transmothraFinally! My online portfolio is nearly finished… The only thing left to do now is to acquire the main files from my most recent project and remove all proprietary informations.
I thought i’d NEVER get that shit done. That last one was a bitch to nail down – it turned out that it made much better sense to lose the damn b2evolution blog and just write in static content.
Well, it’s been taking forever, but finally!, my portfolio is online and pretty much more or less all (well, most) of those old dead sites are recreated and re-animated and essentially living again, albeit with synthetic blood this time around. Don’t look them too closely in the eyes, as there is no more soul in them as there is in an idiot, slack-jawed goldfish.
It’s been quite a learning experience… in fact, it really is amazing that i got away with such junk HTML in some of those sites. Actually, on the most prominent website i ever did, i actually used double-quotes within inline CSS. Which effectively turned off succeeding CSS rules, and invalidated the whole mess. It’s quite lucky, i’d guess, that anything worked at all in some cases.
There’s just a couple more sites to put up.
I’m working on getting my legacy sites ready for an online portfolio to be presented here on this site.
The unfortunate thing about being a relatively-inexperienced web designer/developer is that most of your clients will be fairly small outfits and that much of your work will be necessarily pro-bono, or close to it. This means that many of them won’t be around for a very long time. In my case, none of them are. I think the Tecumseh Local Music Boosters may still maintain a site somewhere, though probably one with tildes in the URI that i’ll never be bothered to really track down, because it’s probably no longer my work being displayed there.
On to the point: this means that i have to re-build all of those old sites from the archives. Which, in turn, means trying to get code written a pretty long time ago (by www standards) to work. That’s not much of a problem, in most cases, because i at least had the foresight to include some useful future-compatible functions, the most underrated of which is the doctype declaration.
Regrettably, i don’t remember how some of the functions worked, and i don’t have much time to figure it all out.
The worst part, though, is that the one of the coolest sites, for a sadly defunct print magazine, won’t work locally, and i think it’s because i no longer have any idea what kind of a server environment it was written for.
So take this to heart, fellow amateurs: always, always, always include copious comments in your PHP, and archive a copy of the phpinfo() that you generated at the time (when you were literally losing sleep trying to iron out that one nagging bug). Mirror the damn thing live if you have to. This will save you in the long run, when the site goes belly up, and you have to prove to potential employers or clients that it existed outside of the sick, narcissistic fantasy world inside of your head. You won’t look like a blowhard when you can at least produce a working copy. Right now, i’d settle for just some screenshots of that magazine site.
Speaking of which, i can at least produce a static HTML version, using archive.org for the markup and my backup image files for the graphics. So all is not completely, irretrievably lost.
But i’d rather get those bugs ironed out. I just need a lot more time than i can actually come up with lately.
Spiffed up the navigation menu a little bit to have submenus, via Suckerfish. Added some poems, grouped mainly by the volume of work from which they spawned.
At least one is a song i’ve been working on for many years, which may soon see the light of day, finally…
Have a lot of catching up to do in many areas. Off to bed with me!
from the Missing Link files: 375 million year old Fishapod fossil discovered. A fish with a freaking neck. Oh, and finger-like bones attached to wrist-like bones. Fuck you, Creationistas! (See also: Ray Troll’s related artwork)
“Dark Miracle: Trinity, the Manhattan Project, and the Birth of the Atomic Age”, a fabulous piece by Josh Ellis (see also: video of Ed Grothus’ Black Hole tour)
SXSW video coverage. Sweet.
Big Brother is (or will soon be) watching you, via SkySeer. Already this drone camera-plane is in use in L.A. skies.
Remember this, GWB? “Leaks of classified information are bad things. We’ve got too much leaking in Washington… I want to know who the leakers are.” Does anyone have a mirror for Mister Bush?
It’s All in the Mind, man: psychedelics research.
Israeli soldier murders journalist. From a related BBC News story:
“The inquest has heard that Mr Miller approached an armoured personnel carrier, carrying a white flag which he shone a torch on, calling out that he was a British journalist and wearing a helmet marked TV. He was shot in the neck, unprotected by his body armour.He had been attempting to ask for permission to leave the area.”
So, yeah, just keep on supporting Israel, all you Left Behind-reading end-times obsessed know-nothing Revelationist fuckwits.
…and now the site passes XHTML validation (with some few per-post errors)! i moved a couple things, added a copyright, changed the lists on the sidebar very slightly, and generally cleaned house.
i swear to “Bob” i will also eventually put content up under the new links (up top).
cleaning up the layout a little bit. no more yucky slowdown in IE: i figured out that IE doesn’t like to repeat a background image, at least one with transparency, too many times; so instead of using the smallest possible denominator of pixels to show a grid, i simply repeated the pattern within the image itself a few times. in this case, i changed the grid to vertical lines; but where i might have liked to use, say, 2×1 pixels to repeat across the element, i used something like 2×75 to reduce the overall repeats. not sure why this strange behavior isn’t better known or more widely documented, but i may have to experiment with it more in the future.
also fixed a couple of positioning errors on my part. the sidebar isn’t the most consistent, because some of my sections there have heading elements within list tags, while others don’t, possibly owing to different plugins having been created for different versions of WordPress, or for different themes, and so on.
I’ve re-positioned some elements (see navbar on top) and re-colored some text and images. Hopefully it will make the site more functional and readable, although there are still a few little bugs that i’m none too happy about. But until browsers are 100% standards compliant, i’ll have to learn to live with at least some bit of rendering lousiness. Some of it i can clean up and tweak; as for now, it’s off to bed with me. I’m too tired to make any links at the moment, so good night, and i hope you like the layout a little bit better.