Site Re-Design/Re-Launch

Welcome to the newly re-launched digital home of Joe Stump. A couple of days worth of work has gone into the new site and I’m overjoyed at the results. Most of what has happened to the site you won’t notice, namely the upgrade to JAX 3.0. The new backend has tons of fun toys that the old one didn’t.

As you can see I’ve put together a new designe as well. The new design includes a completely tableless CSS design that, according to http://validator.w3.org, is both valid CSS and valid XHTML 1.1. I’m just happy that the new site looks nice, is well formed and generally runs on better code now. For those of you not running either Mozilla or IE you may find problems. If you do please contact me.

For those of you interested, I relied heavily on CSS info found at http://www.simplebits.com as well as icons found at http://www.gtmcknight.com/buttons/. The new code that you see here allows me to use a WYSIWYG editor, edit my blog roll from a web interface as well as update my quick hits section via a web browser. Unfortunately, not everything is working. Namely photos and blog comments are not currently working. They should be up and running within the next few days. Also, I have not had a chance to port over my old entries (except for the About Me entry). This is going to be a long and tedious task as I plan on editing each one to make sure it’s XHTML 1.1 compliant. And, finally, the archives are not yet up.

About Me

IMG_3471Why anyone would be interested in a short bio describing my rather dull life is beyond me, but it seems like you can’t have a cool website without one and I want to be cool.

I was born in Adrian, MI to Mike and Sue Stump. Being that my mom’s maiden name was Bair, pronounced “Bear”, I was screwed in the last name department from the start. Of course I could have had it worse, such as a classmate named “Harry Johnson”. At any rate, back to me. I spent most of my childhood in Brooklyn, MI. Many of you NASCAR fans out there may recall this is the home of Michigan International Speedway. This time of my life was spent swimming in the local lakes and running around the back woods of our property.

When I was 16 I realized my parents were never going to purchase a new computer to replace the outdated Tandy 3000 collecting dust in the home office. Feeling that I was missing out I bought one at a local computer shop with my own money. She was a beauty! A Cyrix 133MHz with a whopping 16MB of RAM and a spacious 3.2GB hard drive. This was soon upgraded to a Cyrix 200MHz and 48MB of RAM. Not long after I created a webpage and started learning HTML. Thus began my computer geekdom (I say computer because I was already a typical geek).

After a short stint in Northern Michigan, that I’d rather not talk about, I enrolled at Eastern Michigan University. It was here I joined a fraternity and met Moonkhan. I also started programming PHP here as well.

At the end of my sophomore year I joined the team at Care2.com. I moved to California with literally a duffle bag and a back pack. It was here that I was able to learn a great deal about systems administration as well as programming large websites. Since then I’ve worked for a few other companies doing consulting and generally being a typical UNIX geek.

After graduating from EMU I headed west to Seattle, WA were I worked as the Director of IT for eNotes.com and lived with my cat, Crash. I spent about three productive years with eNotes before an offer I couldn’t resist came along from Digg. I spent 2.5 great years at Digg, two of which I spent as their Lead Architect. While at Digg I spent time promoting open standards, working on scaling the website, breaking many things, and growing the engineering team.

I’m currently co-founder and CTO of SimpleGeo, which I founded with Matt Galligan in Boulder, CO. We provide location services for other developers.

Jared the Subway Guy

My recent battle to lose some weight has been somewhat successfully, but nowhere near as successful as others I know of. I saw my freshmen year college roommate lose about 80 pounds over the summer (which he attributed to my fat jokes – hey I’m a “motivational bully” of sorts – we’re still friends by the way). Another good example is Jerry the Subway Guy. He lost about 250lbs by just walking and eating Subway (veggie/turkey subs with no oil/mayo).

The funny part is how this regular guy has been thrust into the national spotlight as a pop icon of sorts. I love stories like this. A regular guy who sets out to achieve a personal goal and gets paid an assload of money to tell people about it.

Fogle said he’ll continue to be “Jared the Subway Guy” for as long as they keep sending the stretch limousine to pick him up for appearances. He’s also working on a book and thinks he might try motivational speaking.

Hell yah Jared! You can read the complete story here.