Mashed Potato Success

istock_000002938934xsmallWe had the whole local family over for Easter today and watched the Masters. Games didn’t work because everyone was too tired to actually move to go play them, which I was fine with since I was the one napping on the carpet like a dog on a lazy day. What I’m most excited about was my successful first batch of mashed potatoes. I have it from a reliable source that it was the first time a certain someone ever took seconds of mashed potatoes, so they must’ve been as good as I thought they were. I thought they were tasty, run of the mill. I’ll let you decide because I’m going to tell you how I made them.

Jesse’s Supremo Mashed Potatoes

4lbs of potatoes
1tbs garlic powder
1tbs onion powder
1/2tbs salt
1/2 tbs Italian seasoning
1/2 tbs basil
butter and milk to consistency (1/3 – 1/2 cup milk and a couple of pats of butter)

Peel the potatoes and cut into 1″ cubes into a large pot and boil until soft when poking with a fork (15-25 min). Use a good old potato masher to mush it up and leave some chunks if that’s how you like them. Whipping later won’t really rid it of all chunks if you leave them there at this point. Add the seasoning, butter, and the minimum amount of milk and whip with a mixer on low until you have a good whipped consistency, then crank it up to medium. Mix for a minute or so and add season more to taste if necessary. Serves at least 8-10. Add cheddar cheese to the top and bake leftovers in the oven at 350 until the cheese melts for twice-baked potatoes.

Trust me–it almost doesn’t need gravy (can’t NOT do holiday gravy, man!), though I love my salt and pepper and added as I usually do at the table.

The End of an Era… Again… Leaving iThemes

istock_000003721281xsmall-flipFive months ago, I left the nest of my last job to the vast expanse of the start-up business to enter at the ground level. Life was, and still is, exciting every day: meeting customer requests, helping teach people how to use FTP and WordPress, and hopefully generating more income for the company by upselling and holding enough hands to create a fanbase.

Today, this morning around 11:00, the era as Customer Support Manager of iThemes came to an end. For now, I’m shocked, hurt, and all of the other things that come with losing your job, but I do have good company as I am reminded of a post a while back from Bryne Reese, who was let go from Six Apart: A sad departure from Six Apart and looking to the future.

The good news first: we still have 12 months of COBRA left, my moonlighting is doing quite well, so while I look for another job, we hopefully aren’t going to drain much of our rainy day savings, and I got a decent severance package to allow me some time to get my bearings. With such news, there is usually an influx of work that comes in with news of one’s free time, so I hope that is the case for me as well.

The bad news is a tad more complex, as it primarily deals with emotions and history. I really don’t want to go back to my last employer for a number of reasons, but they had the best darn insurance and benefits package I’ve had. I also don’t want to be in that profession any more now that I’ve finally started to make a name for myself in the WordPress and online publishing industry. I’ve got clients, references, and testimonials out the wazoo, and I’m excited to exercise those with my full-time attention now, but feeling the responsibility to get a “real job” and get a salary again. Monster.com isn’t very likely as an option because I was working in an English degree, but still have about 20 hours left to go, and my area of expertise is computers, which often require a computer science degree to land a desk job.

My mind is going 1,000,000 miles per hour with plans, ideas, and ways to keep our heads above water. I’m certain it won’t be a problem… I just don’t know what path to take right now. Looking at this on the home page, it’s such a stark contrast to yesterday’s post, it’s unbelievable what a day will do.

In the meanwhile, if you have any site needs or know anyone who needs a professional, easy-to-use site, please head over to JessePetersen.com and check out my testimonials and services.

JessePetersen.com Is Open for Business

JessePetersen.com - ready for traffic!

JessePetersen.com - ready for traffic!

I’ve been working hard, too hard in some family members’ minds, on my freelance site over the last two weeks. Now that it’s done, I can relax and reap the rewards for a job very well done.

I am in a very unique position at iThemes in that I am the front line of contact with our customers, not just one of the front line. There are only so many things that we offer for support that is included in the price of our premium WordPress themes. We can’t train someone from scratch how to use WordPress or learn enough CSS and HTML code to change their site. We offer answers to specific questions, but projects need to be directed elsewhere.

For the last couple of months, I have been directing them my way for some literal moonlighting. I typically start my second work day around 9-10pm and work until midnight on projects. It’s great money, creates networking contacts, and makes iThemes to be an all-around solution, even if one has to pay for certain services.

It became rather tedious, though, to reply to someone that they can contact a moderator or myself for services and write a long e-mail about my services and fees and hope they e-mailed me back on my personal e-mail. Since I’d been holding on to JessePetersen.com for about 15 months waiting to finally develop some content, I decided to make it about promoting me and what I do rather than me forcing myself into writing or producing material. Now I can simply refer people to my namesake domain (I sure hope they spell both names right later) and they can see that I am the real deal with testimonials and links to prove it. Not to mention the theme I’m running – /horn toot!

I’m quite proud of what I did at the bottom of my home page, though I openly admit that my wife had a LOT of very constructive and helpful suggestions about certain elements of the home page and it now passes with flying colors in her very distinguishing design opinion. Please check out that little area and the hover action on the guy, especially. I’d have to say I’m more proud of the bird and my graphic and code work putting that together, but the Image is Everything ad is definitely my best marketing work to date.

Customized code turned these from text areas to this!

Customized code turned these from text areas to this!

This is actually our latest iThemes release, and the first of 2009 for our rapidly expanding group of 2009 Theme Club customers. By purchasing the Club package, customers are entitled to every theme we produce this calendar year, so the release of this theme, called Architect (demo site here), produced a new wave of sign-ups today. My fingers were quite busy creating new member site logins for their download access since the value of receiving our premium themes at less than $35 per multi-use license them is $100 off per theme! The more themes we produce over our promised number reduces the cost per theme to the customer even more.

Introducing the Easiest Theme Ever: FlexxTheme

After nearly two months of development, iThemes has released what we believe is the world’s easiest theme to use and modify. Because we have nearly 20 themes in 9 months, we felt that it was time to rock the industry and develop something that takes a quantum leap in terms of user-friendliness.

The result of our company retreat in September was a whiteboard that detailed our theme goals and dreams of usability-enhancing features, along with the framework of a layout options page to allow for 96 unique layouts. Within a couple of days, it looked like we were going to have around 700 layouts. The final tally is an industry-leading 1,056 unique, functional, and ultimately desirable design layouts. [Read more...]