I bit the bullet recently and paid to join a site with some premium themes. The site is Elegant Themes, and for $20 a year you get access to a lot of nice looking themes. They have their own options and most have multiple layout and color options. The themes are very nice looking and well put together, the designer/developer did a great job here, and at $20 for a year, access to all the themes you can want to choose from, and potentially more themes, it’s a great deal.
I made another site for myself, this more for personal stuff, mainly posting pics from my RC Racing and whatnot. This one is on a different host, Dreamhost. My girlfriend’s blog runs there, and with just about everything is unlimited, storage, bandwidth, etc… No offense to A Small Orange, but I kind of like them better now that I have spent time with it.
Dreamhost has a lot of stuff built into their web panel that just makes life easier, and they allow me to manage my domains, ASO does not. The domain thing was huge, it allowed me to setup Google Apps for the new domain in a flash. It’s all little stuff I guess, when you’re talking about little sites it all is little really, but it is nice nonetheless.
So either way, the new site can be seen here, coreytess.net. Let me know what you think, either here or there.
I’ve been busy working, both for my job and to finish learning what I need for Ruby on Rails. I’ve been spending some time with Ruby on Rails again, now that the books have mostly caught up to the version 2 and 2.2 stuff, it’s making a lot more sense. I do find it a little funny that as soon as the books come out for 2.0 and 2.2, they drop 2.3 on the community. I haven’t looked at it much, but hopefully it isn’t a huge change causing everyone’s hard work to become outdated as soon as it is released.
I’m working slowly, I managed to pick up a new hobby over the summer, Remote Control Cars/Trucks, and it has been consuming a lot of time, and to my girlfriend’s dismay, money. Great hobby but it can turn into a money pit when you start racing like I have. I’m sure I can make a whole post on the racing and what I’ve learned and done and so on, maybe I will tomorrow. Anyways, once the weather turns to the cold stuff we enjoy so much up here in New England, I’m planning on going full speed into the rails version of this site. I’ve dug myself a bit of a hole with it already using Wordpress for the interim, as I will now have to write some sort of import for the existing post and content on the site now. All in all it should be nice once done. I’m not sure about a design, but I am sure I’ll try and go simple and keep it along the lines of what is here now.
Work has been busy, I’ve been expanding my programming skills a great deal in the .Net world. I have made some amazing pieces of functionality for our customers. It might be my opinion but I have no shame in taking pride in the things I have made lately. I honestly was not aware of how much I knew and could get done at my previous job. I was not allowed time or opportunity to really program like I do now, and I am glad I made the change. You can take a look at the work we’ve been doing from our corporate site, Websolutions Technology Inc..
For anyone interested my girlfriend does have website finally, we got her setup on Dreamhost after a deal I could not resist. They offered $6.95 for a full year of unlimited hosting. So I set her up with a Wordpress blog like mine, and now she blogs about her quilting and crafting, and she links to her Etsy site where she sells what she makes. Feel free to take a look, http://lovejessicaalways.com.
Well off for now.
