What it Is
Mon Nov 27, 09:56 | SchoolHey there everyone, you’re probably checking out this site now as part of our presentations for our studio project. Well, allow me to explain just exactly what mine is.
This is Skyscape3, my personal portfolio and website. You might be groaning and wondering “how did she get away with that, that’s such a cheap studio project” but no! There’s a lot of learning experiences and a lot of inner workings here.
This is what Skyscape3 entailed:
1) A design that was compatible with my target audience and with multiple browsers. This design, minimalist and clean, is: a) Under 30k for fast loading and low bandwidth; b) Compatible in Firefox and Safari for Mac, and IE and Firefox for Windows; c) Easy to read and simple to view without CSS enabled; and d) my favorite colors, eee.
2) A blog. You might note in a previous blog entry that I… well, hate blogs. Yes, I do, and yes, I am a hypocrite. Well, I ended up settling on Textpattern, an amazing system that runs almost all of the site here. Textpattern required a major learning experience on my part – I’ve never worked with a system that will generate things for me, only designed my own pages. So this coupled with my web project planning assignment allowed me to learn a lot about these kinds of systems and how practical they’ll be to give to clients in the future.
You can see a screenshot of the inner workings of Textpattern here.
3) A working and easily updated gallery. I chose to implement Simple Picture Gallery Manager, a PHP-run gallery that requires only a thumbnail, the image, and (optionally) a description of the item to update. It’s a great system that I highly recommend for even beginners – you only customize it as much as you’d like.
You can see a sample of inside a subgallery (FTP style) here.
4) Videos for download. I’m a video major, I make stupid cartoons, I have to show them off. So by mixing both my SPGM gallery and some practical conversions, I have some nicely-compressed video for both viewing (with Flash, which is widely accepted as proper for video) and for download.
See the motion gallery here.
5) Additional fun items. Like a contact form with PHP or a special viewer for my videos (rather than using a plugin) or an archive, each of my additional items was a learning experience in itself.
Just look around, these things are scattered all throughout the site.
I think my studio project has turned out functional and very practical and exactly how I need it to be, and you can bet you can come back often to check out new updates – it’s pretty great for that.
Neat! I look forward to seeing some of your work.
— Nick Presta Fri Dec 1, 23:49 #