This has been a long time coming for me, as I’ve been working on this off and on for the past two months or so. I’ve just pushed out a new design of my online portfolio, of which you can read about more here.
Jason's Blog
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This has been a long time coming for me, as I’ve been working on this off and on for the past two months or so. I’ve just pushed out a new design of my online portfolio, of which you can read about more here.
You shouldn’t notice any major changes on the front end other than a few minor enhancements, but I’ve switched over from Drupal 6.9 to WordPress 2.9. When I first moved to Drupal from Coranto a little over one year ago I quickly mashed together a template. This move has allowed me to completely re-write the site to make it cleaner overall.
The major things that you should know is that my rss feed has moved from /rss.xml to /feed. The old link will still work, but I recommend you update it just in case. A few old links may be missing here and there, but all posts, pages, and comments have been moved over from Drupal. If you encounter any other weird issues, please leave a comment.
A few days ago I revamped and relaunched my portfolio. The new site is now built upon WordPress and should help expand the type of content I put on the site. The new launch also includes a blog which will be completely separate from this blog. For friends & family, don’t worry; this blog is sticking around. I’ll be able to post about mumbo-jumbo like “jquery, javascript, css, php” over on my portfolio’s blog while keeping this one on things I find purely interesting (and non portfolio related).
If you have any remote interest in web design, or the things I post over on my portfolio, please feel free to add my portfolio’s feed to your favorite RSS reader.
I’m probably the only one who would actually access my blog on an iPhone, but I’ve just now pushed out a design that should be better suited for mobile devices. I’ve optimized the design obviously for the iPhone/iPod, but it should work on other mobile devices like the PSP, DSi, or Android (fingers crossed).
Pretty much the only thing you should see is the header menu, the main content area (blog posts, archives, main content, etc.), and the footer. The sidebar and random quotes were removed due to lack of sufficient space. If you see anything in addition to that, it means something isn’t working as it should.
If you have a different mobile device *cough*guy*cough* and are willing to give it a go, please let me know. If the page doesn’t fit right or something just looks strange, please leave a comment here and any images that you can provide to see if I can’t fix it. Any other ideas or suggestions that might help will be considered as well.
To think today that the internet is where it is today is just amazing and the amount of changes that have happened in the past 20, or even 10 years ago. 10 years ago, can you imagine when companies like Google and Amazon were in their infancy, and sites like Wikipedia, Youtube didn’t exist.
Even more interesting is how I got my start doing web development, and as I stumbled upon some of my older site designs I thought it would be interesting to showcase them, and how I got my start on the internet. It’s kind of scary for me to look back and think that I created that, but it’s here for your entertainment.
I don’t remember exactly how I first got started. I recall my dad popping in an old AOL disk cd when we had a 2400 baud modem, and attempting to access the Cartoon Network channel of AOL. It wasn’t until some time later when we eventually obtained a computer with a 28.8kbps that I got my real start sometime in 1996-1997.
My first website was a result of my infatuation with SimCity, so I wanted to share that interest with others. Through Earthlink, we had a member space available at home.earthlink.net/~charawilson/ (no longer exists) that was the jumpstart for that first site, Simcity 3000 News Central. From that spawned a sister project called SCN (SimCity Network), which was a portal for SimCity sites at the time.
Eventually I outgrew the member space that Earthlink provided, and through the generous offer of a friend moved to simcity.boulderd.com (internet archive). With the move I discovered NewsPro (which eventually became Coranto), a perl script that would allow me to update the site from anywhere and not have to edit html code any time I wanted the site to be updated. This is really where my interest starting growing, as I discovered how one could make a site dynamic, and do cool things with DHTML as well.
I’ve updated scurker.com again slightly. All “www.scurker.com” will now redirect simply to “scurker.com” as the www is quite redundant. The front page and navigation has been updated slightly to be more interesting. While I’m not completely satisfied with it, it believe it looks better than it has before.
If you haven’t tried out my google maps tsp application recently, I suggest you check it out again. A lot of stuff has changed since my last post. I think I’ve worked out a majority of the bugs and issues, but any feedback is certainly appreciated.
I am aware of the various IE bugs that still exist, but I need to do further research to determine a fix to the problem.
I have been working on a Google maps application for a while, and am finally releasing my first “public” beta of the map. The project’s goal was attempt to tackle the traveling salesman problem (shortest path between all points) with a real pratical application. View my Google Maps Fun page to view more details on the application.
Please, if you use it and like it, let me know! Any bugs/requests can be directed in the comments as well.
I know I mentioned this a while back, but I kind of had something come up in November which prevented me from doing any work on the site.
Anyway, scurker.com is now mostly up and running, at least enough for me to display some of my portfolio among other things. I’m currently still working on the backend that will allow me to have essentially another blog, or content management system, but that might take months. So I wanted to go ahead and stick something up there.
This site has been my “personal” site for nearly two years now. I’ve been posting random ramblings, or just cool stuff I find as I surf around the net. I’ve also used this site as a platform to do some freelance stuff.
However, I feel I’ve come to the point where I need to split things off. It is time to split work from play. So I introduce to you my newest venture, scurker.com. Right now it’s not much, but I’m working on setting things up on the backend. Don’t worry, my blog here will still remain the same, and you can still read about the randomness which I call my life, but most of my projects, code, and other freelance related things will move to scurker.com. Expect to see a few changes here and there in the upcoming weeks.