Personal promotion sites

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kaos78414
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Joined: Thu Jul 22, 2010 5:36 am

Personal promotion sites

Post by kaos78414 »

I think there was a thread here a while back where people shared personal / resume type sites, but I couldn't seem to find it. Anyway I just got finished with mine recently, and I wanted to share it with you guys, because you always give constructive feedback, and I think I need it: http://jonathonharrell.com

Note: The only part that's not done as of yet is the "Read More" button in the about section. It's really hard to write a self summary without sounding conceded, so I've struggled with that a bit.

It's meant to be short, and a little humorous to show to potential clients/employers. I've also set up a blog and started tweeting more regularly... I've recently realized that web development is truly my life, so I'm trying to become a bigger part of the web dev community as a whole, and going to try and start contributing to open source projects that are important to me, as well as blogging/tweeting regularly. Let me know what you guys think, and share yours too!
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Jackolantern
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Re: Personal promotion sites

Post by Jackolantern »

Looks very nice! I would however drop the "beer-to-productivity" graph. That really isn't what you want to tell prospective employers ;)
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kaos78414
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Re: Personal promotion sites

Post by kaos78414 »

Haha. Yeah you may be right.
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kaos78414
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Re: Personal promotion sites

Post by kaos78414 »

Okay so I went ahead and updated it. I didn't like the way those charts fit in anyhow, I just wanted to use and abuse highcharts.js, lol. Anyway, I think its shorter and more to the point now.
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SpiritWebb
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Re: Personal promotion sites

Post by SpiritWebb »

Love it...great work!

Started following you on Twitter ;)
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vitinho444
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Re: Personal promotion sites

Post by vitinho444 »

Wow... awesome website design, very self promotional.

I had one a while ago, but it was too simple so i took it down.. May i ask where do you get the design idea, or the path to create a design :C I lack creativity you see.. so it's a big problem to me to make something "unique".. :( I can like go to google, search for a template (image) and do it from scratch in coding with no problem but that doesn't feel right you know?
My Company Website: http://www.oryzhon.com

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kaos78414
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Re: Personal promotion sites

Post by kaos78414 »

Yeah I definitely get what you're saying. And honestly I'm not much of a designer, that's why I chose to go very minimal. I'll take you through my process though, because maybe that'll help you out :)

Firstly, get a foundation to build from. For me, Bootstrap is a must. http://getbootstrap.com/

It enables responsive design from the get-go (so the site is mobile-friendly out of the box). That's a great point to jump off from, and after playing with bootstrap for a little while you'll quickly see that I didn't deviate too far from what bootstrap offers. Among good designers, they would probably look at my site and immediately recognize angular and bootstrap. I also used font-awesome for the extra icons: http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/

For the logo, I honestly just played around with different shapes until I arrived at a point that was passable. It only took a few hours.

Then I just thought of what could go in the site, and honestly most of it is just filler, lots of white space. Very little actually going on, but it gives the illusion of a "full" site. What made me come to that conclusion was just looking at other, similar sites. The main two I drew inspiration from were http://sailsjs.org/#!/ and http://teamtreehouse.com/

Treehouse's website gave me the idea for a photo as a background. I actually struggled for a while with different background patterns, using some from http://bg.siteorigin.com/ and some from http://subtlepatterns.com/ , but nothing really gelled the way I wanted it to. So eventually I just decided black-on-white was the way to go.

The one thing that sets my site apart, and should not be overlooked when designing a site is font choice. I learned a lot about fonts while doing this site, and I will say that a subtle change goes a long way toward the feel you want. Use "loud" fonts sparingly. Pay attention to the way the white space on the page guides your eyes. Make sure backgrounds aren't too noisy and distracting. That's really about all the advice I can give when it comes to designing a page.

Now a UI for an app is a different monster entirely. Maybe I'll blog about it :D
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vitinho444
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Re: Personal promotion sites

Post by vitinho444 »

Wow very nice walk-through thanks very much. I thought on doing a parallax but I think this new types of websites parallax-like like yours take more from creativity, because they need to be simple (like you mentioned lots of white spaces), but effective, you don't need to much info about yourself, what you did on your 5th birthday, you just need the important things about your career and skills, and I think you did it right. ;)

I will try to find some motivation and creativity to make a personal website again, maybe draw some pencil sketches on my classes (the boring ones :P (a.k.a all of them except Programming)) and I see what I can come up to.

Also I never really used a framework, well I tried to use Zend, then Ignite but i just had no motivation to learn it, i like to do things from scratch, have absolute control power on every single element.. and I know scratch better because it's MY code. I know web developer jobs nowadays require framework skills (or value them) and I will maybe "waste" some hours trying to build simple websites with those frameworks one day.. But I will definitely try Bootstrap for this personal one, because you recommend it :D

Thank you very much and Good Luck with your work.
My Company Website: http://www.oryzhon.com

Skype: vpegas1234
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kaos78414
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Re: Personal promotion sites

Post by kaos78414 »

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, using a framework without knowing how it works can be a killer. My most recent blog post is actually about why I'm currently not using a framework with Node.js. In a nutshell the reason is this: If you don't understand the language the framework is built on, you won't be able to grasp the "magic" parts of the framework and why they are occurring, and it will in turn be harder to track down the source of bugs.

For me, I started off being very much against using frameworks, because I want to know everything that's going on. What eventually led me to embrace them, was actually coming to understand the concepts that they are built on. MVC, dependency injection, test-driven development, all these things are out there to accomplish one goal: DRY, independently maintainable code. If you know how to accomplish that in, say, vanilla PHP, then you've probably at some point written something of a framework and you may as well upload the repo to github for consistent reuse.

You can look at it like this: Every time you start a new project in PHP, you are probably connecting to a mySQL database, right? So you know that's going to be there, you may as well create a file that independently hooks up your application to the database, maybe based on a config file. And wait, you're dealing with HTTP requests and creating an HTTP response each time someone arrives at your app, why not create a "Request" object that each HTTP request is mapped to, and a "Response" object that deals with your response. The request object could even do some automatic stuff for you, like sanitizing GET and POST params. The response object could allow you to easily set headers and return some JSON or render a template. And oh you could use raw PHP/HTML in your templates... but why not utilize something like Twig or Smarty? You can see what I'm getting at.

It's all about getting you away from the boilerplate and allowing you to develop your app. Frameworks do that for you, and a lot of times much more. These days though, it's starting to become less about frameworks then it is being able to mix and match different modules that do very specific things. Personally I like that better. It allows you to selectively choose which pieces you want - I want this routing component, this mailer, this request-response handler, this ORM, this template engine, etc. You can currently do that in PHP using composer, or Node using npm.

Wow this turned into a long post. Anyway, I'm not trying to sway you one way or the other; just sharing my opinion. I do think that starting out, most programmers are going to be against using opinionated frameworks; it's about being able to understand what the developers of whichever framework in question were trying to accomplish, and why.
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vitinho444
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Re: Personal promotion sites

Post by vitinho444 »

I totally agree with you, I like to be in control too so I decide to do things from scratch, but ofc I could make a general DB "framework" (class) like Alain's and everytime i started a new PHP project i could simply push (or pull, im still fresh in git) the "framework"/class and use its functions to connect to a DB and do queries and stuff, because let's be honest, with SQL Injection and XSS attacks we need protection, and its not smart to do that protection 300x for 300 projects right?

So yeah, I see Frameworks as skeletons to maintain code easily. I don't remember if it was Zend or Ignite, that had lots of modules, like a module for the css styles, other for the page logics and so on, that's smart yes, but I'm kinda used to do things from scratch with the help of "little" classes/frameworks like that DB one.

It's like I fear change or something i don't know :/ Because I'm very used to what I use everyday, like Unity (C#), PHP (if($_POST["login"] == "username")), HTML (<!Doctype HTML>), CSS (margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;), JS/Jquery ($(".a").click(function(){ $(".a").css("font-size", 20);} ... I'm used to that, so I'm "good" at it, but if you ask me to do something outside of that, i start losing lots of motivation because I think I can't do it... Even though i should be able with the "basic" knowledge.. It's just my mind xD

But i appreciate your opinion ;)
My Company Website: http://www.oryzhon.com

Skype: vpegas1234
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