I've been doing tons of auction software customizations. The software is Geodesic Solutions® and the code is really bandaged and thick with tables nested within tables. The work isn't too bad though, since I'm doing pretty different things with each site, and I'm also getting pretty nice at it now. Before I could only really attack the HTML side of it, but now I'm in the PHP like crazy.I've also been doing a lot of customization of ZenCart® shopping cart software. This is mainly reskinning it, which is just replacing the header/footer and then doing a lot of CSS work on the content portion.

For a while, I've been doing odd design jobs and tutoring high school students to stabilize my income while I do the freelance web development. Recently, this has seemed a bit silly to me so I started applying to full time development positions. I think going full time would be good because I think that a team environment would be really helpful to me. I want to have my code critiqued, so I can become a lot better. I had an interview yesterday for a design/development position, but I'm not sure it went so well, since I didn't know a lot of the lingo. He seemed interested in my 3D and design portfolios though, which is nice because although ... (more...)

Ok it's time to come clean...when I first started this website I signed up for hosting thru godaddy.com. Yes yes I know, ugh. Well I'd been too lazy to switch it over (that's how they get you!) until recently, as I have become interested in deploying Drupal®. Well I had Drupal® working fine when I found out that I couldn't clean up the long URLs since godaddy's "shared hosting" has mod_rewrite turned off and, big surprise, they don't allow you any shell access. It was pretty annoying because I had been planning on playing with those files to learn the Apache setup. But it turned out to be good news, since I have now switched my hosting to ... (more...)

Over the past couple days I've been redesigning my website.First, I made a design for my website in Illustrator that I'm happy with. What's better is that I was able to implement it fully in a matter of minutes because of the clean template structure I used previously. I had wanted for some time to add some flare to the site, but not to do too much, since I would never want to detract from the content. I hope this design is successful, I don't think it's too flashy. Please let me know what you think. Next, I made a lot of minor appearance changes and cleaned up a good amount of the code, fixing up a few sections ... (more...)

I switched jonraasch.com, yogaenergyheal.com and artbyanes.com over to XHTML transitional. Validation wasn't too hard: since I naturally code pretty well with proper nesting and lowercase tags, and I use mainly floated divs and CSS, I only had to close a few image tags and entities. XHTML makes the code tighter than HTML does, and clean code is something I am focusing more and more on these days. Plus now all three sites can be viewed on blackberries! (who cares hehe)

I'm up and running with CS3. It's not too much different, sadly, but it's awfully weird to see "Adobe Flash" and "Adobe DreamWeaver". The only thing that seems to have changed is some better integration between Illustrator and Flash (which is really awesome and something I've wanted). Besides this, some aspects of it are pretty annoying. In Illustrator, you can't scroll through the fonts like you used to by just pressing up and down, instead you have to click the bar and click the next one, it really disrupts my workflow. Also I can't find an easy way to change the stroke weight in Illustrator. If anyone knows a way to easily do either of these things ... (more...)

Well I finally broke down and bought a brand new MacBook®. I'm a lifetime PC user, but with the CS3 beta looking pretty nice, I decided that it was time to make the cross-over. Now, I've always been able to use a Mac but I love being able to really learn the OS like you can only do when you own a machine (I'm always a little more careful if it doesn't belong to me ;) ) The adjustment to MacOSX has been surprisingly easy. I'm really liking the OS actually, especially dragging programs from the .dmg file to the applications folder to install them, and being able to save preference changes without restarting applications. It's so much easier! Also ... (more...)

About a week ago I started work on YogaEneryHeal.com. The site is relatively small, so I opted to go with plain old HTML pages for the majority of the pages. The only php is on the article page, which is a switch to make coding easier, and the contact page in order to process the form. Overall I wanted the site to be very simple and to have a soothing appearance. I got some great photographs from their photographer and even one that I incorporated into the header (at first I didn't notice how low res the photos were, and I ended up working with one of them, ugh). There was a registered trademark of another company ... (more...)

For the past couple months I've been working a photo-editing job, working on old family photos for an estate. The work is pretty interesting, and I really like my coworkers. We do crazy amounts of scanning and then have only a few minutes to retouch each photo. It's really helping me get faster with Photoshop, and a lot of the photos are very old, and therefore really interesting. I've also been working for the past couple days on an illustration of Kate to give her for her birthday. It's an important one, so I'm spending extra time perfecting all the vectors in Illustrator. I also made a pretty cool pattern for the background. She already knows that I've been working on ... (more...)

So my friend told me that it would be a good idea to keep a blog. Blogging has always seemed to be sort of a strange thing to me, like people talking to themselves. But he said it would be good to show potential clients what I've been up to, and also to keep records for myself of my learning process. Sort of a combination of talking to myself and to other people. Well, here goes, I doubt if anyone is reading this, but if you are, I hope you enjoy it.