We're live!
Stage 1 of our Vagabond Dream overhaul is now officially complete! There have been a number of challenges and changes along the way, but we've finally acheived this important milestone. Much is left to be done, but at least for now the website is feature-complete. If you haven't done so yet, please look around and enjoy the portfolio.
Stage 2 is a back-end process of taking the now-finished design and attaching it to a CMS framework - in this case, we'll be bolting it on to Wordpress. That means, over the course of the next few weeks and months (and forever, really) we'll be greatly expanding the blog portion of the website to include a comments function, travel logs, product reviews, general nonsense, and anything else we think you might find interesting.
As always, stay tuned for continuing developments!
Current Developments:
Part 2 of the redesign is well underway. It's not quite ready to launch, but for those of you who would like to see the progress so far, please have a look in our playground.
Stay tuned. More news coming soon.
Current Developments:
January has been a huge month in the redesign and deployment of VagabondDream.com. We're still putting together the portfolio portion of the site, but we liked the new look so much that we couldn't wait to show what we've done so far. We hope you like our new look.
For the month of February you'll see several more improvements. First of all, our biggest goal is to show you all the cool design, development and video projects we've done over the years. You can see a few samples on the links to the right of the page, but soon there will be so much more for you to enjoy.
Also, with so many projects happening so fast - and so much new technology to keep up with the ever evolving state-of-the-art as it comes to technology and design, we're working hard on following the portfolio with an expanded blog to include reviews and comments.
And, of course, we're holding some surprises for longer-ranging projects. We think you'll love them, so stay tuned to this space as we continue to grow and develop.
Current developments:
This was just a quick update on some of the projects I'm working on. Tomorrow is the observed celebration of Thanksgiving for us expats in Berlin. The beer is cooling in the fridge and I'm greatly looking forward to meeting with this group of friends again. Otherwise, the cramming for the German test continues. When I grow tired of that, I send out CVs and look for clients. It's an uncomplicated life.
Currently developments:
The website has taken a back-seat for the past week as I take care of a number of other projects. The most pressing event is the Deutsch Prüfung that's coming up in four weeks. This is the culmination of months of intensive study, so it's good to focus my energy there. Otherwise, the other order of business is to see if I can line up a job for when the course is over. I suspect I'll continue with the 'Agile' approach of iterative weekly improvements. For now, enjoy the Lemonade Stand game on Github!
Using a basic blog template from getBootstrap.com, the site now has a much more modern look. I'm really impressed with the groundwork that's been done to maximise browser compatibility and responsiveness of design. So while I COULD try to code all of the compatibility bits by hand, I would miss out on the advantages of the 'hive-mind' when it comes to knitting together a single unifying code-base to start from. jQuery comes along for the ride as well. Bonus.
So the other question remains, why didn't I use Word Press as my CMS/Blog platform? This answer is simple: I still may. I DO very much need to tackle Word Press development at some time, but first I want to make sure my HTML5/CSS3/JS are all in order. Once this site functioning to an acceptable level, I'll switch to Word Press and start tackling PHP as well. Until then, there's still a fair amount here left to do.
Here's a quick update of our current progress:
I have been busy and I've been generating ideas for the site. On one hand this is good as I'm fleshing out what exactly I want to achieve with this site, which will also help me settle on a functional design. On the other hand it risks devolving into 'feature creep' where nothing will ever get finished.
So, to bring a bit of order to the list of wishes, I need to make a list of 'Needs' and 'Nice to Haves' - as well as some sort of development plan to roll this out. My goal is to show the progression as I go, sort of like making my office in a construction site. It'll be messy, but in the end it might be interesting to see all of the iterative steps along the way. Therefore, I also need to make an easy way to navigate through my version control.
I’ve enrolled in a few online courses through Stack Social to brush up my coding and UX design skills. I did study computer science way back at the turn of the century, but much of what I learned back then remains useful today. For example, the legacy of C programming remains strong, so sitting in C, C++, Java programming courses remain relevant, MVC software architecture is still at the heart of new technologies, such as iOS development. classes/pointers/instantiation/inheritance/arrays/etc… all still there. What is new, however, is Apple’s Swift programming language. It was released just this year, so now is a good time to get back into development and start with a fresh new language.
In that spirit, I’ve signed up for some online iOS development courses through Bitfountain.io. They were sold at huge discounts through Stack Social, which is a great resource for developers looking for useful courses and gear. [NOTE: Make ‘Developer Reviews’ section. Do reviews for Stack Social, Bitfountain, Sketch, Hype…] I also picked up a few affordable HTML/CSS/JS courses for reference to help me build this site. Back in my day, all we had was HTML 2 and CSS was merely some promising new technology that nobody understood. I’ve got a few things to learn on that front, as well.