how much you beg it. Over the years I've built up a fairly big reserve of dead files that have made their way to my sidebar. I finally decided to do some house cleaning and remove them but lo and behold!! Read More

I didn't get to really work on anything today.

       

December 14, 2011 posted to blog & tagged: cerebro

I attempted to continue the Emacs tutorial but got side tracked trying to make Facebook comments 1) notify me when a new comment is made (didn't work) 2) post the comment and shares count (didn't work). It was a fairly frustrating and uneventful day. I want to get drunk.