About Jordan Riane

I'm not a blogger, I just tweet a lot. Normally I'd start off by saying something witty or sarcastic but I figured I would just jump right into it. I'm currently twenty-four years of age and living in the southside of Chicago, Illinois. While I've lived here almost all of my life I've also lived in Clarksville, Indiana (and various neighboring towns while I was a bit of a nomad), Houston, TX and my favorite, Louisville, KY. I am opinionated but reserved and soft-spoken. I would do anything for my family and friends. Am in love with the most amazing person I've ever shared my life with, Steve. He is the controller to my console.

My geekdom started when I was around the age of 12. Although technically it may have been earlier than that as I loved playing educational PC games like Math Blaster, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?. However, it was the age of 12 that we finally subscribed to MSN for dial-up internet. From there I discovered the perks of having my own email, figuring out what AOL instant messenger was, joining up on what used to be Bolt.com.. And then I stumbled across a personal website. It was unique, minimalistic, dark and of course used i-frames. I was curious on how to make a site of mine on and from there I'd go from using Geocities to discovering resources like Angelfire, Virtue.nu and various other free hosting websites. I would then grow into other communities of website owners and would eventually find a friend that would host me on her very own domain! I stuck with my affinity for creating my own little space on the web all throughout high school. My biggest endeavors throughout the ages 15-18 were running large fansites for bands like Something Corporate and Mae. I struck gold with my fansite for Something Corporate with a friend of mine, Britt (and even 8 years later we're still in contact ♥!), and was able to get my foot in the door with designing and developing websites for an indie record label, an up and coming Ohio band and various other small projects.

Then in the fall of 2005 I decided to take my turn at starting my own small business. I started Holdfire as a hosting company but wasn't sure if it was something that I would stick with 100%. However, in the first few months while business was very slow it was still picking up enough that it was a small profit for me to maintain every once in awhile. During 2006, it would eventually triple in customers and I was able to come close to utilizing it as a sole source of income. 2007 is the year I went 100% freelance as a web developer. I was sitting comfortably enough with my hosting company that I was not worried about finding full-time employment. Over the years I've worked with awesome clients to down-right snooty clients. Would I ever change a thing? Probably not! While I've continued to freelance over the years, I have made worked various monthly contracts with companies and as of August 2010 am currently an employee for a fantastic development company based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

When I am not busy pounding the keys away on my keyboard, I am a very loyal console gamer. I can frequently be found playing Modern Warfare 2 (or any other current FPS that is popular with multiplayer) and streaming my gameplay on Justin.tv where I have a large group of loyal viewers that I've come to appreciate and look forward to chatting with! I am also lucky to say that my boyfriend Steve shares the same love for video games as I do! So when we're not busy pumping out bullets at enemies, we're out together going to movies, going to new restaurants to test out different foods.. We've been together through some of the hardest parts of my life and for that I will always be grateful of him.

I am addicted to buying t-shirts from Shirt.Woot, Threadless. I've collected well over 50 various t-shirts over the years not just from Woot and Threadless but from other places like Jinx, ThinkGeek, Syswear and of course from thrifting! I suppose it has a lot to do with the fact that while I wouldn't mind dressing up I would just prefer to be wearing comfortable clothes. I'm also a bit of a technology pundit so I like to put my money towards the almost latest and greatest. My computer is an Core i7 baby that I'm so proud to have purchased and built (with Steve of course!) I have an iPhone 3G that I hate 45% of the time and refuse to buy the iPhone 4 because I'm going to go Android!! and get a Samsung Captivate to replace my 2.5yr old iPhone.

I think that's pretty much me. You can check out some of the links in the sidebar to see my taste in music, photographs, and various other social networking profiles.

About iCupcake.org

After years of using atourworst.org, I felt it was time to move on to a domain that was more suitable for me. For the past few years I've been on a cupcake kick (which started with creating an Xbox Live gamertag using Cupcakes) so I tossed out some ideas and landed on icupcake. I do have a few other cupcake domains now that I feel like using but haven't decided on whether or not I'll use them.

Currently iCupcake is powered by WordPress and a small amount of plugins. If you can take advantage of the functions.php you can really minimize the need for installing a lot of plugins.

The cute bakery & cupcake illustrations you see throughout the site are by Carrie Wendel of Dish & Spoon. The site's design inspiration came from my uncanny obsession with cupcakes. What better way to do a redesign then to kind of theme it like a bakery?

I also use Hannah.nu's script Domainish to keep track of all of my domains that I own. Although not active, I also use Jemjabella.co.uk's script BellaBooks to manage all books I am reading or have yet to read. If there is anything about iCupcake that you'd like to know, just send off an email to me.