willie jackson

Month: March 2010

  • The case for personal websites

    When you apply for a job, the first thing a recruiter or HR professional is going to do is Google you. In 2010, you are who Google says you are. For the forward-thinking employee, this represents a chance to get a leg up on (and even eliminate) the competition. There is no better way to impress a prospective employer than to put your best foot forward online without anyone asking you to. Have you registered www.yourname.com? What are you waiting for?

    Since 2005, I’ve maintained a personal website. It has grown from little more than a resume and a few links to what is now the hub of my online strategy and networking. I use it to hone my web development skills, position myself for key opportunities, and optimize the search results for my name. I’ve gotten countless unsolicited compliments, web design inquiries, and even a few job offers as a result of my website. What started with a class project (creating what we called an Interactive Resume) has turned into a service I now provide for clients across the nation.
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  • Enabling mod_rewrite in Apache

    This post is a bit geekier than usual but I have to share it because it’s something that was a bit frustrating until it was resolved.

    I built a simple LAMP server at Linode this week and was testing out a WordPress site on it. Everything worked fine aside from the links, which was more than a minor frustration. My custom permalink structure is as follows:

    I have the same permalink structure on my other servers. Nothing crazy.

    My /var/www/ directives were as follows:

    Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all

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  • WordPress events in Atlanta

    I had the pleasure of attending two events this week in Atlanta, both centered around how to use WordPress as a marketing platform. The first event was a roundtable discussion organized by Mike Schinkel and hosted by Matter in their gorgeous Midtown studio. In attendance were the following WordPress experts:

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  • Okay, I’m reloaded!

    That’s a Tony Montana Carlito’s Way quote, of course.

    This is just a quick post to announce my much anticipated (joke) redesign! I’ve been working on it for about a day now, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. The new focus is on a static homepage (which will be updated ad nauseum I’m sure) and less on the blog posts (which are visible in the footer). The new design is still built on the Thesis Theme Framework of course, but leverages a modified version of Dave Wilkinson‘s wonderful Osmotic premium skin. It’s actually a limited-edition skin that had sold out, save for a copy that Dave’s wife never used for her site.

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