I wouldn’t like to call it procrastination, but over a year had gone since I had touched mindresin seriously. Before, mindResin served as a sandbox for projects I was developing, and also as a small portfolio I had knocked up in a couple of nights prior to some job interviewing.

It is still my sandbox, but now serves as a pretty decent landing page, with a comprehensive portoflio (that will be kept up to date. oh yes). The recent desire to expand my ‘footprint’ came partly out of the envy of other portoflio’s out there, but mostly out of necessity. Nowadays, It’s hard to get far in the web-design field without something personal and decent to show for it.

As you can probably tell, this blog is powered by WordPress. The other subpages however are PHP based with some other fun stuff thrown in. Here’s the shopping list:

General Layout stuff

click and drag, baby

The header’s logotype has an easter egg ‘rotoscope’ style animation that reacts to the users click-and-drag (not enabled on this blog page) — achieved with jQuery’s event based functions and a PNG sprite.

Behind the brain graphic, the fixed-positioned header has a lower alpha value, allowing content from the main page areas to slide up and beneath, becoming partially visible through the window.

Most headers throughout the site take advantage of the Cufon js library. I’ve dabbled with sIFR in the past, and although it’s pretty extensive  the setup process is a pain and it’s  accessibility raises some issues.

Cufon still has some accessibility shortcomings (text cant be selected and copied), but it’s ease of setup out-weighs that — at least for this project.

Portfolio page

This is undoubtedly where most of my development time went. As well as showcasing projects I’ve completed recently, I wanted the user experience to be as pleasurable as possible.

The front end

Portoflio items are generated from an XML file using PHP. The sidebar allows the toggling of tags to show or hide items in the frame using AJAX. Selection of an item spawns a modal dialog where more screenshots can be viewed and information found.

The back end

Screenshot of the portoflio CMS in action

A full weekend of coding saw the birth of my own portoflio CMS. The PHP developed framework allows the addition, editing and removal of portoflio items.

Javascripting allows the tags to be defined and inserted from the left menu, as well as a portoflio item’s attributes (skills or tools used in the item’s creation).

I opted for an XML based storage as I really did not feel like dealing with databases. Also, this portfolio can potentially function offline as a self-contained app later on if the need arises.

At a later date I may tighten up the code and release it, but I’m uncertain right now how much support I can provide for it.