ScrnShots Launches next tuesday, May 6 (10:00am PST).

Thank you to everyone who has blogged about it already, and to those of you who have been participating in the private beta. We really appreciate the feedback and the input.

We’re really pumped to see how the community is going to grow in the next few weeks!

It’s official!

We’re named Orange Peel Media!

feedback?

My first week as a startup co-founder was pretty good!

Working for myself is something that I’ve been thinking about for years, and now that it’s here, it really feels no different than doing homework at home. I love it! If I hit a wall, I take my dog for a walk, and if I’m suddenly not into it, I work in the evening instead.

And, next week will be even better, as Greg will be joining me for the “official” kick-off.

One thing that everyone warned me about, that still took me by surprise, is the excessive time that legal and finance can take up. Just thinking about how the daily processes of our company, how things will happen and how things will function is a lot to think about. I knew this, I just hadn’t experienced it… Until now!

What I took away from this week: Taxes alone can suffocate you

Today is my first day inside the startup bubble.

Greg Bell and I have decided to start our own company. Our primary focus for the next 3-4 months is a social community called, ScrnShots. ScrnShots is a place for people to upload, tag and share screenshots of inspirational design, usability or anything else of interest.

Everything still seems quite unrealistic at this point, but I’m sure that the long hours will bring a touch of reality with them.

Stay tuned, as I will be updating this blog regularly with interesting tidbits of acquired knowledge and grumblings.

I was at the Seattle Library this last weekend. I’ve been meaning to go for the better part of a year already, but just never got around to it. It was an absolutely amazing sight to see.

The building was designed by Joshua Prince Ramus. Check out this Youtube Video of Prince Ramus explaining his reasoning behind the design.

I have spent the last six weeks at Engine Digital. I’ve done everything from IA to development, and even some design.

Overall, it has been a good experience. Since most of my experience up until six weeks ago, consisted of working with teams of 6 people or less, I would have to say that the biggest lesson learned was communication among a bigger team.

In a group of 5 people, you can get away with verbal communication. But, when you throw an extra ten people into the mix, mistakes are easily made. Documentation becomes KEY. At Engine we use Basecamp for all our project management, todos, milestones, etc. However, even basecamp isn’t detailed enough to keep track of everything, and so for little bugs, fixes, or edits related to a project, we use Mantis.

Also just general communication among your team, is different too. With a small team, you can’t help but be involved in everyone’s projects. With a bigger team, you have to purposely ask people for feedback, make sure everything is going as planned, because time is easily wasted if you’re not aware of what everyone else is doing, and any twists that the project has taken.

Lesson Learned: Communication is good - Communication with Documentation is better

I was at Value Village the other day, and found my way to the library section. As usual, it didn’t take me long to find the geek section, and what did I find? none other than “IE 4 for Dummies”!!!!

And for those of you who have had a hard time adapting to the 21st century, there’s also “The Internet for Dummies”… back to basics

The other day I was attempting to install wordpress using GoDaddy hosting for a friend. I usually use Dreamhost (not that they’re any better), but she already had hosting set up hosting with GoDaddy. Anyway, I followed all instructions as per usual for installing wordpress, but came up with this error message:

“Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.”

Many google searches later, I kind of guessed that it might be because I was using windows hosting. I switched it over to linux hosting, and nothing happened, so I gave up.

I came back a full 24 hours later, and voila! magic! it just worked!

So what I figure, is that Windows hosting and PHP5 are incompatible for some reason. By simply switching to Linux, everything JUST WORKS.

Last night I finally made time to put the finishing touches on my new design.

Let me know what you think!!!