Reminiscing the past (My Personal Web endeavours)

How time flies. It has been 8 years since I started dabbling with the web. The first 3 years, from year 2000 till year 2003, was spent serving my country as a enlisted soldier. I was a medic by the way, and most of the time was spent either as a PA to the army doctor or out field as a cover medic. Nothing much was done when I was in the army, except for some sketches (I was known to bring my little sketch book and colored pencils out to the fields lolx).

Was talking with Wendy this evening and we ended up talking about our old websites. She had posted something akin to it a few days ago. And so, I decided to show her my personal websites(portfolio sites). Fired up my firefox, I went to my old web address to check whether my old websites are still there. To my surprise, my Geocities account is still alive! (And surprisingly I still remember my id and password after 5years haha)

 

1st Website (Year 2000-2003)

During my time in the army, I made use of my time off to create my very first portfolio site (apart from the one during my final year project). I named it ‘dogurin’, which is the japanese name for ‘acorn’. I am quite a Japan freak even till now. The site was done using Macromedia Director, I did not know Flash back then in year 2000, what a waste lolx.

Dive in to see my first website. (DCR format)

Note: The portfolio section of this site still makes me feel proud even till now lolx. It was considered something quite ‘unique’ back then. Adobe Shockwave Player is needed to view DCR files.

 

1st Web alternative (Year 2000)

buy cheap generic propecia href=”https://rin-wendy.com/images/lvold/works2.dcr” rel=”shadowbox;width=600;height=400″>

As I created Dogurin, I had come to realise that it is too small to view for screens bigger than the 14″ CRT (Yes, that was when 800×600 screen resolution cytotec no prescription was the biggest screen resolution most computers can go). Thus, I created the alternative a couple of days after the website went live. The site, or rather page… never went past the drawing board. But as a very enthuastic youngster, I scripted the first page of it.

Check it out here. (DCR format)

Note: Adobe Shockwave Player is needed to view DCR files.

 

2nd Website – Dogurin: Type Yanagi (Year 2003)

Year 2003 was a turning point for me. Freshly out of the army after two and a half years, I lost touch to the creative industry out in the market. Spent a few months looking for work and was greeted by the same statement everywhere.

“Dude, if you don’t know flash, don’t bother coming for an interview. Macromedia Director is dead.”

Thus, without a job, I started learning Flash 6.0 on my own. Went to library, borrowed a book and embark on a journey which changed my path from design to integration. After a month ‘hermit~ing’ at home, ‘Dogurin:Type Yanagi’ was born. It was my very first flash website, done up in Actionscript 1.0.

Yanagi is the japanese name for “willow”, and the website is named after its unique navigation system (‘Option 4′ I called cialis online order it). I had a lot of ideas of creating navigation and I categorize them as ‘options’. Basically Option 1st is point-and-click (which most websites use and is the most effective), 2nd is Drag-and-drop, 3rd is click-hold-wait navigation that Generic Levitra Super Active+ Online Pharmacy focuses on time, 4th is click-hold-drag navigation, 5th is gestures and so on… Yanagi uses Option4 as the main navigation system. Click anywhere on the screen, hold for a couple of seconds and drag up or down vertically to scroll through the sections.

I did not get jobs after creating this site sadly. The comments I got were, “The design kind of sucks, I’ll be blunt.” or “Perhaps you should look more buy amoxicillin into the integrator type of job rather than a designer type of job.” Though I got shot down in the design department, the companies that interviewed me were quite surprised that I can do such a website without any prior training in programming (My diploma course was purely design and had little programming modules, which I did not fare quite well in lolx).

Click to view Dogurin:Type Yanagi (swf)

 

3rd Website – Littlevault ver.1 (May, Year 2004)

Flash 7.0 came and along with it, AS1.5 scripting language. Blogs and online galleries were the ‘in’ thing during that year and I did up a flash version of blog and gallery. This was the time Littlevault was created. Littlevault meaning “A little pocket of space on the web that houses my thoughts, works and such”. 1st version of the website kamagra sildenafil citrate did not sustain past 2months of updates. The constant updating of content in external text files were too tedious and not maintainence-friendly to begin with.

Check Littlevault-ver1 out. (Full Flash external, hosted on friend’s webspace)

Warning: Background music for this website, and it cannot be turned off. The blog images and background music shown in this website are copyrighted by their respective owners.

 

4th Website – Littlevault ver.2 (Dec, Year 2004)

Rather than a site with my portfolio in it, I decided to create littlevault with a more personal touch (no portfolio). Hence out came version 2.0 of the full flash website. XML was implemented making the website easier to maintain. Staying true to what I envision the website to be, this website was made to be very modular. Everything can be re-arranged and restructured just by editing the external xml files.

During this time I met up with the 13apostles group too. And thus I added in their home page together with my website.

Click to view Littlevault ver.2 (Full flash external, hosted on friend’s webspace)

 

5th Website – Littlevault ver.4 & Rin-Wendy.com Rev.1 (Aug & Oct,Year 2008)

Why the skip in version? Version 3.0 is scrapped after the design stage and never made it to the web.

During the 4 years+ of working in the industry, I did quite a number of web projects. The more commerical projects I do the more I realise that flash is not the way to go if I want a website to be easily maintained, even by a layman. Arriving at this, I decided to drop flash and keep it only for some parts of the website (like sIFR). I have also split the website into 2, one with only my work and portfolio, the other a personal website/blog.

And thus…

the current www.littlevault.com and rin-wendy.com

 

Reminiscing the past…

Looking back, I can see the path which I had carved out for myself. I have grown a lot in the integration department rather than in design. Design-wise, now not as sucky as I was in the past.

 

LOL. Time really does fly.