Here’s a quick digest of what I’ve been up to in the last week or so. I reinvigorated my 6-year old deviantart account. After logging into it and brushing away the e-cobwebs, the personal information attached to the account was pretty amusing – I was at the earlier end of teenage years at the time I registered it, but at least I still had respectable taste in music.
Anyway, with that cleared out I’ve moved three new pieces up there. The first and second are the result of me importing some Illustrator messing about I did in my (amazing) Visual Communication class into Photoshop and letting loose. Like I say in the creator comment on deviantart – they may or may not be too busy, but I guess that will become apparent in time when more people comment!
Next, I was really neglectful of uni last weekend, locked myself in my room (stop laughing) and bashed away at the keyboard until I came up with a little something I like to call ‘Sentient’. It’s the most together thing I’ve done so far, that is, everything before now has been held together with digital sticky-tape and sheer willpower. But I can actually look at the sequence of this music and zoom in and zoom out at my leisure. So the third and final piece I have to blog about is actually two-pronged – music and accompanying artwork.
Sentient
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I made the image initially in 4:3 format 800×800 pixels for album artwork, so there was something to look at in iTunes… Then I decided to post it to youtube in eye-shatteringly large 720p, so I had to adapt it to 1280×720 format which I dare say came out better than the original…
The youtube version of it is here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSEqbEBtWVo&feature=channel_page&fmt=22.
This is my first genuine, certified content post on this website so the pressure is on. Thankfully, I can announce today that the site Learnex.net for all intents and purposes is finished. Of course the site isn’t 100% yet as it lacks the most important ingredient – the demo that it was designed to advertise! Indeed, it’s true – if you were to head over there now you would notice that in attempting to download the demo via that attractive yellow button on the middle left (and providing you have javascript enabled,) you will be met with a low-tech alert message stating that it’s not quite finished.
This is unfortunately the case – it’s currently verging on completion but there’s still the process of converting the version of Writing Skills I’ve been working on with integration to the server backend stat tracking program into something any random person can jump straight into.
I’ve consciously tried to avoid having a signup process, e-mail confirmation, etc in this demo because it’s essentially throwing up unnecessary walls in front of any potential user. The plan at the moment is to demonstrate the stat system at a later date in a subsection of the learnex site, plus, the demo doesn’t focus so much on assessable content tracked by the stat system anyway so going through the rigmarole of registration only to have all of one exercise tracked would be a little underwhelming to say the least.
Anyway enough talk from me – the plan is to have the demo released sometime over the weekend and you’ll hear about it the instant it goes live from this site. Other methods of staying in the loop are subscribing using the link above right, signing up to the Learnex mailing list using the swanky form on Learnex.net or following me on twitter – @jameseunson is (unsurprisingly) my username. Each of those sources will be updated as it happens so pick a system and I’ll hopefully see you on release day.
UPDATE: The project has been put on the backburner for now. Further information as it comes.
Welcome to the new Jameseunson.com. The new site is using wordpress as the CMS and it’s actually working out a lot better than I expected. Props to wordpress for being pretty darn flexible. The wordpress I’m running includes every bell and whistle I could find to improve the functionality of the thing as a whole including Recent Posts, Similar Posts, Auto XML sitemap. Honestly, if there’s any shortcomings of wordpress I’ve encountered so far, it’s that many of these plugins aren’t implemented in the original code but I seem to recall at least sitemaps are coming in a revision in the near future.
As an aside, the theme creation mechanism is also pretty easy to grasp once you get your head around it. By far the best resource for it is http://www.wpdesigner.com/2007/02/19/so-you-want-to-create-wordpress-themes-huh/ – an epic tutorial spanning 16 pages, covering in painstaking detail the process of creating a theme. Props to Small Potato, author of the tutorial and former admin of the wpdesigner.com site before it started to circle to proverbial bowl. Combined with the resources a simple google search yield on the subject, creating a theme is much easier than it otherwise would be.
The content for all pages is complete – it’s pretty brief but I don’t want to fill an entire site talking about myself – the purpose of this blog is more sharing information than ‘Dear diary today I had a chicken sammich…’ etc, and the purpose of the work pages is just to give a brief overview of the thoughts, goals and any future intentions for each of the projects listed. The idea is to give a little context to each project and help further understand them, if the reader is so inclined. If they aren’t then the power of not-reading-prerogative is quite conveniently at their disposal.
Thanks for visiting and stay tuned for some quality stuff.
