Posting has been quite sporadic here over the last couple of months. School, work, and life had gotten to be a little too much. So the blog obviously suffered a bit. But I will hopefully get back to posting on my semi-regular basis fairly shortly.
I recently decided that it would be a good idea to actually give my blog a unique look and feel. So I redesigned it from scratch.
While the overall minimalist theme hasn't changed all that much, the design is somewhat different. Three columns rather than two, adding some navigation, using an actual grid-based layout - all of these are big improvements over the previous version.
I would like to thank a number of people for their help in making the design happen: Blueprint (grid), 37 Signals (link color), and most importantly Rob Goodlatte for lending me his copy of The Elements of Typographic Style (and all the other advice).
So I haven't posted for a exactly one month. That's a bad thing. But I guess moving back to college and trying to launch a large-scale consumer website will do that to a man (make him forget to post to the blog that is).
So anyways I figured I would give a fairly long update my favorite form of prose - a list.
- Coupon DJ - So this is the big news: we have officially launched. Check out the site and let me know what you think. A lot of time and energy has been put into this site by a lot of different people. Remix people, remix. And if you find any IE 6 bugs, let me know as well. I like to think of my self as an exterminator of such things, but alas, they always seem to find their way back into the code.
- Back at Duke - Moved back in on the 17th (of August) and have been loving it ever since. This place really does grow on you after a while. Not to mention the fact that my room is an iPhone's throw away from my room. If you are wondering why I would mention such an outrageous idea, it is due to the fact that my iPhone will not work in my room. After two months of use, this remains as my top complaint - horrible coverage. Fewest drop calls? I think not.
- Duke startup scene - So this summer has been a little coming out party for a number of Duke tech entrepreneurs. I have mentioned them before, but Shoeboxed was the big hit of the summer in terms of sheer publicity. They have been on Rocketboom, Mashable, and more recently, Lifehacker. Taylor has some great people working with him and its encouraging to see them move back to Durham (rather than Silicon Valley) after their summer in Berlin. Breck Yunits started SeeMeWin, an Internet entertainment network with an initial focus on scratching lottery tickets. They are doing some pretty cool things with Ustream.tv and are also donating a decent amount of money to charity. Finally, Sterling Cross has put together (along with a friend from the University of Michigan) an interesting spin on a college-centric start page, Daily Devils.
- Other notes - I would also like to mention two other interesting Duke students. Jeremy Welch and Robert Goodlatte. Both have some great ideas and are pretty darn good at what they do. Both are pretty active bloggers as well. I also recently purchased the Adobe Master Suite. $2500?!?! Nope - $500 with the student discount. As you can see, I am pretty excited.
I figured that I would resolve some housekeeping business with a post:
- Facebook does have some RSS - I stand corrected. After complaining about Facebook's lack of RSS a few weeks ago, I discovered today that your notifications can be read as an RSS. Unfortunately, I already get most important notifications sent to my mobile via SMS. This also doesn't address the Newsfeed RSS problem either.
- Wider blog design - Unlike the NYTimes, which seems to be getting more narrow every time I visit (more on this in a later post), I increased the width of the blog by about 60 pixels. The non-designers reading won't care, but I did this to increase my line lengths.
- New domain names - So I now have a whole bunch of domain names that I own: danielwromero.com, blazamos.com, dratius.com, coupondj.com, he.rodot.us, milliondollarhillary.com, feehanbooks.com. And now I have two more: danromero.tv and kville.tv. What they will be use for, that's still up in the air.
- Upcoming birthday - A much less pertinent piece of info, I will be turning 20 on the 12th. Scary.
- iPhone typing speed - I have been using the iPhone for over a month now and I just want to say that I can type very fast on the keyboard (with thanks to the auto-correction software). I will be doing a complete "one month after" analysis sometime next week.
- Next week - Expect some posts about Twitter/Pownce/Facebook next week. I also think a post about the new MMOG company Multiverse and Indiana University's The Synthetic Worlds Initiative. Exciting stuff.
