Welcome to my new website!

Hello everyone and welcome to my new website, this one I promise you is gonna stick around for a very very looong time. It's been almost 3 years since I first decided to start making a new website for myself, as with all my previous personal websites I chose to face another challenge and learn something along the way. I also decided to not limit myself creatively. The biggest problem was to make something that I would like after a longer period and something that I would actually get around to updating. Since I first started tinkering around with html and started making websites for people my biggest issue was finding a CMS that would simply work and not limit me in any way.

I'm not a programmer and never will be so finding something that would give me the flexibility I need and the simplicity of developing was the goal. And I'm very happy to say that I've found the ideal CMS that does just that, Expression Engine. I'm also excited and happy that this never ending nightmare of coding is over for me. I now have a website that I'm happy with, that I've been slowly developing for the last 2 years in between other projects. As I said this one is here to stay, I have no intention of making another project for myself anytime soon that's why I took extra care to make sure I really like this design, that I can always come back to it and that I can actually write a proper blog that people will find interesting to read as well as properly update all my sections.

Design process

For the last couple of months I've been writing code up until 6am and eating "breakfast" at 4pm. The .psd file I started when first drawing up the website is more than a year old, I made sure to take the extra time and polish everything up the way I wanted instead of simply rushing things and getting something that I wouldn't like 2 months after it goes online. I tried working with Cutenews and eventually gave up because I realized that I have to do this right. I don't want to come back to my html after a few months and wonder what it is that I need to change to update an entry in my portfolio. That's when I decided to purchase Expression Engine and after a week or two of steady learning I managed to pull this off.

Soooo?

So who am I? Well at this early stage of my new website chances are you're probably someone I know pretty well but just in case you got to my website from another source than me feel free to read the about section. In case you're feeling lazy I'm a graphic designer from Croatia, Zagreb, a label DJ for a danish chill out label called Sofa Beats and I'm currently finishing up with my college and I plan to get my diploma on various issues actually connected to the development of this website. In any case I hope that I will manage to force myself to write regular blog entries on some of the following subjects:

• webdesign
• html/css
• gaming
• chill out/downtempo
• psychedelic trance
• festivals and parties
• any other random bits and pieces I find interesting

So what can I see here?

Well I have a photo gallery section which I hope to fill up with various photos from my travels to different festivals and parties, from nature and from any other random source I may find. Please not that any party or festival I go to the photos usually end up on Trancepleme.com so I won't make duplicate galleries here and there. I also have a design portfolio online where you can see some of my works and there's the music section for all of my DJ mixes. I also opened a myspace account for the fun of it. I've felt enormous pressure and I really didn't feel the need to make a myspace page but I figured that it would be a nice addition if I could somehow integrate it into the rest of the website. Of course being the hellhole of html that it is don't expect the code there to be valid like it is on the rest of the entire site. One thing that's really pissing me off about it is the fact that if you use any external links leading away from myspace you get a nasty warning tab, it's really fucking up what I intended so if anyone knows how to get whitelisted there let me know. Oh and another thing I want to point out. I hate IE6, I really really do, and I don't have any intention of fixing my website to make it work in that damn browser. Actually the problem comes from the fact that I don't have it installed anywhere and I don't want to format a laptop just so I can install IE6 and then bugfix it's damn double floated margins, png transparency issues and whatnot. The site works fine in IE7, Opera and of course Firefox. I never installed Google Chrome though but I guess it uses the same engine as firefox so there shouldn't be any issues. Now I welcome you all to dig through my code, let me know if something isn't working. I've spent too much time trying to polish everything up that in the end I just gave up. I'm not satisfied with my headers and there are many other areas that could use some improvement but if I delayed this any longer I'd probably go insane. And I also have 2 friends waiting for me to do a job I've delayed for too long. So I think the website is in a good shape to be online now but I'm really interested in hearing where and how I could reduce my css and make it even better. As I start writing more and more I'm sure I'll find stuff to fix and change but overall the work I put into this site greatly surpasses any other time I spent to make something for myself. I guess a girlfriend breaking up with you does that. I just hope I can get my sleeping habits back on track.

Technology

Anyway I really wanna go over some of the features I implemented here. The main page has among other things a list of the last 10 tracks I listened to. If you're using songbird as your media player of choice it has this really cool feature to connect to Last.fm and upload the info about which track you're currently listening to your Last.fm account. Last.fm then generates an RSS feed that you can easily connect to and download to your own page. I found it a nice little addition since most DJs I know usually make fake top10 lists and just include tracks that aren't released or are in early production phases. So I figured why bullshit you, I'll just listen to what I really like and make it update itself automatically. There's my Amazon wishlist you can go it if you're feeling generous. and if you don't feel like refreshing my website every day feel free to subscribe to my RSS and Atom feeds. I'm also very happy to have my website hosted on a dedicated virtual server at media temple. Just before I was finished with the design I thought something was missing, I then decided to use sIFR to replace all my headers with a custom font. I chose the Diavlo font from Jos Buivenga, check out his homepage, the guy PWNS seriously.

Thanks

There is one special person that I would love to thank for an amazing source of inspiration and creative ideas. I would surely never get this far if it wouldn't have been for Veerle Pieters. I have learned so much in the past few years, the books on html that I bought came from her website as did so many other tutorials and articles. I've also used firebug on her website so many times to get the idea of what html should really be used like. There are so many endless possibilities that we often ignore. After discovering how easy it is to develop without tables and after seeing the many ways you can utilize all the forgotten and rarely used html tags I never went back. Be sure to visit Her blog. We never spoke or met but I learned so much from you, again Veerle, thank you very much!

Much more to say but I'm running out of breath so I'm gonna call it a day, I just wanna get some sleep and I want this website to just stay like it is for a while. I hope everyone likes it as much as I do although this is one of those projects that I made mostly for myself. I know a little bit of accessibility got sacrificed along the way (my next blog entry is gonna be about that) but I really didn't want to limit myself. I made the website to learn, to be creative and to have fun in the process. I got all those things and I'm freakin happy

Ps. Install the Corbel font, it comes with Microsoft office 2007 or is it 2003, not sure really...but if you don't have it you're seeing helvetica.

Posted on January 4th at 07:35 by Dovla | Next entry