work on main danbretl.com site has begun
posted february 22, 2008
i'm tired of making little individual websites for every project that i've got going. i'm tired of coming up with lame simplistic design after lame simplistic design, always trying to make them a little different but always sticking with the same basic layouts. i continually do this though because i just don't want to spend a lot of time designing the website presenting a project - i'd rather spend that extra time back on the project itself. in any case, enough is enough, and i've decided that the time has come to finally house all (or almost all) of my projects under one roof. i've begun work on the design for an all-encompassing danbretl.com site. i don't promise anything fancy - in fact i suspect that the site will still have a rather basic layout. but that's what i want: something simple, easy to navigate, all-encompassing, and above all else easy to add on to. i want to try and get rid of as many excuses as possible that might be keeping me from working on the art projects themselves that i have mulling around in my head all day.
danbretl.com front page redesigned
posted february 20, 2008
after growing rather bored with my danbretl.com landing page, i decided to sketch out something new. i still wanted it to have the same simple 'floating in white' look but i wanted there to be something more. i came up with the (presumably not novel) idea that links on the greeting page could reflect how popular they were, so that the quality content of the moment that is getting a lot of attention would naturally pop out for the visitor. turns out this was quite easy to conceptualize, and it wasn't all that hard to implement either - it only took about a day. each time the page is loaded it dynamically creates a style sheet describing font sizes for each of the links, based off of a data table containing those links which keeps track of visits to each location. i like it because it makes the front page feel fresh, since every time it loads it's a little bit different with the font sizes, and also it's so easy to add new links that an exciting healthy amount of growth can occur.