I wanted to go to Syracuse this weekend with friends for Dinosaur BBQ and window shopping, but I had already committed to working on the Cornell Computer Animation website with people. Ah well.
Right now I’m involved in 3 website projects:
1, at work, tweaking the conglomerate of intertwined CSS files. It’s a virtual game of hide-and-seek, but things are slowly being accomplished.
2. personal website. I just started uploading my portfolio to my github, but it’s not live yet on the website. Made some appearance changes. It was too dull and flat earlier, so I’m trying to spice it up.
3. Cornell Computer Animation website. For my own reference I’m currently hosting it as a subdomain: animation.apokellypse.com. So far, it’s a basic web design, but once we get in more pictures and things it’ll look more hearty.
Some notes: it’s pretty difficult at first to know how to delegate tasks to people when you’re working in a medium group for a website. It’s so much nicer if people just stick to once kind of task.
I’m used to working with myself, so I’ve developed a personal workflow (do meta tags, put in stubs for .css and .js files, look up fonts, add header and nav and footer, then fill in content) but in a group suddenly it feels like there are too many hands to do just HTML & CSS. The inexperienced web designers might not indent things properly, or might lose tags here or there, or put too many block-level things inside each other when only the outermost would have sufficed.
Meanwhile, the more experienced designers will have different naming conventions than thou, and you’ll see class=”content” when you typically use id=”container”. Not that one way is any better than the other, not at all – it’s just strange because then someone has gotta consolidate this whole thing. Or they might be coding in HTML 4 Strict Transitional because that’s what Cornell teaches and you’re all like HTML 5 doe
It was a good experience, though. I really love the small set of stats Github provides, and to see how everyone was able to contribute. Sometimes it’s not about efficiency, but rather being able to work together as a team in terms of trust and common interest towards the goal.
Also, I found out why Chrome is so bad at rendering fonts. There is actually a reason out there, but I won’t talk about it here (the post is long enough). Apparently it’ll be completely fixed in Chrome 37, but in the meantime, there are definitely work-arounds.
Adventures 