I have been working tirelessly to create my new website and now it is nearly finished! In what started out as an effort to create a website that allowed my slideshows to be seen on the ever-increasingly omnipresent iPhones and iPads of the world, I have ended up digging deeper than I had planned.
While talking to my computer nerd brother about all of this and getting his input and suggestions, he introduced me to the concept of the responsive website. I’m sure everyone knows what this is and I was the only odd man out- but just in case: a responsive website is one that can understand what type of browser and device you are looking at it on and will adjust how it looks to be best viewed on that device. Genius! This is exactly what I’m looking for!! I took some more of my brother’s advice and began playing with WordPress as a viable (and Javascript heavy) alternative to the Dreamweaver that I have been using for years. WordPress is a little intimidating at first, but is awesome once you learn how to use it! This took some time but I felt that the time investment was worth it and jumped into learning the program. However- as an artist I immediately found myself frustrated with my inability to have complete control over the medium. So then I was turned onto Twitter Bootstrap (also by my brother) where I could now create themes for WordPress from scratch. This of course meant that I was going to have to learn how to use another program, but what the hell? Right? Oh yeah… and the program required that I learn how to code html from scratch… and there was going to be another program called Sublime 2 (that I’d also never used) to do it! No problem. Nothing that a period of intense YouTube tutorials couldn’t get me through.
So, looking good and moving along nicely. Then I decided that my Photoshop was not working quite as fast as I’d like, so what better time to install a new OS? Let’s upgrade to Lion (which I know is not Mountain Lion, but I’m trying folks), that should solve it. Well it sorta did… Turns out that the version (old enough that I don’t care to say what release) of Photoshop I was using can’t even be run on Lion, so now I had no Photoshop at all! Well since I’m learning new programs and since I don’t use Photoshop enough to care to afford a copy, let’s just throw some GimpShop into the mix here.
Well, after learning enough GimpShop to get by and Gimping around for weeks while spending the past month learning WordPress, Bootstrap (which is a good thing since Lion doesn’t support Dreamweaver anymore either!), and Sublime 2- I’m happy to announce that I have successfully built a new website for my mom’s yarn shop Yarn and Company and for my lovely actor wife Erica Highberg, and I have nearly finished the new Tolin FX website. I will announce that it is ready in the next couple days and I can only hope that someone is as excited about all this as me!
By the way- it has slideshows that you can totally view on iphones and ipads (as well as any other device and on nearly every one of the nearly 200 browsers that I looked at it on). Nice!
For what that’s worth!
tolin
