In other news, I am really proud to announce that I finished putting together the concept behind iFeedFish.com. Thanks to some encouragement from some of the awesome people at work, like Matt (who introduced me to effect queues), and Tom (who totally loved the concept and encouraged me to continue), I am near completion of the site. The bugs are out of the JS animations and overall it’s 99% complete (and totally workable as-is).

The slide transitions that are being done on it are kind of a knock-off of the Coda site using the Scriptaculous library. Once I add a few more features I plan on releasing my JS code under the MIT license, so others can benefit and add on to the effect. It’ll be my first openly released piece of software, and I’m very excited about it.

In other news, I think the move to NYC has been very good to me. I’ve been feeling more creative and coming up with more web concepts than I can count. Today I started using Backpack, and even though I’ve messed with it before I never really got ‘into’ it – something that’s changing now. With the growing community of creative support I have around me, it’s time to kick-it into gear, and once started, I don’t think there’s anything that can stop me.

Finally, I got it all figured out. For the last month, I’ve been secretly trying out WordPress, feeling out how I want to go forward with my web identity. There’s been some adjustment, but I feel strong in publicly launching this site today.

There’s a lot differences between this site and the old VWChica.com – the most obvious being the name. Although I’ve used vwchica for years, I felt it was time to move on, and Rauenzahner.com was picked as a replacement for several reasons. First, it’s a derivative of my family’s last name – and my (great great..) grandparents name in the ‘old country’. Also, it’s fun to make my name even more complicated than it has to be.

Besides the name, it would seem that a lot’s the same. However, I would like to focus on keeping the blog updated – optimally I’d love to be able to write one post a day. But this is new territory for me – although I’ve been writing for years, writing intelligent posts about the latest in web (and not sounding like a blowtard) isn’t as easy as you’d think. I’d like to only have to put my foot in my mouth once a week (at most).

So that’s really it… I’m excited about the relaunch, and I’m hoping that it will help continue my drive for all things web as I continue to leave the ‘academic’ world and journey into the professional one.