mbu's blog

I kinda dig this idea:

Humans.txt

"What is humans.txt?
It's an initiative for knowing the people behind a website.

It's a TXT file that contains information about the different people who have contributed to building the website."

I think I'm going to start doing it on all my projects from now on, another little indiscreet signature when you don't want it plastered somewhere on the site.  People really take for granted how much work goes into developing a nice web site, which is also why I'm no longer doing freebies.

If you see any work cached in Google or any other search engine, or anything being misrepresented as my work for "Bangkok Fight Night" or "Bangkok Boxing Fitness", it was for previous work on fighting events 3-7.  Any current promotion, marketing, or web work is NOT MY WORK.  If it's not in my portfolio, or not tagged by me ("mbu Creations"), it's not mine.  They decided to go a different direction with their online marketing, and I am in no way, shape, or form affiliated with them.

I do not put my name on garbage.  That is all.

Another great book to add to the collection.  This short and concise book is a great quick Saturday morning read, compiling 11 questions into what it calls the "endleofon" questions.

These 11 questions are used as a set of steps when working on a new idea or creation, to develop that idea up to it's best possible potential.  In other words, it gives you guidelines and strategies on how to creatively think about an idea, and is built to work for anyone in any discipline.

Check it out.

Next on my list? "Problem Solving 101" and photograpy book on my new hobby.

I have experienced "design hell" too many times this year.  If you are wondering what that is, take a read of this wonderful and concise summary done by The Oatmeal:

This little story tells the tale of exactly how bad everyone's misconceptions of web design and web development, can turn a project into a first class flight to Hades.

Just got finished reading this great book called "Making Ideas Happen". Scott Belsky does a great job of taking techniques used by other people/companies, summarizing them into a good set of everyday practicies that can lead you to making your own great ideas come to life.

I've already noticed a boost in productivity, just by simply wording the tasks in my daily To Do list with action verbs, and simply thinking of them as "actions" instead of tasks.  I wouldn't be writing in my blog right now if it wasn't for my bi-weekly "Write a blog" task I just started.

Definitely a great read for anyone that has a mind numbing amount of ideas floating around in their head, or even if you have one idea that you've been sitting on for a while and are stuck on where to begin.  Check it out.

Next on my list, "The Genius Machine".

Playing around with the Context-3.0 Drupal module, I found out there was a slight conflict with Zen-2.x theme that I use.

The problem arises with how Context and Zen theme handle blocks, both overriding the theme_blocks() theme hook.  So, what happens is that Context's rules don't work, as Zen wins with the last hook override.  So the solution, is to combine both sets of logic in a theme_blocks function in your template's "template.php".  Utilizing a fix that works with Context 2.x, I came up with the following fix that works for 3.x:

And my digital business card vCard is complete.  Finally.

Go check it out => marshallupshur.com

Welcome 2010!!! It's a new year, a new decade, a new realm to play with new creations. Where have I been the first 3 months of it?  Playing playing playing, here are a few things I've been working on.

If you are seeing this blog post, that means mbu Creations has finally moved off of the nightmare that is Dreamhost. From their horrible shared hosting, to their even worse virtual private servers, and completely non existent support structure, a move was not only suggested but was needed. I think that Dreamhost has gotten to the point where they've signed up so many users they can't adequately serve or support their infrastructure.

So where are we now?

I am happy to say all services have been moved over to Media Temple. Thus far, Media Temple is eons better than Dreamhost, and we are only hosting on their GridService (for now).
[UDPATE]

I always had an amazing love of the new White House web site.  Never did I realize it was powered with my favorite content management system!  Here's a link to the article I just read that gives an in depth look at the project and some of the parties involved: via O'Reilly