KatsBits Community

General Category => Public Discussion => Topic started by: silicone_milk on January 20, 2010, 08:51:19 PM

Title: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on January 20, 2010, 08:51:19 PM
Hey guys, I know I had linked to my site in the private section of the forums but I wanted to publicly post that my portfolio is now online at http://www.siliconemilk.com

I would really appreciate it if I could get some feedback on it (ignoring the Art section) and receive suggestions on how to improve the site.

Thanks :)
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: kat on January 21, 2010, 07:09:53 AM
Add a couple of screen grabs from the games you're worked on, linking to the site is good (obviously) it would be better for you too show some game shots on your site so you directly associate some sense of 'ownership' over what you did in each context. Incidentally, you need to add "target="_blank"" to your external links otherwise you're 'loosing' visitor by loading over your site - always open external sites in a new page.
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on January 25, 2010, 12:01:55 AM
Thanks Kat :)

I was working on changing up the layout and personalizing the web site rather than relying on the templates from Dreamweaver since that was an often-repeated "complaint" amongst viewers.

Right now the server is offline since I'm moving to a new place and all of my hardware is in some boxes right now.

But, here are two shots of the new design:
First Draft
(https://www.katsbits.com/community/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi12.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fa242%2Fcaldiar%2Fth_web_design.png&hash=bfb4373cc8b5a25b8ef677aaf86b3c3132192d9c) (http://s12.photobucket.com/albums/a242/caldiar/?action=view&current=web_design.png)

Second Draft - lights on navbar removed since they didnt tile very well.
(https://www.katsbits.com/community/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi12.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fa242%2Fcaldiar%2Falmost.png&hash=1b078e6e090598845c99feffe7cde081dd966710) (http://s12.photobucket.com/albums/a242/caldiar/?action=view&current=almost.png)

Playing with the tables for the programming page and trying to get the images to align correctly.
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: ratty redemption on February 02, 2010, 09:22:55 PM
I like that layout milk as it reminds me of q2 :)
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on February 05, 2010, 04:10:00 PM
Thanks :)

It should remind you of Q2. The template I'm designing uses Evilair's eq2 texture set :)

Website's been offline for a week or two now since I moved and haven't gotten around to hooking the server up again.
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: ratty redemption on February 05, 2010, 05:23:14 PM
hehe, cool and I remember some of evilair's work now that you mention it. he was talented :)

and good luck with your site.
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on September 10, 2010, 12:52:07 AM
just bought a hosting plan so I no longer host the website on my own computer. I'm tired of fending off script kiddie attacks. (none were successful ;))

I also registered a new domain http://www.guineacode.com for some programming tutorials/experiments/whatever I feel like putting up that doesn't belong in my portfolio.

Both domains share the same host I'm just redirecting siliconemilk.com to a folder in guineacode.com's root.

Also, I have subdomains up. Should be able to type siliconemilk.guineacode.com to get siliconemilk.com but I'm waiting for the changes to propagate to see if the rerouting's successful or not. Likewise, guineacode.siliconemilk.com should take you to www.guineacode.com
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: kat on September 10, 2010, 02:23:07 AM
Ha.. love the new name! Self hosting is more trouble than it's worth these days so I'm not surprised you ended up buying o_O
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on September 10, 2010, 12:55:19 PM
Thanks :)

I've always had issues with web hosts which is why I had chosen to self-host lately but my PC simply isn't meant to be a web server. Plus it puts the other computers on my LAN at risk for attack as well.

I just got through with a 6 hour struggle in DNS Management hell.

I have a machine on my network that I like to connect to through ssh to upload/download source code.
My domain name no longer points to the ip address of my router so I can't get to the ssh server through my domain name.

I contacted my host provider wondering if it would be possible to alter the DNS records so all ssh traffic ended up going to my router rather than to their web servers. The answer was "I'm not sure." then 20 minutes later "No you can't." then I was hung up on.

I had an idea after that to create a new A record for a subdomain of my site which, with my infinite wit, named ssh, points to my routers ip address.

So siliconemilk.com and www.siliconemilk.com points to my host ip address.
ssh.siliconemilk.com points to my home ip address.

Now I can access my ssh server as usual through a slight modification in address. I can type ssh://ssh.siliconemilk.com and get at the machine I want to get at :)

------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm disappointed because a good friend told me this host was great and I should move my site to their servers. I've had a 5 minute downtime in less than 24 hours (guaranteed 99.9% uptime) and dealt with rude, incompetent tech support.

I'm not naming them because they don't deserve any additional google brownie points from me. But I'm sure you can guess what it is when I say the first part of the name is host and the second part is the kind of creature Godzilla is. (You need to watch more Godzilla films if you're guessing gator...)
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: kat on September 10, 2010, 04:03:08 PM
Hmm. not good getting support like that (with "H057 M0n573r"). I seem to have lucked out with the Co. I use. Be mindful that what you're doing isn't against their general terms and conditions some hosting companies are a bit funny that way.

[EDIT] just realised this means your images are down... make sure you re-establish the structure so they pop back into place.
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on September 12, 2010, 07:19:08 AM
Yep. I was a little frustrated with the response that I got.

And yeah, I know the images will be down now. I need to fix all the links which, luckily, won't be too much of a hassle since I no longer want my images to be under the /music/ directory :P

I could always write a rewrite rule in the .htaccess file but I think a cleaner solution is to go on to the forums that link to the images and edit the posts to use the new addresses.

http://www.guineacode.com has a design now thanks to some wordpress theme magic.
Finally finished up on the configuration for search engine optimization :)

Was also having some 404 errors with some url rewrite rules so I just bit the bullet and decided to deal with the extra bit of the url that was bugging the OCD side of me.
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on September 22, 2010, 01:44:19 AM
Tutorials are starting to take shape.

Didn't have time to finish the section on linking opencl in a visual studio environment but I'll have it finished tonight I think.
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on September 24, 2010, 12:26:08 AM
Linking and Configuring OpenCL tutorial is finished.
http://www.guineacode.com/2010/linking-and-compiling-opencl/

 8)
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on July 15, 2011, 09:18:03 AM
http://www.siliconemilk.com got a redesign with some HTML 5, CSS3, and JQuery love.

Still adding some content but it's pretty much around 98% finished I think.
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: kat on July 15, 2011, 04:45:30 PM
No links to the projects you worked on in the blurbs? (Site is nice an simple btw *up*)
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: ratty redemption on July 15, 2011, 08:22:09 PM
milk, i agree with kat, your site is very easy to navigate and clean looking, also impressive and interesting cv.

you remind me of a mod coder i used to work with back in the heretic2 days, he also implemented features like fire propagation and some cool medieval weapons. i was the lead level designer for the mod and we had a lot of fun with his simple bots that we had to escort around the maps i would build. the ai wasn't perfect but it was one of the most fun games/mods i've ever played and worked on.
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on July 16, 2011, 07:36:55 AM
Thanks guys. I'm liking the design much more than the Quake 2 based design I came up with previously. Another plus is that it's faster (I think there's a total of 4 images all under 512x512 on the site).

Something I think is interesting that goes on behind the scenes for the site is the asynchronous page loading. Using JQuery, only the center of the page ever changes depending on the menu link you click. So you're technically always on the index.html page and the content of other pages is fetched and slapped in to the middle of index.


I guess I should do a write-up on the site itself as a programming project? hehe

@Kat - if you click on the images in the blurbs it will take you to the project sites. Although I suppose it's not immediately apparent. The Encore! section has no page to link to though since it was cancelled. Maybe I should link to the youtube videos I recorded of its development.

@Ratty Redemption - I personally feel the cv is lacking a bit so I'm working on some quick 2D games and such to be able to toss up there to demonstrate various programming tasks. (wow I haven't played Heretic 2 in ages)
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: ratty redemption on July 16, 2011, 07:50:00 PM
milk, understood and good luck with those. do you mind me asking how your going to animate the games?
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on July 20, 2011, 11:44:24 AM
just through simple blitting of images on an HTML5 canvas element.

Currently playing with Node.js which allows for client-side AND server-side development of applications in javascript which take up a very small amount of memory per connection and dont allocate an entire 2 MB OS thread per client.

Fast. Efficient. Easy. Did I mention, fast?
Title: Re: My Portfolio
Post by: silicone_milk on September 24, 2011, 03:30:40 AM
After some host shenanigans on the 'monster host provider' that I was using, I now only use them to register my domain name which points to a custom DNS server which I run at home.

http://www.siliconemilk.com and my blog/tutorial site http://www.guineacode.com both have their domain names resolved by my own DNS server which I think is pretty damn cool.

Speaking of guineacode, I just finished an article on Facebook app authorization with JavaScript and OAuth 2.0. It covers keeping the authorization dialog in the same window as the app preventing pop-ups from ever displaying.

If you guys have any suggestions on how to improve it, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know. I'm aware it's pretty wordy. I might have to either split it in to two posts or maybe add some more images to it to break it up.

http://www.guineacode.com/2011/facebook-app-authorization

Thanks :)