Archive for August 10th, 2008

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-10

Published by mark on August 10, 2008 under Sideblog

  • Back from a “last-minute” LAN party at a friend’s #

Lack of “real” posts lately

Published by mark on August 10, 2008 under Rants, Technology

Indeed.

The main reason is because I haven’t had much to say. Summer for me hasn’t been very interesting, however I did had to go down to Truro a couple of times regarding various things, as well as a couple of LAN parties, the most recent one being today.

Even though I haven’t been posting much lately, I do have my twitter feed being added to my blog.  I like this because I do twitter more often than I blog, which seems to be the case with alot of people lately.  But anyway…

I am having a little difficulty again with making my portfolio website.  I did do a great design, but however I think that I can do better.  I’ll try probably at least do another design, and decide if I want to put that to rest and redo it.  The reason?  I want to get better at designing. Right now I look at all of these portfolio sites and of course they are made by 25-35 year-olds.  I’m 19.  To me, having a nice looking (and correctly coded) website at 19 would be well… quite interesting ;)  Most people who are out there now only started around 20-23, while I started at 14-15 and even then I was learning about XHTML, and CSS, and stuff like that.  That, to me, is quite an accomplishment.

There are people in my Web Development class from Fall 2007 (last year) were pretty much learning how to do that for the first time (or so I think.)  Now, I do say that when I was first hand-coding HTML, I would not write tables.  At all.  I felt that they were difficult as heck. :p  But now, I can do it pretty well, because I eventually just started to accept tables.  However I do not use them for layout. ;)  I have NEVER coded HTML tables for layout.  Well, with an exception for a local website that I had to rewrite the whole page for, and I wanted to keep a similar look to the rest of the website.

Another reason why I want to start over again with the design.  I want to try different methods of showing the navigation, logo, and content.  So far I’ve only done top-down “HNCF” (Header, Navigation, Content, Footer) layouts. (Should I coin this term? <g>) I want to try things like positioning the logo and navigation to the left, and content to the right, or something along those lines. Perhaps this would be the time to look into different concepts and ideas, such as my previous “Coffeehouse” layout, which utilized a blackboard for navigation, and had a coffee[house]-inspired logo.  Also, this might be a great time to learn how to make my own backgrounds and effects (I’ve already figured out the half-tone effect.)

I do not know whether saying that this portfolio website is going to be two-going-on-three years in the making would be an understatement, but however to be honest, I’ve restarted this project pretty much every time I put a layout in storage.  That would be… at least 35 times.  Although I have been slowly getting better every time, and actually, the latest two layouts (”Azure Heaven” and “Coffeehouse“) have been a step up in what I had before.  I think that if I keep at this one, it’ll be another - possibly big - step up from the previous one, which I could have added a light coffeecup stain and some texturizing to the header + footer.

If anyone has any Web Design resources that they wish to share with me, there are several methods that you can reach me:

Either way would be really helpful to me, as a growing Web Developer and Web Designer. It’s always interesting to see what other people find on the internet. :)