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Matt Robinson
Technical Artist
It's Alive.....
Well, the new website is out in the wild. Feedback is most welcome, especially critiques.
Send it in at matt (at) matt-robinson (dot) net.
-M
By Matt on 2010-09-01 00:39:49
Rolling Your Own
Recently, I decided the site needed a bit more life. A little more pizazz, if you will. So, I thought adding a little animation might help. Not wanting to be trapped with Flash again, I decided to do this through JavaScript.
I did a little research and thought, "Hey, this is totally doable. It probably won't even take that long!" Part of my research included looking at the jQuery library. It was at this point I made an important decision. I chose to forgo the convenience of jQuery and instead, roll my own. I ended up learning two pretty important lessons.
Lesson One - Ambition =/= Capability
Creating my own animation library took quite a bit longer than I'd hoped. The main reason was because I let my ambitions override my better judgement. This was a pretty big undertaking for someone who had only written a few lines of JavaScript up until this point. I thought, "a few timers here, a frame count there, how hard could it be?"
Also, there may or may not have been a little bit of ego involved. This is MY site, right? I should be able to handle writing ALL the code MYSELF. I don't need no help from nobody! Well, sometimes, maybe that help can save quite a bit of time, effort, and stress.
Lesson Two - Knowledge is only acquired through Exploration
Now, I didn't learn Lesson Two until after I beat myself up a bit with Lesson One. It finally dawned on me that, "Hey, isn't this what personal projects are for?" And low and behold, Brain was right. While this site is supposed to be used for getting me jobs, it is still a personal project. I have free reign to do things however I please. And I should use it as an opportunity to make these kinds of mistakes. Sure, rolling my own animation code may not have been the most efficient means to the end, but it was very fun and my JavaScript and Object Oriented programming skills grew exponentially. I'm not sure I would have learned as much as I did if I had gone with jQuery. Plus, if I do decide to use jQuery in the future, perhaps my skills will empower me to use jQuery in even more creative ways.
All in all, I'd say this was a great project. My system may not be as good as jQuery or any other set of libraries, but it doesn't have to be. It just has to handle the tasks I give it. And if it does not, at least I now have the skills to make it better.
-M
By Matt on 2010-08-15 12:41:25
Web Programming
I have a confession; Web Programming is hard.
Admittedly, I have not been as diligent as I should be in working with my PHP and CSS. For instance, I made the decision to try and do everything on this site myself. From scratch. While I intend to stick to my decision (as I am learning tons), I feel like I should maybe get some help next time.
I'm finding there is a lot of "plumbing" code to write. Perhaps it is just my ignorance in how I should be using PHP and HTML. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it is. I have no idea what I am doing. But that is what makes it fun.
While I'm in a confessing mood, I will also admit that I have neglected this site in the last few months. Splatterhouse seems to suck up a lot of time (mostly because of the commute), and at the end of the day, I almost always would rather see my wife than see the computer screen some more.
It's been nice to sit down and work on it again though. I've still got a few things left to finish. Mainly the Portfolio section. And I should tweak About a little more. Ahh, the work of a TechArtist is never complete.
-M
By Matt on 2010-07-06 11:57:56
Hello World!
Well, this is the first post from the web based blog.
\m/ Awesome \m/
The whole blog can be administrated within the website itself using a set of controls for authoring new posts and managing existing ones.
The blog was the first major feature I wanted for the new site and I'm pretty happy with what I've set up so far. I've got a few ideas I still want to try, but for now, it's onto the 'About' and 'Portfolio' pages!
-M
By Matt on 2010-04-28 22:15:02