I’ve been wanting a new website for a while now, but can’t settle on a design I like. Got so sick of looking at it I’ve put up something temporary. Which probably means it’s not temporary.
The old one feels really lifeless, and this isn’t much better, but at least feels like it has room to evolve.
Midish last year I thought it would be a good idea to try doing a drawing each day, with no others rules.
That didn’t last long, but I did enjoy drawing in Tux Paint on a tablet I’d found. Tux Paint’s an open-source drawing program aimed at kids for touch-screen things and PCs. Seemingly inspired by Kid Pix, there are lots of fun brushes and effects, and silly sounds. I like drawing with my fingers, and smudging things and using the toothpaste brush, and just playing round. I ended up using the toothpaste brush on a CHAI fansite I made too.
Here’s everything I done, in chronological order.
Looking at them together now, they remind me a lot of paintings I did between TAFE and Uni.
Default Filename TV is a website by Everest Pipkin for browsing videos on Youtube that use the camera’s default file naming convention. I used to like browsing these kinds of videos; I guess because my videos are framed in such a careful, cold way, I like seeing photos and videos whose composition is a product of different motivations.
(edit: turns out there’s a similar site called Astronaut that does a similar thing, though it plays videos only for a short time.)
Knowing that these, often mostly unwatched, videos are out there somewhere makes me feel good things about the world.
I’ve been using a proper RSS reader instead of Firefox’s menu-based stuff. Because of that I’m now using RSS to read whole articles instead of just going to whatever pages, and today noticed that the RSS feeds I’ve been hand-writing from my own sites could be more useful: at the moment they’re just giving a short summary, instead of the whole post.
So I’ve been learning a bit more about RSS syntax, and wanted to update the previous post I made.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title></title>
<link></link>
<description></description>
<item>
<title></title>
<link></link>
<description>
<![CDATA[]]>
</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>Notes:
<![CDATA[]]>. Feels a bit hacky, and maybe Atom handles this stuff more elegantly, but the output is nice. I finally sat down and spent 20 minutes researching making RSS feeds. They’re super simple, just a little XML:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title></title>
<description></description>
<link></link>
<item>
<title></title>
<description></description>
<link></link>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
So you make a new item set for each update. You can have multiple channels per file for things like blog posts and blog comments. You can also link multiple RSS files in the head of the HTML to a similar purpose.
So now ryliejamesthomas.net, blueberrysoft.ryliejamesthomas.net and blueberrysoft.ryliejamesthomas.net/web-log all have RSS feeds.
Also I remembered that I had Google Analytics code on a bunch of websites so I cancelled that gross shit.
I’ve moved my main website over to ryliejamesthomas.net, and will now use ryliejamesthomas.com strictly for commercial things.
It’s always made me a bit uncomfortable using a .com for my main page, but I’ve always talked myself out of doing anything about it. UNTIL NOW.
That also means a bunch of subdomains have moved over: bangaiospirits.ryliejamesthomas.net, blueberrysoft.ryliejamesthomas.net, and videoworkscatalogue.ryliejamesthomas.net. There must at least be a bunch of broken blueberrysoft links floating round Internet now (again). I guess there’s also gallery.ryliejamesthomas.net, but there’s nothing there at the mo’.
illustration.ryliejamesthomas.com has stayed where it was. There will probably be a shop.ryliejamesthomas.com at some point? Haven’t thought too much about the .com, apart from putting links to my pages on etsy, bandcamp and itch.
The Game Making Tools website I’ve been working on also has a new address: gamemaking.tools :) Makes it feel much less like a solo project, though there’ve only been a few wiki pages made by others :)
I’ve also been having fun doing more stuff with my web-hosting, like using it to host my E-mail (weening myself off web-mail), calendar, contacts, and a ‘cloud’ service.
I was going through earlier work, and was pleased to all the work I had made in 2012, in my second year of University. most of those things I’d never posted here, I assume because some I never finished properly (a series of clay heads), and some I thought were too personal (the Dialogues). I made a lot that year. Also a lot of drawings/rubbings, wood carving, and the performances I, at the time, called Monologues (they were made after these Dialogues).
I’ve made a web site for the Dialogues, and I might make a general 2012 one to link all those works together.
You can reposition the video windows by dragging them with your mouse.
It’s about time I mentioned something that I have actually been doing:
http://blueberrysoft.ryliejamesthomas.com/ https://blueberrysoft.ryliejamesthomas.net/