Seems like start-ups are just a set of balancing acts. Trying to balance costs, prices, promotions, marketing, development, and million other different spinning plates.

Specifically, sales tax is a nightmare.

Well, this blog is old and has a lot of cruft. Really, my whole site is way past its expiration date. It’s been needing a redesign for years now, but I just haven’t had the time. Well, now I’m making the time. New homepage, and a new blog. Let’s try this again, shall we.

So I recently answered a question on the Game Development Stack Exchange site related to an MMORTS (Massively Multiplayer Online Real-Time Strategy) and why that had never come to fruition. And, a few years ago now, some friends and I tried to tackle this very problem and find out how we could do just that. This was before WOW became what it is today, and was more around the time of Everquest. None of us played Everquest, but we were familiar with the mechanics and loved to play Starcraft and Warcraft 3, so we set out at designing what it would look like to have an RTS in a persistent world.

Another revived post from my old blog.

This is a post from my old blog. I’ve seen that this still gets hits on occasion, so I thought I’d bring it back from the archives.

While it may seem that I have already been on hiatus as of late, I will actually be going on hiatus for the next few weeks. I will be traveling a bit over the next few weeks and will not be doing my weekly projects. During this time, I will be online sporadically, and will answer e-mails, questions and concerns about anything as I can.

A new version of Firefox means new features, and as much as I hate their new release schedule it does offer me the chance to get new things to play with sooner. Like the new Websockets API, which was removed from previous versions. Now that I have that to play around with, I’ve got a few fun projects in mind to utilize it.

So, I realize I missed my usual midnight on Sunday deadline. That was actually because this week I was out of town for a few days, and actually just got back. So, this is the update for this week. I’ve entered into the design phase, getting the look and feel down for the project, but I’m not sure I quite like it yet. It still seems a little rough around the edges, and doesn’t quite fit the way I think it should look, so I’ll likely be continuing in the design phase going forward. They say you have to design something wrong to know how to design something right. I will continue to play around with the design until I can get something that I think fits better.

I answered a question a while back on [Doctype])(http://doctype.com) about how to start out as a freelance web designer and developer, and I wanted to go into a bit more depth with it. My answer there is fairly thorough, and is certainly a good overview of the process, but here I wanted to get a bit more into specific good steps, where to start from learning to getting hired, to maintaining a good level of product while still doing enough work to make a living.

For those of you who are following along (which I can’t imagine is too many at the moment), you may have noticed that I did not, in fact, release a new project to play with this week. That is due to the fact that this next project is one that will take a few weeks to complete, and will probably undergo some upgrades in the weeks following. That said, this project is also significantly bigger and should offer a bit more lasting enjoyment.

So this is a brand new blog. My old blog, including all of my old posts, now resides in a backup file to sit in ‘storage’. My last blog, a more technically focused one, was horribly out of date, and not something I ever felt the need to use. This one will hopefully not be that way for two reasons. First, I will be updating this one with information about my weekly projects, and possibly doing a bit of showing off of my process with it. Secondly, this one will be a combination personal, and technical blog. If you’re looking for nothing but articles about how to do neat little JavaScript tricks, there are better places to look. I should have a smattering of these, but I will also probably have rants on this or that, reviews on things I like or don’t, and probably updates on where I am, and what I’m doing.