We’ve just completed our first Rentcheck Film

Since we’re in the midst of Holiday Madness, Sutter threw us a softball and instructed us to simply introduce our team. We had a month to do this, but we were already in production on another project, Mortar, and so we gave our Rentcheck film a good 40 minutes of our time. In case you’re wondering, no, this isn’t acting. This is exactly what happens when we get together to discuss making a film.

The Pitch Session

Of course, I’m very lazy

And the previous site was so tedious to update that the very thought of posting annihilated the inspiration to do so. I had to do all the XHTML markup for the new post by hand, add the prior post to an archive directory then create and update links to and fro. I updated infrequently enough that I had to re-learn the process every time. It was a retarded system that my limited understanding of web development was content with but it drove Jes and I nuts. To the point where we only updated four times in two years. The other expression-crippling limitation was the lack of photos and video support. But that’s all changed.

Go? Go where?

The erstwhile jesandian.com was hosted by Go Daddy. They were the most convenient place for me to get a domain back in 2004 and their service suited me fine. As I worked in web longer though, I realized that they weren’t the best deal in the world. For example, my 3MB jesandian.com mail account was always teetering on the brink of overflow, I begged them to up the capacity rationalizing that I’m paying for service with them whereas Google was shooting 1GB of email storage out of one of those tee shirt cannons. They robotically offered to sell me more space for some laughable $9.95/mo. Stan suggested Dreamhost to me and even gave me a promo code so I got my first year’s hosting for free one penny. The options for administrating your hosting are a million times better than Go Daddy’s were. Their savvy is right up my alley and they know how to communicate with me– Dreamhost: monthly, text-only newsletter, Go Daddy: telephone calls while I’m with clients. To get a taste of what’s what, compare their homepages: 1, 2. I’ll wait. I currently host four sites on my Dreamhost hosting plan (about $100 per year), they add on additional server space to my plan monthly and they offer free installations of content management systems for those of us who can’t wrap our heads around managing a site, but are too proud to settle for a Blogger page.

Which brings me to my apologies

Apologies to this Scott fella. Apologies to the people who think that using someone else’s work is unethical. The theme of this blog was called Barthelme, created by Scott Wallick. My original intention was to take the PHP modules inside a basic WordPress blog, re-arrange them for my own use, create a slick stylesheet and publish a unique jesandian.com. That proved to be way over my head. So instead, I chose the template that used type the way that I liked most and modified the stylesheet until I was happy. I know, it’s a cop-out. But I really can’t justify spending hours and days learning something that I don’t really ever need to know. Besides, there’s license that says that it’s okay to do what I did. Thanks, Scott.

This new site is simple, there’s no links to our web buddies, no dumbass calendar, no archive. It’s just as basic as a book about two people called Jes and Ian. Thanks for reading.