As Kim and I move closer towards going full time with our web design and development business and other projects, I’ve been considering getting a “real” blog. You know, the kind with ping-backs and comments.

While this custom-brewed baby has served its purpose well (I even added RSS!), I’m feeling like I need to move into the modern age. For one, it would be really sweet for people to be able to comment on my posts, and I just don’t feel like programming that or any other blog feature that I could just get from WordPress.

This project has been fun. And I’ve definitely learned a lot putting this site together. The blog has accomplished exactly what I intended it to: it got me to write and produce.

So a new blog may be in the works when I get a little more free time. Until then, we’re it keeping real.

On Sunday, I proposed to Kim. I wasn’t too worried about it, but for the sake of completeness I must tell you that she said “yes”… or more accurately “I want to marry you too.”

We’re very excited.

Being the nerd that I am, I made t-shirts for us to wear. It was actually a rather ingenious idea that came out of a conversation I was having with a friend at work. She said to me, “When women get engaged, you know it because they’re wearing a ring. But how am I going to know that you’re engaged?” My response: “Easy. I’ll wear a t-shirt. Jason’s engaged.”

I fooled around with some ideas similar to the “I’m with stupid” style t-shirts you often see. You know the ones with the arrows on them. My version would have read “I’m engaged to stupid”. That sounded a little too cold for me though.

I ended up going with two separate designs. The first for Kim says simply “I’m engaged” with a heart design and a glowing diamond ring on it. My shirt says “She said yes!” with the word yes in a comic-style quote bubble.

We wore the shirts on Tuesday as we were visiting our families, and they were a big hoot. Referring to the shirts in his joking tone, my grandfather said, “Why would you want to advertise that?”. But I know that after 57 years of marriage he really does know why.

The t-shirts were such a success that I’ve decided to share them with the world. You can see the designs and even buy shirts of your own at our CafePress shop. I don’t want to beg for your patronage or anything, but I am looking at a decent sized wedding in my future. 😉

Yay to me!

Kim and I just launched a beta for WineLog.net. WineLog is a site to keep track of wines you have tried and discover new wines to experience. Our hope is to become the greatest wine site there is.

Please have a look at the site, and let me know what you think. If you need an invite, use the contact form of this blog or some other way to send me a note. I’ll forward you an invite as soon as I can.

It’s been a while since I’ve uploaded artwork here. Here’s a graphic I made for a friend. I put the image on a t-shirt, which you can purchase yourself at Cafepress. Also, if you’re interested, here is a link to the rest of the current Stranger Studios t-shirt collection. 

Emily Chang has posted our interview with her on her eHub site. Check out eHub Interviews Mobilicio.us.

Remember that InvestorGeeks site? Whatever came of that?

Well you can read my review of Jim Cramer’s Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World and other articles by me over at InvestorGeeks.com.

Today my colleague and I will be releasing a new project. Mobilicio.us is a mash-up between the del.icio.us bookmarking service and Google Mobile, a tool which “mobilizes” websites for viewing on limited-display browsers. Mobilicio.us will let you view your del.icio.us bookmarks from your phone’s browser and automatically mobilize any site you visit.

This has been an amazing project experience for me. We’ve gone from the initial idea (from Rob trying to check his flight status from his phone at the airport) to initial release in less than a week. Take that, suckers!

I hope you enjoy.

I’m just posting to test my new custom-made RSS feed. My last 5 posts should be added to the rss file located here: recent.rss.

UPDATE: This is a post from the old blog, which was custom built. On the old system, it was a big deal that I managed to implement RSS feeds. With WordPress, it’s built in. Here’s a link to the current blog feed, or just look for the orange RSS icon in the right sidebar.

Things are moving so fast in this “Web 2.0” world. It is more crucial than ever to get your ideas to market faster than the competition. Because there is competition. No matter how novel your idea is, you have to assume that there is someone out there (probably a large group of someones) working on the same thing.

I just ran into standpoint and Predict Wall Street, which in their own ways do a lot of what I had planned for my rateThings site. [My Abandoned rateThings Demo]

The two sites listed above are developed by smaller companies. Still Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Amazon will always be a threat to any new Web 2.0 application. Of course those companies are also potential partners (buy me out!).

The goal of sole-proprietorship-like projects like mine should be to fill a niche so small that other players are overlooking it. I’m not going to be able to build a recommendation system better than Amazon’s. I just don’t have the time or the resources. However, if I can focus on just the wine-drinker’s experience, I might be able to gain some traction with the site before bigger players get in the game.

Hopefully I can slip WineLog out to beta before I miss my chance.

If anyone read this, I have two new toys up in “alpha” stages.

1) rateThings: This site allows you to rate and comment on items posted by me. The main idea of the site is to enable users to quickly view the best comments of people who disagree with their own standpoint. For example, if I rated Bush’s State of the Union Address a 5 I would see the comments of everyone who rated the address a 1. For people looking for reinforcement, you can also view comments that “agree” with your own.

2) Wine Log: This is a browsable DB of wines which allows users to rate wines and receive recommendations. You can catch up on the site’s development at the blog here.

Both sites are in the very early development stages, only partially functional, and tremendously ugly. But I am interested in your thoughts.