While little of it has (yet) manifested itself into this blog the last 12 months have been incredibly busy and exciting times for Idealien Studios, both personally and professionally. In July ’09 my fiancee and I sold our house in Ottawa and bought what is as near to the farm of our dreams as one could imagine. 45 acres of wide open vistas, light forest trails, fields of hay and horse pastures are backdrop to a stunning 1830’s stone house, big old beautiful barn and a few other small outbuildings. The transition from city-to-farm life has been a welcome change that has improved my fitness through general work around the farm and decreased my stress level quite noticeably. Even the aspect of the transition which I feared the most, a 50 – 60 minute commute in to Ottawa, has turned into an opportunity.
- Less stop and go traffic than my existing commute which could often approach 45-minutes in-city.
- Ample time to listen to great podcasts on my iPhone via FM Transmitter to keep me up-to-date on the latest details of the web design and WordPress industry(ies).
- Opportunities to think about particular coding challenges outside of pressing deadlines. The results of which are highly scalable and re-usable code that will benefit many current and future Idealien Studios clients. Not to mention others in the WordPress community as the results will make their way out as plugins or projects of an open-source variety very soon.
It has been a magical summer to say the least. At the beginning of August we also decided the time (and place) was right to get married on our farm. Mother nature showered us with beautiful blue skies as many friends and family came together to witness the Oastler empire expand by 2 🙂
After a few well-deserved weeks off to celebrate said nuptuals, many wonderful things are coming together in a timely manner on the professional side of my life as summer too quickly changes to fall. The release of WordPress 3.0 in June brought with it a significant number of new features which further my long-held belief that WordPress = CMS. Deploying this release worthy of the milestone version mark and the Multi-Site capability in particular will enable faster support deployments to all Idealien Studios small-business clients. The use of custom post types built as plugins will also make content management for clients far easier for those not comfortable with html and even faster for those who are. Specific fields capture your data through radio buttons, checkboxes, etc (known in WordPress lingo as meta boxes or custom fields) and short codes handle the data display on the presentation layer that your customers see exactly what you want them to.
As we enter the last quarter of 2010 I am quite excited about the future for so many reasons. I look forward to more opportunities to share knowledge and success together.