From Away

It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted, but as you can see I’ve been quite busy. I’m proud to present the second version of Jeff Smith Designs Online. I’m really happy with this design, so I think it’ll hang around for quite a bit longer than the previous one did. It took me quite a bit of time to get everything as I want it with regards to the layout, and I’m not quite done yet. I’m still not happy with the loading times and have a few more optimizations that I hope to make over the next few days to improve that. I’m always open to feedback regarding bugs, errors, etc. so feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this post or send me an email and I’ll look in to the problems. For all of you visitors that are using Internet Explorer, you won’t have the benefit of seeing the new fancy roll-over buttons in the nav bar at the top of the page. If you’d like to have a look, you could always give Mozilla Firefox a try as it’s a more standards compliant browser and a lot of web pages, especially personal ones will look a lot better.

I’m also pleased to announce that the site validates as XHTML 1.1 Strict and CSS2 (aside from the comment pop-ups which are XHTML 1.0 Transitional). I’ve also added two news feeds near the bottom of the right hand column, one for the main news entries, such as this, and one for the little sidebar entries in my “Worth A Read” section to the right. I’ve also added a spiffy iTunes tracker (iTunes Watcher 2.51 courtesy of Micheal Simmons). Also as of right now, the downloads section is just a placeholder, I plan to add some of my wallpapers and such to that section, but haven’t had the time just yet to come up with a layout for those pages.

Aside from that, a lot has been going on the last few days for me. Krista has a prospective job offer out in the prairies and we’ll be flying out there in a couple of weeks to check out the area and meet with her new employer. We’ll be in St. Albert, Alberta (a suburb to the northwest of Edmonton) around the 14th of August and be staying there for a few days. We’re also hoping to possibly get out to Vancouver to visit with her sister, but it’s still remains to be seen if that can be arranged or not.

I’m really excited about the prospect of moving to a new area. Not that I don’t love Fredericton, it’s a beautiful city, probably the cleanest I’ve ever seen, but I’ve been here for the last 5 years and I feel that it’s definitely time for a welcome change. I’m hoping to pursue a design job out there, however I haven’t sent out any applications as of yet because we’re not sure if we’ll be moving out there for good at least, not until after our upcoming trip. I fully plan to find just about any job I can when we get moved out there just to get a little money flow and then pursue design jobs during my time off and hopefully get some freelance work to make a little extra cash. I had been hoping to rely solely on freelance work, but at this point I don’t believe that it’s a realistic plan for me until I get myself settled in to a new area and get my name and reputation established.

I hope to be making very regular blog entries from now on (well there will be a gap while I’m away, and when I move, but other than that I plan to be completely faithful), so definitely keep checking back for more news, articles, and artworks. Until then…