I’ve never seen someone go from friendly and cheerful to all business so quickly. From the reaction, you’d think I’d said “I vivisect puppies.” I haven’t told someone “I work in marketing” since – at least not out of context.

The thing is, they’re partly justified. Think of marketing as a consumer and the first things that come to mind are probably an inbox full of spam, copious handfuls of junk mail (physical spam), phone calls while you’re eating dinner, commercials interrupting your night on the couch, and so on. Hell, why stop there? Don’t forget the bots posting nonsensical links in your blogs, or the bots and slimy “marketers” on Twitter (those guys with 50-100X more “following” than “followers”).

Yeah. Nowadays you’d better clarify: “I work in marketing, but I’m not one of the guys you hate.” Luckily these days I can say “I run my own business through websites,” and folks don’t always realize that that job description includes marketing. Being an entrepreneur is much more smalltalk-friendly than working in marketing.

Rule number 1 of modern marketing: Don’t be a dick.

Don’t send people any marketing materials they didn’t ask for: No spam, no junk mail. Blog comment spam, twitter spammers, etc, are Internet extensions of the old-and-broken mechanic of “I will interrupt people, steal their attention and valuable time, and they will buy my product.” People don’t react like that anymore. They hate you for it. I know I do. Don’t do it.

My projects will never spam you. I refuse to be that guy.

Listy.us will feature Google ads for non-paid accounts. Context sensitivity is it’s main selling point; If I have no choice but to show ads to support a project, I’m going to make sure those ads are something you want to see. As soon as a site can stand on its own without ads, the ads will be gone.

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This is probably my first real attempt at a grid-based layout. Vertically it falls short of perfect baseline alignment, simply because I didn’t feel it was worth the effort to get it perfect. This is a blog. If it were a corporate product page, then yes, it would be worth the trouble to get everything in a perfect rhythm, but it’s not.

Also, I have not tested this in IE 6 or 7. Out of curiosity, I tested it in 8 a few seconds ago and it looks fine. Obviously, ignoring IE isn’t a luxury I can afford in the future, but in the current “I just want to get this WP theme done so I’m using something more appropriate than a public theme” context, it works.

I’ve also added a link to Listy.us, my primary project. There’s nothing there yet, so don’t bother clicking the link. The logo is a result of a number of failed attempts and a number of discussions with my girlfriend. The logo’s meant to be warm, playful, and casual. Most importantly casual. Other list services out there—my would-be competition, at any rate—are too impersonal, too boring. I want Listy.us to be fun. That’s my goal. If I can make some money along the way, peachy.

Somewhat related, here’s the Zend_Db Table cheatsheet I promised in Twitter:

public Thingies extends Zend_Db_Table_Abstract {

	protected $_name	= 'thingies'; // actual table name

	// for a standard primary key:
	protected $_primary	= 'id';	// our primary key

	// OR, for multiple keys, omit above and use:
	protected $_primary	= array('widget_id','thingy_id');
	protected $_sequence	= false;

	// for tables referencing this one:
	protected $_dependantTables = array('Widgets','Thingies');
	// note use of class names instead of table names

	// for tables this references:
	protected $_referenceMap = array(
		'Doodad'	=> array(
			'columns' => 'doodad_id',  // column name that references doodads table
			'refTableClass' => 'Doodads',  // class that encapsulates doodads table
			'refColumns' => 'id'  // column in doodads table that doodad_id references
		)
	);

	// all your CRUD goes here

}

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The desk surface in my office

I’ve missed having a camera with manual settings. My most recent before this one didn’t have a fully-manual mode, or manual focus, and was therefore only good for tourist photography—point and click but nothing artsy. New one has a very nice manual mode: It’s a Canon Powershot A590. It’s no DSLR, but for the money (less than $100), it’s pretty damned nice. I still need to do a little Photoshop tweaking to perfect the image, though. 

I guess I should set up a Flickr account, huh?

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So I set up WordPress, picked out a nice template, did a bit of tweaking, and here we are. The problem, of course, is that while I’ve been trying to flaunt my portfolio recently to a select few, the portfolio that was here is no longer… here. I actually just entirely swapped hosting providers to simplify setting up WP – my other provider only offered MovableType, and I just like WP more.

Sorry about the confusion, folks. I’ve relocated my javascript “portfolio gallery” to tkstudios.org: James’s Portfolio Gallery. I’d planned to just add a couple pages to WP to act as Resumé and Portfolio, but ended up spending a lot of last night managing some problems that crept up on another project. Soon, I promise.

Now that the “Why” is out of the way…

I currently have two experimental projects underway that could probably monetize rather well. I’ll start posting about them as they develop more, and try to give some insight into how I’m approaching the unique challenges of each.

Subjects you can expect to see covered in this blog: Web Design, Security, Marketing, to name a few. I’ll probably muse about off-topic things now and then as well, but try to keep it all relevant.

Here’s to a bright future.

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