Thinkcage

An interview I did with Tiago from Locaweb in Brazil is now online. Read Entrevista com Jason Zimdars, designer visual da 37Signals on their user experience blog (yes, it’s mostly in English).

I haven’t been writing much here, now that most of my effort has been on pieces for Signal vs. Noise and our new Design Explorations series. Here are a few recent articles in case you missed them:

• Exploring the Basecamp Account (Upgrade/Billing) screen
• Highrise Edit Contacts Screen
• Work in Photoshop, don’t save in Photoshop
• “Good enough” instead of “absolutely perfect”
• Design Decisions: Redesigning Basecamp’s global milestone view
• Working at 37signals

I’ve been working on some really great new features in Basecamp that I think you’ll like. Keep an eye on SvN and our Product Blog for updates.

As I wrote previously, ESPN page 2 writer, Paul Lukas, recently proposed a contest to design the uniforms for Oklahoma City’s yet unnamed NBA basketball franchise. I immedially whipped up a concept based on a little spoof piece I had done a few days earlier. The results were posted to ESPN.com today along with a nice mention of my entry. You can see it and the full list here in Lukas’s column:

Meet the Oklahoma City uni finalists

Just a quick reminder that I will be presenting at tonight’s Refresh OKC meeting. The topic is Typography Techniques for the Web, A practical guide to tips, tricks, and best practices for achieving elegant type in HTML and CSS.

The meet-up is this evening, August 21st, 2007 at 6:30pm. We meet at the downtown library in Oklahoma City. If you’re in the area please stop in — it’s a great little meet-up and refreshments will be served. More info at www.refreshokc.org.

Hope to see you there!

Those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed (both of you) are about to notice a change. A few weeks ago I stopped splicing in my del.icio.us links and Flickr photo feeds so all you’ve been seeing is the woefully inactive blog feed. The reason? Jaiku. Jaiku is the best solution I’ve found to address my long-standing desire to offer a really comprehensive JasonFeedâ„¢.

At it’s core, Jaiku is a twitter-like app that allows for short IM-like blog posts. But the real beauty is it’s capability to read and splice most any RSS feed into your personal stream. And I might add, it does a marvelous job of auto-discovering these feeds. All you have to do is point Jaiku to a URL and it will find any associated feeds. Very slick. So the end result is a combined feed showing a large portion of my online activity. If you want to know what Jason is doing online (not sure why you would) you can see it all on Jaiku. The feed combines my Jaikus, tweets, blog posts, Last.fm tracks, mog tracks, upcoming events, Flickr photos, and my links from del.icio.us and digg. Its everything!

So tonight, I replaced my blog feed with the combined feed. This should show a lot more activity and really better represent me. If it gets to be too much, though you can still get the classic blog-only feed here.

I reshuffed a few things in the XML feeds for the site. So if you’re a subscriber (and really, why wouldn’t you be) you’ll see a little more than normal in the feeds. The biggest yet most transparent change is that I am using Feedburner to serve this blog’s XML feed. For most of you this will be transparent as the change was made via a server redirect. However you will notice that in addition to the none-too-frequent text posts you will also see pictures. After playing around for the past few months, I’ve decided to abandon my homebrew moblog for the ease of use of Flikr. Flikr is great, offers nice presentation and lots of community features. What’s more, Feedburner allows me to splice my Flickr images right into my regular RSS feed.

So, if you’re still subscribed to the Moblog feed – thank you! And you’ll see photos exlusively from Flikr for the time beging. However, those photos will now be automagically shown in the main feed so why not just use that one?

Later on I’ll integrate this all better with the site. I’d like to display the Flikr content in this template as well. I am also contemplating a move to Word Press or some other ready-made system.

I’ve been busy. Yeah, well who isn’t? After a truly trying stretch over the past few months I’m able to exhale and think about life again. Much of the pressure rests on the shoulders of a very demanding freelance work schedule — you know, in addition to the full day I put in at EF? While the extra income, unique projects, and opportunities to work with people I like and respect makes freelance a part of my life, the amount of my life that it has taken up over the past few months has been far too great.

That said, it is a tremendous relief to have finished up a couple of large projects (and many smaller ones) and start thinking about life again. It is fascinating to me how an inbox full of mail, a desk full of papers and magazines, a news aggregator full of unread posts, and a ever-expanding list of household projects can really add to the stress.

So now it’s time to come down, a get back to normal life. For me that means: Catching up on information (blogs, mail, messageboards, etc.). Finally getting to play World of Warcraft. Taking a little time off and spending it with the family. Working on my long-neglected personal project (like this blog). Restart the book on my nightstand.

It’s good to have the weight lifted.