State of the site 2021
While checking out the Wayback Machine (see previous post), I realized that I had a number of pre-WordPress ‘news’ entries and writings going back to 2001 that I had forgotten about, and had neglected to bring to future versions of my site. I corrected that mistake by retroactively inserting those old writings into this existing blog. Those old posts don’t really add much to this blog, but I figured those posts add some personal history and help pad out this relatively light site.
I have also begun completely revamping this WordPress theme. I call it m20T1 and I have it hosted up on GitHub. I plan to phase in this new theme for marchtwenty.com sometime this summer. Attention to detail and automation is my goal for this new theme, and I also plan to make it more animated.
Wayback Machine
It just recently dawned on me that my old websites going all the way back to 2001 are sill out there via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Sure most of the pictures were not archived and my HTML coding is super janky (thanks Microsoft FrontPage), but the writing is all there.
My first website through RoadRunner:
http://home.nycap.rr.com/tbalmer/
The original March-Twenty.com:
http://www.march-twenty.com/
Tedillize 2 Stylesheet
I revamped my normalization CSS stylesheet and I cleaned out all the specialized classes that I had implemented in an effort to make this more universally acceptable. This version is far more streamlined and deals only with the core HTML elements. There is still a lot of opinionated stuff in there, so this probably won’t be for everyone, or anyone other than me for that matter. 🤷♂️
I also moved the my specialized functions that I created over to CodePen. Breaking them up into individual projects makes them easier to work with and understand.
Three Twenties Day
Today is 3/20/2020 and the namesake for this website, which is named for my birthday 🎂. Otherwise, I wish I had more to offer on this day. 🤷🏼♂️
And we have another site redesign
I went ahead and redid my site for the millionth time, mainly because the original header (hero) was too data heavy, and also not very interesting. Also, I wanted to clean up the look of the site, and improve its mobile presentation as well.
The core of this site is a normalization and base HTML5 stylesheet, as well as a companion JavaScript file with a set of functions that correlate to the added element styles. I sourced these two docs based on information that I had gathered from all over the web, and are easily portable.
My picture of a bunny in the Journal Sentinel
I got a picture that I took of a small bunny from my folks backyard printed in the Weather Photo of the day section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 📰 today. Pretty neat!
Link to the article: jsonline.com
The Mischievous Bears Re-rendering
I just completed the High-Definition re-rendering of The Mischievous Bears short animated movie. The process went smoother than I expected it to, considering the assets I was using were 15 years old, and plus, I haven’t really worked with 3ds Max in 10 years or so. It goes to show how little 3ds Max has changed after all of these years.
This is a list of changes made to the original 2003 movie:
- Rendered in full 16:9 1080p.
- The bear’s fur is now modeled with 3ds Max’s built in hair and fur plugin.
- Changes to a few background objects.
- Improvements to some of the camera motion.
- Adjustments to some of character animation.
- Sound effects are slightly altered and new ones included.
- Inclusion of music, created with GarageBand.
- Inclusion of the animated M20 logo at the beginning of the movie.
- Altered camera movement in the opening shot.
New Renderings with 3ds Max
I recently began playing with 3ds Max again, mainly to see if I can load up some of my old renderings. To my amazement very little has changed with that software in the last 12-ish years since I last worked with it. Suffice to say, I was able to re-render a few of my old favorites and I even made 8×10 prints from them. This whole process has reinvigorated my desire to remaster Mischievous Bears in 4K and fix a few lingering issues I had with the original movie that I made 15 years ago. With computers being significantly better than they were back then, I hope I can get this movie rendered sometime this year.
You can see these final renderings on my Google Photos album.
Update:
And on YouTube as well.
Raspberry Pi ramblings
Last Spring, when I rebuilt this website, I used a Raspberry Pi on my home network as an internal web server to host the site development. Setting it up for that purpose was fairly easy once I got php/mysql and WordPress installed on it. However, there were a couple of config files that had to be manually modified that required a little research on my part to configure correctly.
Since that project is now completed, and now that I’m currently between projects that would utilize the Pi as a development server, I need to find a good use for it. It’s running Ubuntu Mate and it’s also hooked up to my TV as a display, however, I already have an Apple TV hooked up to the TV for my usual TV-type watching purposes. I may try and set it up as an arcade or console system, similar to the RetroPi.
Overall, the Pi really is a neat little computer.
New site, new logo for 2016
I spent the last year working on redesigning MarchTwenty and it’s respective logo. I figured the ‘m20’ logo with the title ‘Marchtwenty’ seemed a little redundant, so I went with something more dramatic, plus I wanted a logo that would fit nicely in a square.
The site itself is built around a WordPress template that I created from scratch. The template itself was made so that it would be flexible enough to be used with other websites that I could end up working on in the future.
Also, I’ve been dabbling with Xcode and I hope to have an iOS app of this site soon as well. 😗