June 4 2009

minning.de VI

, ,

It’s been more than two years since the last major revi­sion to minning.de. To coin­cide with the upcom­ing release of a new ver­sion of Nor­mal­ity I thought it would be a good idea to finally push through with the new design that’s been cook­ing for almost ten months.

Word­press remains my CMS of choice and I am very happy with the lat­est ver­sion. I was con­sid­er­ing both Dru­pal and TYPO­light, but WP does every­thing I need and does it well.
My new design also makes heavy use of jQuery, which I am using to spruce up the site with some neat effects and also to sig­nif­i­cantly cut down on load­ing times through the use of AJAX; accord­ing to my tests, this iter­a­tion of minning.de is fastest I’ve ever devel­oped, even though it is by far the most com­plex per­sonal web­site I’ve worked on.

And thanks to web browser’s increased stan­dards com­pli­ance devel­op­ing this site was rel­a­tively pain­less and at times an actu­ally enjoy­able process. Fire­fox and Safari pretty much ren­der the way one expects them to.

At this point I’d also like to send out a really big F***YOU to Microsoft’s Inter­net Explorer.
From the get go I decided not to make any effort what­so­ever to sup­port IE6. Lit­tle did I know that IE7 would require per­sonal atten­tion as well.
It’s almost like Microsoft is inten­tion­ally try­ing to screw web devel­op­ers: They have accu­mu­lated nearly a hand­ful incom­pat­i­ble ver­sions that each require indi­vid­ual hacks and to top it off, you can’t install them at the same time to test your site – brilliant!

July 13 2006

minning.de upgraded to WP2

, ,

Finally made the tran­si­tion to Word­Press 2. I’d been hold­ing back on this upgrade mainly because I’m already work­ing on a new design for minning.de and intended to apply that along with the new ver­sion of Word­Press.
Also I was expect­ing some trou­ble with the upgrade process as the site uses sev­eral cus­tom plug-​​ins, but guess what — it all went smooth as silk! Even the Gallery, an out­ra­geous hack of a hack, still works.

September 26 2005

Welcome to Minning.de V4

, , , ,

Well, it’s been a long time with­out updates! But I wasn’t idle all this time; for one, it’s just another week until I’ll finally receive my diploma in Media Design. My desser­ta­tion on non­pho­to­re­al­is­tic ren­der­ing was handed in two weeks ago, which left me a lit­tle time to update Minning.de’s design and con­tent.
This is a rather large leap in terms of design and func­tion­al­ity and I hope that every­thing works fine now. Some areas are still a lit­tle rough, but that’ll be fixed soon… I just wanted to get the update out before any­thing gets in the way again.
The whole site is based on a highly cus­tomized ver­sion of Word­Press, unlike my pre­vi­ous site, which incor­po­rated Word­press only in the Pro­duc­tion Log. I’m not some kind of XHTML/​CSS-​​zealot and, quite frankly, I couldn’t care less if my code val­i­dates or if every­thing is done the “right” way. For me all that counts is that it just works. So the site’s been tested up and down in var­i­ous browsers, but bear with me if I missed a bug or two along the way — should you encouter any­thing weird on your visit, please let me know!

As men­tioned above, my desser­ta­tion on non­pho­to­re­al­is­tic ren­der­ing is com­pleted. If all goes well I’ll post some sam­ples of what my ren­derer Panda is capa­ble of. Let me just say that Panda is suited for a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent styles and the result­ing look is very painterly.

So now that I’m more or less fin­ished with my stud­ies, I’m look­ing for a job in the CG indus­try. Con­tact me if you’re interested!

August 15 2005

Updated to WordPress 1.5.2

, ,

The good peo­ple of Word­Press have fixed some more bugs and added new fea­tures in their lat­est release.

Minning.de is now run­ning Word­Press 1.5.2.

More updates are com­ing soon, I’m quite busy writ­ing my stu­dent the­sis at the moment.

June 18 2005

Updated to WordPress 1.5.1

,

Ok, I updated the site to Word­press 1.5.1 — looks like every­thing is run­ning well!

February 18 2005

Getting back on track

, , ,

You may have noticed a slew of posts mostly unre­lated to the topic at hand, the short film Sleep­ing Dragon. This is another one of those.

I was noti­fied that Word­Press, the open source soft­ware pow­er­ing this plog, has reached ver­sion 1.5.
Rea­son enough for me to upgrade my install to the newest ver­sion! Looks like every­thing went well, so far… should you encounter any prob­lems or irreg­u­lar­i­ties, please let me know!

Other than that, expect my com­ing posts to be more con­cerned with the actual pro­duc­tion of Sleep­ing Dragon than the last few.

The film is still in active pro­duc­tion, but in the cur­rent phase there’s sim­ply not that much to write about. Sure I could go on and on about the tech­ni­cal­i­ties of par­ti­cle dynam­ics sys­tems or how to inte­grate ani­mated 2D and 3D ele­ments in a com­pos­i­tor, but I doubt many reader’s would find that inter­est­ing. Or maybe I am wrong?

1