Matt Heerema

Restructuring The Site

A couple weeks ago, I alluded to a new version of this site coming out. Along with the redesign, I’m considering a restructuring of content, from an IA standpoint as well as topic standpoint.

I have four great loves in my life: Jesus, My Wife (and kid (soon to be kids)), Music, and Web Design. I talk about one of these here generally. Occasionally I mention news about my family, and I have a religion category that I’ve posted to exactly three times.

The new site would roll all of these topics (likely with the emphasis continuing to be the Web industry) into one blog.

I’m thinking the changes would be that I’d start posting music reviews, news about my band (and music we’re putting out) thoughts about being a husband and father, and the occasional theological topic.

Would you stop reading if I posted about Jesus from time to time? Music? My family? I promise this won’t become a “baby blog.” I’m just thinking about combining my “lives” here. We’ll see where it leads.

I promise to have easily accessible feeds for each topic so you can filter if you’d like ;-)

Adding Comments to Tumblr

You might have seen that I’ve been playing around with Tumblr at omni.mattheerema.com - using it to compile most of my different soc.net and blog feeds into one location. Not sure how useful it is, but it’s fun to play with. Tumblr has some great posting tools too. Maybe someday I’ll switch to it as a blogging platform entirely, it fits my style better. Short, media driven posts, rather than long articles (which I never write).

One major thing that has held me back from going all Tumblr is their lack of comments.

Disqus has fixed that problem for me. I hope they stick around.

Getting Things Done: Make Time to Make

I’m not sure how many times I’ve recently told people that “my job has changed dramatically” and “all I do” now is answer e-mail and attend phone calls, whence my comment on twitter about being able to do 90% of my job on my new iPhone 3G (which continues to amaze me).

I have definitely felt off my game, unproductive, and am staring down the barrel of managerial irrelevance. If I’m not able to continue sharpening my design and development skills, and spend all of my time on project management and people management, then very soon I will no longer be a Web designer.

Having read Merlin Mann’s recent series “Make Time to Make”, I don’t think my problem lies in the phone calls and project-related e-mail. It’s all the e-mail requests for help and ideas, Twitter, and incessant IMs that keep me off my game.

Now I just need to figure out how to manage that.

Constant, short, queries from my team via e-mail and IM are a constant part of my day, and an important (?) part of my job. Many of these require a near immediate response. Maybe I need to accept my fate as a manager. Thoughts?

mattheerema.com v.5, someday

mattheerema.com v.5, someday
Originally uploaded by mushin.

This has been sitting, half finished, for quite some time now. Maybe someday I’ll be able to build it.