I Have Some Announcements/Excuses to Make

Hi everyone! It’s been nearly two months since I’ve written my own post. This is pretty much unacceptable, but I do have some good excuses. Are you willing to listen to them? Or are you just gonna ignore this? Whatever, either way I don’t care too much. I just want to give an update on what is going on around here so you know what to expect and aren’t disappointed when you don’t see anything going on.

The Marionette Book

In June, I informed everyone that I was writing a series of articles about MarionetteJS for Smashing Magazine. Well, plans have changed. Instead, this series is being turned into a book. Whoa! I’ve turned down so many book-writing offers from numerous publishers because I don’t have much time to write something along the scales of a book, but since Smashing Magazine is more concerned with the quality of the book than my speed of production and since I was going to write it all as posts anyway, I decided to go on ahead and write this book.

Socket.IO Screencast

This isn’t a guarantee, but if I can make enough progress on it quickly enough, I might end up getting the privilege of creating a two-hour screencast tutorial on Socket.IO. Don’t worry, it isn’t two hours straight. It’ll be split into several bite-size segments. This would be an amazing opportunity to get my name out there even more, along with the book.

A New Business

I’m still working my normal full-time job with Kaplan University, but my wife and I have decided to try to make more use of our spare time by starting and online marketing business, which I already announced on my social media channels. We have a couple reasons for this, but in the end we hope that we can make it very successful so that I can quit my full-time job so we have more time with each other as a family. I also hope that our income will be able to grow to a level that we’re able to give more to help those who need it all around the world. We’re already giving a substantial portion of our income, but it still has a very limited impact. We want that impact to grow. If you want to join us, then you can sign up through the link in the ad just below this paragraph.

Well that’s enough of the excuses. How about some announcements regarding what you’ll be seeing here on JZJS in the future. (Hopefully the somewhat near future, but don’t get your hopes up too high).

More Screencasting

It’s been a very long time since I created a screencast, but that should end, even if I’m not able to nail down the Socket.IO screencast. They’re more work, but I think they’re more rewarding and worth the effort. I also think that “readers” are looking for more videos and are getting sick of reading everything (I know I am). Video is a great medium for teaching, so I’ve decided I’m going to use it more often. I have a few ideas lined up: Twitter Bootstrap, Socket.IO, and Google Analytics. Got any more screencast tutorials you want me to try? Just let me know in the comments.

A New Look

Twitter Bootstrap 3 is out and it has some great promise. Version 2 also had some promise, but I think that version 3 has a lot more promise in the ways of responsive design. Responsive design is the biggest reason I want to make a change to this site’s theme. I had a plugin installed for a while that automatically gave me a mobile theme, but it didn’t consistently show up when it was supposed to, and sometimes it showed up on my desktop browsers. Not to mention, it wasn’t exactly pretty. I’m designing and coding the new theme by hand, and considering everything else that is going on, it could be a while before you see any sign of it, though I’ll probably the design compositions up on here for some feedback from all of you.

Conclusion

Thanks everyone for sticking with me. I know I haven’t been great at keeping this site up-to-date, but I hope that you all understand and that eventually we can get this site humming again.