Welcome to silencia.net, a personal blog and professional portfolio website. I am Ang, a 26 yr old web designer and kickboxer from northern Minnesota. I have a full-time job, a car, a house, 3 cats, and a moderate phobia of taxidermy. I enjoy stand-up comedy, movies, books, technology, genetic anomalies, history, Dave Attell, Dexter, money, and pizza. What more do you need to know?!
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Archive for the 'Tech' Category
Stating the obvious.
Yes, yes, I snuck a new design in. About a week ago? Maybe two. Ha, I don’t even remember now. I like it, overall, but I feel like it’s lacking something. I didn’t want to use that little octopus, but it felt like something needs to go in that spot. And I don’t know what yet. So for now, I will consider it a placeholder until I get my “eureka!” moment of realizing what I should put there. I don’t consider it quite done until that happens though…
I ordered my very first laptop about a month ago, and it just arrived! It is named Agent Blue. I wanted to name it Agent something, and I ordered a laptop with a blue case, just to have something different. So my pal Rob named it Agent Blue when he was networking it to my desktop machine. A Dell XPS M1530. I am sure I spent way too much on it. But I will get much use out of it. I thought when the laptop arrived, I might be less enchanted with the iPhone I got a few weeks ago, but I am finding room in my heart to love both new pieces of technology in my life. We shall live harmoniously. It’s like I have machines for small (iPhone), medium (laptop), and large (desktop) techy stuff I need to do!
Hi, I am officially a geek.
I know you’re wondering if you got lost.
But alas, this IS in fact silencia.net. After TWO YEARS, it is finally redesigned. Overhauled. Simplified.
I tried a few times in the past, and abandoned the designs because they were not up to par, or I simply couldn’t get something VITAL to work properly.
I have noticed over the last couple years that all my “inside pages” were basically stuffed with useless filler to take up space and make a menu even worth having. So now there is NO MENU (stop looking for it). The only inside pages are for the portfolio. And I don’t imagine too many people are going to go looking at that.
This design is quite a step away from what I “usually” do. At work, I am so fucking sick to death of putting gradients, textures, background imagery, and shadowing all over every little thing. And I have been doing shitty design work at client’s requests (at work, not my adorable freelance projects) for so long that I feel my design skills are not up to par to try to blow anyone away. (See: guitarangel.net.)
So what we have is a design featuring one subtle gradient (the blue page background), and everything else is mostly flat. But I’m hoping there’s enough contrast that it is still visually interesting. And the darling little creatures (I hope) make it even more enjoyable to view.
Look around for errors and let me know about them. I troubleshooted (shot?) many of them already. But just in case I missed something. And let me know if it sucks!
PS - I added Google analytics for the hell of it about a week ago. And one of the keyword phrases used to find this website is “old cunt”! Not only that, but my link is on the FIRST PAGE of a google search of that phrase. Yay for me! It’s because of a previous and since-deleted post, but I’m hoping by mentioning it again, I’ll go up to #1 in the search engines for “old cunt”!
Sometimes things work out nicely.
So a few weeks ago, my beloved iPod died. I thought it was all over, the angels had sung. But it miraculously resurrected itself from the dead a day or two later when I checked on it. Then last Thursday it died again. So I plugged it in for a couple days thinking it might resurrect itself again. Nay. It had kicked the bucket. So it was time to go to Best Buy to see if the replacement plan I purchased for my iPod would come to good use.
What I had was a silver 4GB iPod nano that was $199.99 when I bought it. I guess it was the “2nd generation”. The tall skinny one. And apparently the iPod nano that goes for that price now is one of those new little 8GB iPods that also have video capability. So I exchanged my old one for a new black shiny 8GB iPod nano. Yay for me!
I had to buy a new replacement plan for the new iPod, but I got the iPod itself for free. The replacement plan was $30. AND the guy tells me it’s “$20 off an iPod day”, so I got a $20 gift card. So it was like I got a brand new iPod that had twice the capacity of my old one for $10. Hell yeah. A new iPod once a year for $30? I’ll take that deal.
It’s so sexy. That’s my new baby now. I listen to my iPod when I’m driving and all day at work. So it gets used a lot. I missed it dearly those days it was deceased and I hadn’t gotten the new one. But now I can be happy and my ears filled with music. Believe me, I need it to drown out annoying coworker voices.
And you know the reason #46841 why Pay-Per-Post spamblogs suck? I actually hesitated writing about my new iPod experience because I was worried it might look like a spammy sponsored post and people might turn away from this site, much like I do anytime I come across a blog that looks like it has sponsored posts. Rest assured, there are no links in this post, no one paid me anything, and I was simply writing about my experience of losing my beloved old iPod and replacing it with a newer sexier model. There are actually several instances where I’ve wanted to talk about a purchase or product I enjoyed, and I don’t because PPP spamblogs have ruined my desire to give personal testimonials about things, for fear it’ll look like a spamblog. So here’s a big fuck you to those spammers who have ruined blogging for the rest of us.
I thought I was a nerd…
I have been making websites since 2001/2002 or so. I was in the Web Developer program at a community college for a couple years, though I didn’t finish. I’ve worked as a web designer for a web company for the last three years. I work on websites just about every day of my life, even if I’m not at work. I would say I am fairly in-the-know with web design and development.
I do not know what “Web 2.0″ is.
I even read the Wikipedia entry for it, and I still don’t know what it is. When reading the “Technology Overview” of Web 2.0, it doesn’t even sound like it’s a new thing… to me. Am I wrong?
Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques:
* rich Internet application techniques, often Ajax-based
* semantically valid XHTML and HTML markup
* microformats extending pages with additional semantics
* folksonomies (in the form of tags or tagclouds, for example)
* Cascading Style Sheets to aid in the separation of presentation and content
* REST and/or XML- and/or JSON-based APIs
* syndication, aggregation and notification of data in RSS or Atom feeds
* mashups, merging content from different sources, client- and server-side
* weblog-publishing tools
* wiki or forum software, etc., to support user-generated content
I’ve also read that it’s more of a design thing - particularly the use of gradients in the design. I like gradients, they can add a smoothness and flow to a design, instead of being visually bluntly chopped into parts. Again, that doesn’t seem like a new concept. Usually when I read about someone who hates Web 2.0, they mention the shiny graphics and gradients. If the entire backlash is people who hate “o0o shiny” designs, I think you’re expressing your hate using the wrong term.
My guess is the things involved in Web 2.0 are simply not as new as the term itself, at least in how it is being thrown about now. O’Reilley actually compares Web 1.0 being Netscape and Web 2.0 being Google. Has anyone used Netscape since like 1997? The little chart here is kind of a nice way to compare 1.0 and 2.0, but it has Napster listed under Web 2.0. Napster? Is that still out there? And everything listed under the Web 2.0 column, again, does not seem all that new to me.
I’m not saying Web 2.0 does not exist, I’m just saying I don’t know what the hell it is. I recognized that the times have changed and things advance, but there are people advocating and abhorring this “Web 2.0″ thing, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. If it is advancing technology, I’m not understanding why there is some backlash against it, or that anyone needs to speak for it. This is the internet. Isn’t the whole essence of the internet to advance and expand and improve?
If anyone has any further insight, I’d love to hear it.
Comments fixed. Bad Behavior plug-in isn’t as useful as I had hoped. Bless Akismet.
Happy 5th birthday, silencia.net!
Wow, color me surprised. So I recently realized that I registered this domain in October of 2002, and it is now October 2007! Which means that my beloved silencia.net is now 5 years old. And going… fairly strong. I’m not one to study stats, so I have no idea how my “popularity” is doing to know if my domain is a formidable presence at 5 years old (I have my doubts). But I still enjoy it, and that’s all that really counts. Except when it’s comment whoring time! I kid, I kid.
It’s funny to think back to the internet of only 5 little years ago. The trends have changed, I can’t say they’ve gotten particularly better though. I remember when anyone who owned a domain ran an award site, web review site, a few cliques, and had tons of hostees. Then came the fanlisting fad that rocked the webs. I think I ran around 12 fanlistings at the most at one point. Now I have none! I remember when celebrities were THE thing to have in your layout, all blurred out and dreamy-soft looking. And vectorized celebrities! I know celeb layouts are still out there, but thankfully they aren’t usually on the sites that I frequent or come across much.
Content like stuff you’d find in dumb forwarded email messages and “free” icons that were cropped out of photos of, again, celebrities. I think people still do the forwarded emails as content thing, but I haven’t seen that myself in years. I’m not really interested in the content people have on their personal sites. So I’m not completely up on what’s out there. I think instead of cropped out images of celebs as image icons, people do more stuff like blending or colorizing photos they found and giving them away. I guess? I should maybe have researched the point of this first, haha. There is definitely some original content out there in the personal website world, but there is also a ton of stolen crap still making its way around and around. Which is how it was 5 years ago!
I used to have tutorials! And they were terrible! I don’t even remember what most of them were now, but I remember one was to make your scrollbar on the left side instead of the right. Like, what? How did I think that would be useful. But I’m sure there are still dumb tutorials out there like that. I’m kind of out of the loop of looking for tutorials and new things to do with websites. Which is weird because I make websites for a living. I’m so burned out on web design by the end of the day, I rarely do anything web related on my own time. Which would explain why this layout has been at silencia.net for… at least a year. I’ve seen enough of Jem’s pants awards to know that dirty old tutorials are still making their way around.
I’ve definitely changed in the last 5 years on this domain. Much like the rest of the web has changed, and I’ve changed in my own life. I used to try to come up with new content ideas; now I don’t even bother with content anymore. The portfolio here is an afterthought at best, because a few people have asked for some examples of other stuff I work on. My personal section used to have several pages of silly things. Now it’s down to a page with a few paragraphs (which need to be reworked).
I used to join listings and cliques and fanlistings and webrings like crazy! Now most listings, cliques, and webrings have gone defunct. And I’m pondering how I can find all the fanlistings I joined over the years and get off their lists. Remember “sister sites” and affiliates?! Do people still do that with their personal sites? Man. The old days.
That photo is of me at my own 5th birthday, in 1987. I’m tearing into a My Little Pony with Megan doll. Gawd, my spindly little arm and light blond hair. I look nothing like that anymore! But I still have that cheesy grin.