New changes for the new year on this site.
Firstly, this here website is using a brand new template design called the 640 Magazine Template. It’s meant to mimic the templates used by most of the online newspapers: New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, etc… It is a very CLEAN and SLEEK template that doesn’t mess around with fancy stuff. It’s straight up black and white for maximum comprehension and uses serif fonts to give the page a little bit of class…at least I think so. I played around with the stylesheets to copy the New York Times in terms of font-size, colours for the hover effect, line-height, etc. I think I did a pretty good job and I’m satisfied that this site is readable.
Secondly, the rl:ID portfolio has changed as well. The template has changed to something that looks like this website but most importantly, I’ve decided to migrate away from Wordpress and move to Joomla 1.5 . The main reason is because of a component called JPortfolio. For the most part, I moved to Joomla just so I could use this component because I think that Joomla 1.5 and this component are going to be easier to administer in the future as my portfolio content scales.
Joomla is really an industrial strength CMS — really, it’s always been that, but relative to Wordpress and the way it handles lots of content, Joomla wins out. I’m not going to go into a full-bore, detailed review of JPortfolio but suffice it to say that, for the most part, this component gives me all the control and organizational functions that I needed to get a bunch of disparate content together in one place under an overriding umbrella of sorts.
I’m really happy with the way things turned out, but I must say it was A LOT OF WORK. I didn’t realize that I had so much stuff and so many things were of different media types: websites, instructional design media using Captivate and Camtasia, videos, Flash products, writing examples, Power Points, etc… Instructional design and development really is a dynamic field and requires a lot of us to do a lot of different things during the course of our careers. Maybe this is why what we do is misunderstood (or is that the other way around, where BECAUSE we are misunderstood, we have to do a lot of things…). Hmmm…maybe the next blog will be an article about that.
Onward and upward then. The economy is recovering nicely but the jobs and job potential are lagging behind with most estimates showing at least a 6 month lag to the beginning of job growth in most areas of the United States and with California lagging FAR BEHIND with at least 18 months prior to the beginning of decent recovery. Oh man…what a wait.
BTW…I’m STILL UNEMPLOYED and looking for that next great gig. Hopefully, this gig will be better than the last and afford me the opportunity to learn new stuff or even better, the let me do what I was trained to do and push the edge of learning. We…shall…see.
In any case, my portfolio site and blog site kicks butt.
