Congratulations to Kevin and Jane on the birth of their beautiful baby girl, Caia Jane Broome!

The Ivory website has been live for just over a week now and I have to admit, watching the Google Analytics is totally addictive. I mean, look at this! I think we may reach 800 hits today, and so far for the week we have 6300 pageviews. That's double what we had yesterday.

Ever since we submitted it to coolosxapps.net a few days ago it's gone quite viral. Gotta love the internets. Just wait until we submit it to the Apple Downloads website, we'll see what our hosting can handle then…

Interesting fact: We've had more hits from Italy than any other country. Made it onto one relatively prominent site there and hit the jackpot. 

About a year ago I went looking for a decent, free Mahjongg Solitaire game to download, and I realized that all of the good ones cost money. So Jeremy and I thought that maybe someone should write one that's free and doesn't suck. Someone being us. It's called Ivory Mahjongg, and is available for Windows and MacOS. Now, I can only take credit for the look of the game, and the website design & markup; all of the programming was Jeremy.

As a follow-up to my last post, I'm selling my old iMac. Dorothy served me well, got me through design school and then some. Sadly, however, I've got to sell her to help pay for my new pretty shiny. So if you know anyone who might be interested, please pass it along!

So yeah, turns out that size does actually matter. What you see pictured is my new 24" iMac sitting next to my old 17" iMac, making it look small and silly. If you look very closely you may see a bit of drool on the keyboard. It's a friggin' huge monstrosity and I love it! I don't even need two monitors anymore, and I'm back to using Spaces again. Also, this thing is so bright it's like sitting in front of a car with its high beams on. I have to keep the brightness set to 1 notch out of 16 to preserve my eyesight. 

It's like surfin' the interweb in an IMAX theatre. Without all the screaming kids.

Well, I wasn't a complete sloth this holiday season. In my 2.7 weeks off I spent exactly 1 week with a nasty cold, and managed to design and markup 2 websites (this one included). Not too crazy of an overhaul, but the way I've built the back end makes posting much easier for me, and I've added a lot to the landing page so that you don't have to dig so deep to get where you want to be. 

Since I'll often post 2 or 3 quickies in one day, it makes more sense to show the last 10 quickies rather than just the last one on the home page. There's also much more navigation in the sidebar now. I've taken portfolio posts out of the main blog and added a "recent work" and "recent play" section to the sidebar, as well as categories and external links. So that's that. Please let me know if you find something that's not quite right, or broken.

It was recently brought to my attention that my navigation is missing one thing. There’s no easy way to just get a listing of recent blog postings. The archives pages mix regular posts with portfolio posts (as it should), but for someone who just wants to keep track of what I’ve been up to lately, there’s no page showing only that. Therefore, I’ve added “blog” to the navigation, which is basically an archives page that excludes portfolio work. Now all my blog-type posts and quickies can be neatly found on one page for your viewing pleasure. I’ll let common sense win this time, but don’t get used to it.

I wouldn't have no luck at all.

So, part of the reason I was finally able to find time to finish the site was that I broke my foot almost 5 weeks ago. It was a strange, unlucky incident in my parking garage where I swerved suddenly to avoid an obstacle, too suddenly in fact, and dropped my bike. Luckily the bike sustained only some very minor scratches, because my foot sacrificed itself to save it. I didn't even realize it was broken until I got to work and realized I could barely walk. Nonetheless, I sat through a client meeting and was taken to the hospital after, to discover I had a broken third metatarsal.

None of this is terribly remarkable, things like this happen. It's a bit unlucky, but you heal and move on…. Unless, of course, you re-break it.

Related: Scientists say Hell came dangerously close to freezing over.

That’s right people, I finally settled on about the thirteenth design overhaul and coded this baby up. As you can see, the eventual winner is monochromatic with lots of whitespace. I present to you the new justafrog.

This was a long time coming, I know. When I built my old site, its main purpose was to have an online showcase of my portfolio, and had no requirements as far as being dynamic, but as my interests and portfolio grow I’d like my site to reflect that. Also, sometimes I find I have stuff to say, and junk.

So, what’s there to see around here? Well I’ll give you a quick tour.

Work

Work is just sort of a catch-all for anything I’m doing that’s not just for me. This section is going to start off pretty sparse, as many of the things I’m most proud of at IBC haven’t launched just yet, and therefore I can’t give a sneak peek here. It may also occasionally include other things I do as freebies for friends and family.

Play

This will include pretty much any and all of my artsy extra-curricular …