Portfolio: Freelance and Personal
Most of what I self-taught myself about HTML was initially done by building sites for myself. Personal projects also allow for more experimentation, as the constraints of work projects don't always allow for picking up newer technologies. I've also made the occasional site on the side for friends and coworkers.
Over Queersville
http://oq.7au.net/ (previously http://over.queersville.net/)
Art direction, design, XHTML/CSS and graphics creation, PHP, writing, CMS installation and tweaking
I had just moved to San Francisco without a job and decided I should start weblogging again, and wanted to build something onto Movable Type to keep my skills up. I also wanted to experiment with multiple stylesheets for the same markup, and you can see how that worked out on the skins page. Underwater is the default theme, Curtains was a within-one-hour semi-redesign just to see if I could do it, and Queer Punk's Not Dead is big shift away from the base template design, and except for the smaller font size (my eyes are getting older, here) it's still one of my favorite weblog designs to date.
The title came from an unfair assumption on my part that San Francisco's gay community was going to be full of nothing but the stereotypical cliques that I didn't particularly care for during my post-punk, queer-radical-leaning Chicago days, and while they do exist to some extent, there's a lot that left me happily wrong, and I've grown out of my angry young man phase since then. I ended up suddenly discontinuing this weblog after my web hosting service upgraded their servers' UNIX distribution and Movable Type wouldn't let me log in. I had enough web work to handle at the office, and I had been wanting to start something on another weblogging CMS under a different title anyway, so I scrapped the idea of upgrading MT and re-hacking it for the umpteenth time to my liking, and just ended it. Clever future employers can probably find any current weblogs of mine, but these days I've been grabbing design templates for convenience, so you won't find anything particular to my webdev talents.
Sometime in September 2006, due to a lot of life-altering things that started to happen and then aborted, I stopped checking a few of my minor email accounts for a while. Unfortunately, one of them would have told me that the queersville.net domain name registration was expiring, and then had expired. Oops. I've moved the site to another domain, but some things are still broken, like comments.
MagnuSongs
Art direction, design, HTML and graphics creation, audio file encoding, maintenance
A great example of the barter system at work: I make a site for an artist and his manager-wife, and she gives me free Tai Chi classes. Done in 2001, browsers at the time didn't do a good job of supporting fully-CSS-based designs (or at least enough people were using older browsers to make it so), so this was done using tables for layout.
Somnolent.org, v3
Art direction, design, XHTML/CSS and graphics creation, PHP, writing, CMS installation and tweaking
The latest version of my old weblog, Somnolent.org. This version's layout, completed in September of 2002, is completely CSS-driven and, barring bad URLs or characters in individual entries, validates. I use Movable Type as the CMS, but also tweaked MT's output and used PHP (since MT wouldn't produce files named the way I wanted them to be) to simplify the URL structure for old entries. (For example, http://somnolent.org/presents/?451 instead of http://somnolent.org/presents/archives/000451.html) Not having the design replicated in each and every archive file also means that the collective archives take up less space on the webserver.
Somnolent.org, v2
http://somnolent.org/index.v2.php
Art direction, design, HTML/CSS and graphics creation, PHP, writing, CMS installation and tweaking
The second design for Somnolent.org, completed in April of 2001, and the first to use a CSS-based layout. I was admittedly a bit frustrated with the boxy nature of CSS designs other people were creating at the time, and went a little overboard in expressing that in this design. Again, PHP was used to use smaller include files so the collected archives took up less server space, but I hadn't yet implemented a simpler URL method. This version used Greymatter for the CMS, as I wanted to include comment functionality.
If you're curious, that crazy wall in the header image is the outside of a warehouse on the corner of Noble and North Avenues in Chicago.
Somnolent.org, v1
http://somnolent.org/index.v1.php
Art direction, design, HTML/CSS and graphics creation, writing, CMS configuration
The original Somnolent.org design, table-based and using PHP to call on include files for the current index, monthly archive indexes, and individual entries. Blogger was used for content management.
Picolina 200
http://picolina.somnolent.org/
Design, HTML/CSS
A quicky little site made over a couple nights for my friend and then-coworker, Hollis, aka Pickles Oksietowicz. It showcases some of her paintings and other habits.
Zine.Blog
http://zine.somnolent.org/template.html
Art direction, design, photography (such as it is), HTML/CSS and graphics creation
Several webloggers in Chicago got it into their heads that they should do a regular web-zine. In order to simplify communication that had turn into a mish-mash of emails, I threw up a Movable Type-driven weblog on my server space. This was the design originally conceived to replace MT's default design, but due to heavy time constraints elsewhere, it was never fully finished nor implemented. Still, a nice experiment.
Running Tally
http://www.nullmeansnull.com/tally/ (defunct)
Art direction, design, HTML/CSS and graphics creation
My original weblog, started in late 1999. This page got around in its day; it garnered a small mention in ZDNet's Daily Net Buzz and was used as an example of personal web publishing in an introductory multimedia class taught at Charles Stuart University, Australia. (Though thanks to the transitory nature of the web, only the last of those links works anymore.)