Portfolio Building

Posted
November 14 2004

The plan is that I'm going on internship in January. To realize this, I have to send a portfolio to the studios I'd like to work for. I need to hurry up with this, as there's only a couple of months left. Today, I spent most of my time working on the portfolio chapter of this website, and the site in general.


I got up very late today, which surprised me untill I remembered I hadn't been getting a lot of sleep the days prior. Almost immidiately, I booted up my computer, and started working on my website. I haven't been doing that much working on it lately, but I did a lot of thinking about various matters concerning it. Today, I put a lot of these musings�and then some�to work.

Index

The site now (finally) has an index that lists�most of�the different chapters (as I like to call them). I had been doing a lot of thinking on how I wanted to present an overview of all (read: most) over the past few days (again). I concluded that I wanted the title of the thing to simply be ACJ�s Index, and I wanted the uri to reflect this with acjs.net/index. However:

  1. I didn't want the uri to show a file extension (which would currently be .php, but would be subjective to possible future change). Simply acjs.net/index: no more, no less.

    Thanks to Anne van Kesteren's Playing with flat files, I knew adding the following simple rule to the .htaccess would do the trick:

    Options +MultiViews
    

    Works like a charm, but there was another thing�

  2. I didn't want the index to be the default page (home, if you will) of this site. In other words; I didn't want http://acjs.net/ to (re)direct to http://acjs.net/index. Trivial, but�again�the solution was easy, and�again�involved modification of .htaccess:

    DirectoryIndex intro index.php index.html index.xhtml index.htm index.swf index.jpg index all.css icon.png
    

    The server will now look for intro (with any or no extension, thanks to the previous point) before even bothering with any index file. The only thing left to do was to rename the previous index file to intro, and I was set.

    The other added rule (index) forces the server to look for another index.* file if the specified extensions (.php, .html, .xhtml, .htm, .swf, .jpg) can't be found, before going to the next option (all.css), which�by the way�makes for that my style sheets can be parsed even though I don't explicitly reffer to them my markup.

The new Index is fully automated with my cms (Movable Type), but is not ordered very logically yet (it won't do it alphabetically for some reason), and contains a few links that return a 404.

Stylistic Integration

I've also worked a great deal on the current theme (20041112), and�more importantly�applied the new style to many more pages: some basic chapters; all individually archived weblog entries; and the longly overdue Search Results cgi that had been using some default Movable Type template (with a link to a non-existant style sheet!) since my last cms upgrade. The thing is still buggy, but at least it looks okay now. (Shrug!)

Real Life

Between events, I called my dad to congratulate him (I couldn't get hold of him the day befor). We hadn't talked to eachother for some time, and it was good to hear him again. He also had some good news: a new cellular phone is coming this way soon.

That was about the only non-computer related thing today. There were a few instances where I was ready to pack my stuff and head out to play some 'ball, but these moments were spoiled by the dirty weather outside. Judging now, that was probably a good thing.

To Do

ACJ