Fine-tuned

Posted: 2 February 2010

I had announced about some changes in my last post. This will be the first upgrade for mesonprojekt since August 2009. It's just a minor visual tweak here and there, nothing much at all. Version 1 of mesonprojekt already exceeded all my expectations, and I thought why fix something that's not broken?
So, in keeping with the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen (iterative refinement), I present v1.1 of mesonprojekt...

Taking Out The Trash

My portfolio was in a dreadful state since June 2009, and that continued even with v1. It contained projects from my exploits in college, most of which weren't related to web design or development. I had just left them in there to give me a jump start and some leverage with clients. But I also ended up getting enquiries for print and logo design, stuff I'm honestly not comfortable doing. Since I've now gone pro, that needed to be fixed at the earliest. So I've retained a handful of my best web projects to date. And left out all the rest. I've also created new portfolio categories to serve this purpose better.

I've also included a new project: initiated in December 2009, and completed a few days ago. It's a website for Travel Curators, a unique eco-tourism agency to be based in Goa soon. I quite liked the way that turned out: very organic.

I'm quite pleased with how my portfolio looks right now. Have a look.

jQuery To The Rescue

I jumped aboard the jQuery bandwagon just a couple of months ago. I had heard about the things you could use it to achieve: everything from slick auto-playing slideshows to client-side form validation and loads more. I still don't really know it, but plan to learn it sometime this year. And I have already been using it on a couple of my clients' projects, so I thought why not here?

The first thing I needed it for was my portfolio, where some of the captions for the project thumbnails were a bit long, causing them to span multiple lines and break the vertical rhythm of the page. So I thought I should use an image overlay script to display the caption on hover above the thumbnail itself. That would also allow the thumbnails to be a little larger.

With a decent-looking portfolio and all, I decided to use one of those slick content sliders on the homepage: to allow folks to see more than just the most recent project. Quite simple and effective, I thought.

Other Changes

A lot has happened over the past few months, and my bio on the About page was a bit dated, so I have updated that as well.

I have upgraded my Textpattern installation to 4.2, the latest stable version. I'm also using a few useful plugins I came across while working on my clients' projects, the most important being ebl_image_edit, which allows for image cropping, resizing, rotating and thumbnailing from the TXP interface itself; and rss_unlimited_categories, which gives support for unlimited article categories in TXP. That has enabled me to improve the project classification in the new portfolio.

My experiences during the past few months have made me spot quite a few cracks all over the site. I honestly feel like reworking the entire site again, but time simply doesn't permit that. All I could do was a little mopping up of the CSS here and there, and correcting some flawed logic in my Textpattern code.

I guess that will have to do for the time being. Cheers!

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