RenEvo Software and Designs - Community : Web Design

We are on Facebook now

Tom Anderson — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:56:53 GMT

Finally setup a Facebook page.

Stop by and Like us if you get a chance!

Rolling my own – TomAnderson.me

Tom Anderson — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:35:45 GMT

Well, that’s it.

I am just going to roll my own, what better way to learn, than to do (paraphrased from “The only source of knowledge is experience.” by Albert Einstein).

I have installed ASP.Net MVC 2, and am downloading Visual Studio 2010 Premium RC (which luckily has a “go live” license attached to it). This will allow me to utilize not only the newest in ASP.Net MVC, but also start working on .Net 4.0, which is another one of my goals.

So for today, I want to get the project started up, separate out the projects in the specific concerns and areas, as well as stripping out any sort of Windows Authentication/Forms Authentication in a traditional ASP.Net fashion for the wonderfulness of OpenId.

Once I have the site structure, as well as the logins, I want to start working on the base master page. For now I will most likely style it after a cleaned up version of the current TomAnderson.me – I like the colors, but obviously for copyright reasons, I will have to make some adjustments and roll my own images for the site.

Because my hosting does not yet support .Net 4.0 (because it is an RC) I won’t be able to get live updates until they do, but I plan on posting it up to a codeplex or Google code project for anyone to enjoy and comment on, all feedback is welcome.

The first iterations are going to be very strongly about getting some of the things I want to do fleshed out (site.com/sandbox/blah) most likely, and then re-identifying things I like across the web, and figuring out how to implement them, either on the client, or the server.

Well, while I download the 2.2gb of Visual Studio 2010, I will be creating the directory structure and the hosted source control, will update when those are available.

AtomSite – Well that lasted about 20 minutes

Tom Anderson — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:07:40 GMT

So I downloaded and installed AtomSite, checked it out, the front end seemed pretty good, the admin section was quite nice, and the plugin architecture seemed… sharepointy…

I then took a look at the source code, and seriously decided against it. I am looking for a pure ASP.Net MVC application to work with if I don’t write my own, unfortunately AtomSite is not, it uses some things from ASP.Net MVC, but in fact is using a custom View engine (which I don’t want at this point), and a lot of overhead on the code.

I am looking for simple, light, and easily modified code. Looks like I might still be rolling my own, as this just isn’t what I am looking for at this point.

Back to the drawing board, literally…

AtomSite – Site Development Continues

Tom Anderson — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:29:49 GMT

So, a while back I had mentioned something about creating a site for TomAnderson.me.

Originally I was going to write the entire thing from scratch, then release the source, etc… Well, life happens, I don’t have that kind of time, and I want to “get in an code”.

I am going to check out the Atom Site open source project for ASP.Net MVC and see how I like it, who knows, I might actually get the site up and running in the next few years.

Anyway, off to the races!

Site Themes

Tom Anderson — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:31:50 GMT

There are two new themes under development right now by DreamWraith and myself. You can find them under your user options (dw and beta).

Not sure how fast they will be updated, but feel free to check them out. I can’t guarantee they are going to always work though.

Site is getting dated

Tom Anderson — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:07:04 GMT

Just starting to notice how dated my web site is getting. It has been a few years since I have updated the look and feel of the site.

Thinking maybe over the next month or so I might update the look a bit, I don’t think I have the time to do more than that really. And I definitely don’t have the time for a full site rewrite, which I would like to do, considering that the features even with the blog are getting dated (have to use the FTP option now with Live Writer to upload images).

Not to mention that I will probably switch hosting when I redo the site, to cut the costs down quite a bit, as I don’t get nearly the traffic that I used to, but go figure, don’t update your site that often, the traffic slows down.

Website Journal Part 4 – Follow up

Tom Anderson — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 05:04:44 GMT

So, it has been a little over a week since my last post, this week has been pretty tight with work.

A few things have popped up in the last few days that have finalized some of the design aspects of the website. For one, I have decided against the “Entire Post” blog posts, this model didn’t work well with the “Facebook/Twitter” type of update system I am planning. Luckily Windows Live Writer supports the ability to create “Excerpts” via the Metablog API and the Windows Live Writer “Supports Excerpts” blog configuration. This is a bit more work for me for posting new blogs, but simply pasting a paragraph from the post should do suffice for most cases.

I will hopefully start jotting down some wireframes this week for the basic layouts so I can get started with the feature requirements and get cranking on the code… Which is what this is all about right?

More coming soon…

Website Journal Part 3 – Scouring the web for ideas

Tom Anderson — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:04:33 GMT

Full post disclosure

Most websites only show a fragment of the posts, not revealing the entire post unless you drill down into the header link or the “read more”. This was one of the first things that I modified into RenEvo to be easier to read new content for the visitors. I could see if you are depending on ad exposure separating the topics from the news would give you additional points of advertising, but since I don’t do either, there is no reason to just show the visitor the entire post.

Simple Posts

Facebook has this ideal notion of showing “mini-posts” or “Simple Posts”, there will be times on my site when I don’t want to sit down and add an entire post, but maybe just want to post up an interesting tech video I saw somewhere, or other Facebook functionality. Yes, I am stealing this idea, but this is my site, I get what I want.

Filterable Homepage

Because I will be adding different types of posts, it is only natural that I will need someway to display only certain things on my site. Facebook does this pretty cool like by adding filters on the users Home tab that allows them to only show individual posts by type, or a “News Feed” that shows everything. Just by adding this I will easily be able to combine multiple parts of my wanted functionality all on the home page.

Visitor Bug Reporting

Sometimes I can’t test everything on every browser both logged in and anonymous, so providing some sort of bug reporting and feedback mechanism would be ideal way for the visitors to let me know where I goofed up.

Dynamically Load Older Posts

Not taking it as far as the Google Reader methodology that reloads all the content as you scroll down, Facebook again has the ability to load the next (x) amount of older posts on demand, allowing a visitor to catch up on content.

Inline Commenting and Liking

As a way for me to allow visitors to say something about my posts easily, as well as let me know if the crap I am posting on the site is even worth my efforts, or possibly allow me to statistically analyze what content I could concentrate on more, the Like and inline commenting option both above on Facebook and below on Stackoverflow would be ideal.

Although I would want to go a bit further and allow a user to post more information, kind of like how codinghorror.com does it, I would allow users to enter their name and “optional” email ONLY for hashing and used for generating a Gravatar avatar image. This way people could easily brand their own comments, but antonymous would still be able to be kept.

Tag Based RSS Feeds

Stackoverflow has the ability to create feeds based on their tags. Essentially any feed that is created on their website can be accessed via a feed. Say you don’t care about my home life that I post about, but you are fascinated with my car, you can simply just subscribe to items tagged “Charlie” – the name of my car…

Easy and Quick Adding of Content

Again, going on the idea of me being able to update this site as easily as possible, there will not always be times when I want to open up Live Writer to build a post, so I can easily go to any browser, sign in with my OpenId, and quickly add a new link, video, or quick text about what I am wanting to say.

Auto-Update Networking Sites

Because I will not want to go through and double add content from my site, to Facebook, to twitter, to RenEvo, to… I will be using Networking API software to directly post content based on tags and type. For example if I post a video, it will also share it on Facebook, if I just plop in some quick text, it will also update my twitter and Facebook pages. If I post a blog and tag it with Renevo then it will automatically post to RenEvo.com. Features like this will easily allow me to stop jumping all around the internet to post information, I will only need to go to Facebook to see what everyone else is doing.

Personal About Page

Taking from the guidelines to create a great “About Me” page from Smashing Magazine, I want to create an about page that is kind of personal, rather than “hi, i am tom, i do stuff… *to-do update this later” I really like this one as it shows the person with a full body shot on the page, and some clean information about him.

That pretty much wraps up this part, I think that the next step might be doing some quick preliminary chicken scratches of how I want the main page to look and flow. Stay tuned.

Website Journal Part 2 – Technology

Tom Anderson — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:56:18 GMT

Ok, so I decided to add this bit after watching a great video from Joel Spolsky about the technology used in Stackoverflow.

This is not really that far off from my own list, but I wanted to go ahead and include more information and fill it out for myself as a sort of, ok… did that.

Server Framework: ASP.Net 3.5 SP1
Language: C#
Dev Environment: Visual Studio 2008
Web Framework: Asp.Net MVC
Browser Framework: jQuery, jQuery UI, XHtml, CSS2
Database: Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Data Access Layer: LinqToSql
Source Control: Seapine Surround SCM
Authentication: OpenID
Editor: Microsoft Live Writer
Hosting: Server Intellect
Spam Control: Defensio
Design: Adobe Photoshop CS3

That is it for part 2, now off to keep searching sites for neat features I like.

Website Journal Part 1 – Planning

Tom Anderson — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:02:27 GMT

So today I started out the first steps of the new site TomAnderson.me, the first step was to first start the initial ideas and design of the website. In order to achieve this, I am going to have to first decide what I want on the site, and then build up from there. Planning will be a huge part of this project for one, because I am telling all of you about every step of the process, as well as I want to just deploy this site and have it ready to go live on one date, then do tweaking only after that.

My tools for this initial planning state will be a bit old school and a bit new school. I will be using some hard bound notebooks I picked up at Barnes & Nobles that will open flat to allow me to scan them easily, as well as an Aiptek HP 12000U tablet to use for tracing things directly from the notebook into Photoshop, as well as working with the designs later.

Before the comments come up, I like purple (hence the big purple car), and I am a huge fan of Taoism, so I think these were made for me.

Moving along, I roughed out a quick logo that had been kind of stuck in my head a bit. It is based on my handwritten initials, and will be prettified and redone in Photoshop extensively. I also jotted down a few primary notes on what I want on my site.

This is why I like these binders, they lay nice and flat into the scanner, and allow me to transfer things pretty quickly.

The logo was then quickly redone in Photoshop using the tablet and my awesome handwriting skills, but it gave me the look that I wanted for the logo. I saved it as a 96dpi image at 800x600. This will be plenty big of a base for me to work with later as I redo it for real. It will also allow me to use it for numerous different mediums, such as signatures, favicon, site logo, etc…

Next I quickly wrote out some features that I want on the site.

Blog with anonymous comments
Tag based favorite links
Tag based favorite YouTube videos
A portfolio with my Websites, applications, and designs
About me
Anonymous “shouts” from people, basically… leave a message

Now that I have a baseline for what I want on the website, I will start delving into the next few stages. Browsing around and collecting ideas of things I like on other websites and doing a sketch up of the website, or a “wireframe”. This will allow me to then start deciding on different design elements, colors, how functionality that I like will be implemented and used, and how everything will fit together.