‘Miscellaneous’ Archive
Lately
Here are some photos from my summer (so far – it’s not over yet! Right?).
In more web-related news, I spent a lot of July working on the Toronto Kiss Map, an superfun interactive web app dreamed up by Chris Kay Fraser where people place kiss stories on a map of Toronto. This was definitely the most comprehensive project I’ve done to date, in that I did the design, front-end development, and programming. I’ve made a lot of websites before, but I’d never made anything quite so interactive (or JavaScript heavy, for that matter). It was definitely a challenge, but totally worthwhile. It also proves that you can use WordPress for almost everything these days – I routed all of the map submissions through WordPress and have them storing as comments (for ease of moderation and spam filtering). Totally not what WordPress was ever intended for originally, but there you go.
Website revamp!
Hello all! Over the past couple of days I’ve been tweaking my site. Most of the changes probably won’t even be noticeable to anyone but myself, but I’m pretty happy about it all. I warn you, the following is all fairly geeky. To reward you in advance for reading, here’s a picture of a pretty field in Paris circa 2007.
Changes:
• My primary domain is now daraskolnick.com instead of openedeyes.net. I started with openedeyes.net back in 2006, and while I still like the name, I didn’t feel like that represented my portfolio website anymore. I used to have daraskolnick.com redirecting to openedeyes.net, but now it’s the other way around. I still own openedeyes.net and I have some plans for how to use it in the future!
• All of my pages run on WordPress now. I used to have a setup where my blog was running on WordPress and all of my other content (Art, Design, Photos, etc.) were static HTML pages. I felt like I wasn’t using WordPress to its fullest potential that way, and to be honest, updating all of the pages manually was annoying. After a bit of coding and tweaking, I now have WordPress running everything. It’s much better this way.
• I’ve replaced some images that were GIFs with PNGs. The transparency support is way better… that is, unless you’re using an old version of Internet Explorer. If that is the case, I have one word for you: Firefox.
• This isn’t brand new, but it’s still worth mentioning: I now have my email running through Google Apps. Basically that means that all email addresses I set up @daraskolnick.com run through Google’s servers, get the Gmail interface, and work with Google Calendars, Google Docs, and other such services. Love!
• I finally made myself a Favicon (the little icon that shows up next to the URL in your browser). I also added some shiny buttons at the side linking to my Twitter and Flickr accounts. I hang around on other social networking sites as well, but I’m the most active on those two. I might add more in the future. Or I might not. We’ll see.
That’s about it, really. To thank you for sticking with me through my nerdfest, here’s another picture that I took. This time it’s of Sacre Coeur.
(By the way, both pictures were made using Poladroid. If you miss polaroid film as much as I do, I encourage you to check this out!)
New Year, New Post, New Poster
Hello, world! I haven’t posted here for a while, but now it’s a new year, and I heard a rumour that new years can involve starting things afresh. Things like blogs. I’m not really into making resolutions, but if I were, I’d definitely resolve to update my blog as often as humanly possible.
Speaking of the new year, I rang in 2009 at C’est What, a restaurant/bar/all around cool place in downtown Toronto. Pool, poutine, and awesome people were involved, so it was a really good time.
Every time I see a pool table I think of The Music Man. Anyone with me?
On another note, I’ve already completed my first poster design of 2009, and I’d like to share it with you!
For this poster, I used both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. In the past I was more of an exclusively-Photoshop kind of girl, but nowadays I really do like Illustrator a lot. If you couldn’t tell, I created the happy ghosts in Illustrator. I love vector images (which is what you’re creating in Illustrator) because you can blow them up to any size and they retain their smooth edges. This is because the images are actually based on mathematical formulae instead of pixels. It seems that math has come in handy in the real world after all!
♥ Dara
Little shop of curiosities (or, welcome!)
Hi there, friends and strangers, and welcome to the new and improved front page of openedeyes.net. Instead of having my website up online with static (read: unchanging) content, I’ve installed WordPress so that I can keep my site updated much more often with photos, art, design, and all things aesthetically pleasing! Feel free to leave comments or get in touch with me whenever it strikes your fancy!
♥ Dara.
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