Okay, so here we are. And as clichéd as it might sound, I thought a new year deserved a new start—so I revamped this place from the ground up.

This all really started when Holly and I came back from South Africa in early December and I had about 2500 photos I wanted to share (but I'm reasonable and am not going to share ALL of them!) I thought about building something into my old site, and I thought about just using EverywhereAndNowhere.com to show them. But, in the end, what I really wanted to do was build something fresh and new.. after all, that is what I do.

So I started with a blank canvas and thought about my goals. From a design perspective, I wanted something relatively simple, but still had some visual interest. My thoughts on portfolio sites is—and always has been—that the focus really belongs on the work, which is why I chose to stick with the monochrome color scheme.

On the backend, I wanted to get familiar with Drupal 7. I've done a lot with Drupal in the last 5 years, but I've never really had the opportunity to play around with the latest version since it was released. Since I was starting from scratch here, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to dive in head-first and get familiar with all Drupal 7 has to offer. Some of the API changes are annoying, but a lot of it makes sense. The biggest improvement, obviously, is the administration interface. It's definitely a lot cleaner and more user-friendly—and I'm thrilled that I'll no longer have to point out the admin interface as a potential down-side to clients when proposing Drupal as a possible solution.

This initial rollout uses a few modules I developed myself. One simply manages the items in my portfolio, another is an update to the flickr module I built for Nothing But Bonfires to work with Drupal 7. As time goes on, I'm sure I'll use this site as a sandbox for more module development.

Being that I'm primarily a front-end developer, the front-end of this site is really where I'm focused. My day job affords me the opportunity to work on some cutting-edge stuff—and it's great. But when you spend your days working on what the latest and greatest versions of Webkit have to offer, it's really hard to look back and do things like we had to several years ago. So if you're one of those unfortunate souls looking at this in Internet Explorer, I implore you to download Chrome or Safari or even the latest Firefox and never look back. Frankly, it's just not worth the time or the effort to try and replicate every single feature here in a browser that doesn't natively support it. I do plenty of that in my day job and being that this is my own personal space, I can draw that line in the sand.

Finally, I've added this blog. Writing doesn't necessarily come naturally for me—and it's certainly not among the things I like doing most. But I decided to start this as a way to give back to the internet in a way. Like so many developers, so much of what I've learned over the course of my career has come from Googling my problem and finding the solution on some random blog. I only hope that what I post here in the future can help someone else solve their problem.

So that's it. A new year, a new start, and a new site. Let me know what you think.