Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.

Matt Mullenweg
Creator of WordPress
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Because I do so much custom development to solve a problem and create solutions, I rarely run into this phenomenon. It’s been a cool learning experience, and I have so much more of an appreciation for app developers.

My web development abilities

For the past year, I’ve sort of been developing in a vacuum. I connected with some people over the internet and read several articles, but I always assumed that there was so much stuff I didn’t know.

I found myself sitting in many of the panels with my peers as the panelists/demonstrators would introduce new technologies and none of it was extremely new to me. Most of it (I’m eluding to my next point now) I already knew about…except…

I found out that I can do a lot more with the iPhone.

I have an iPhone, so obviously I’m going to be more excited about it than people that don’t have one and are developing for it, but I went to a panel called “Hold the Cocoa: Building an iPhone App with HTML and CSS3 by Jonathan Stark. He shared how quick and easy it was to build an iPhone app with the development tools we already had in our tool-belt. We all geeked out as he showed us live in the presentation how easy it was to build an app (even a native app) using open source tools that leverage jQuery, CSS3, and HTML5 to make a badass little app.

I can’t wait.

^{via nataliedee.com}

For the past year I’ve been doing contract photoshop work for my former employer. It has been a great experience, but it’s become overwhelming, so I’m taking some time off. For the first time since my daughter was born, I’m actually going to have free time again. I’m very excited about this free time…and here are some things I’m thinking about doing:

1. Finishing and releasing this blog theme; there’s more than meets the eye here I assure you.
2. Designing and creating a new theme that can be used by businesses as a generic website, complete with color schemes (I like color schemes).
3. Building a little more functionality to my baby book theme and releasing it to anyone who might like that kind of thing.
4. Creating a case study of a site that looks COMPLETELY different in Internet explorer as it does in other browsers…oh the beauty of CSS.
5. Creating a website that is made entirely out of <li> elements. This would more than likely skirt some of the box-model problems IE has…it’d be interesting to see.
6. Writing tutorials for people who want to use WordPress as a CMS and have some working knowledge of code. It’d basically be a step-by-step process for a few weeks maybe?
7. Writing an in-depth guide for creating Photoshop actions.

I’d like to do something that’s a challenge to me and helps other people in the process. I don’t know if anybody would be interested…but when I get the time to do this stuff, I really like helping people learn.

So, world. If you’re listening, sound off. Any preferences? If not, I’m going in reverse nobody cares order.