Welcome to sublimed.be

home of my pithy thoughts (and occasional rabid mutterings)

I started out working with web technologies roughly around July 2006. At that time I knew nothing, and slowly tried out various WYSIWYG tools for putting up a website for the band I was in around that time. Needless to say I didn’t find those tools satisfying in both terms of design capability and granular control over page elements, so I started reading books on HTML and CSS.

Build your own website the Right way with HTML & CSS.

I came across this SitePoint book in a serendipitous way, probably while searching amazon for a different kind book, one that wasn’t a ‘manual’ like the ones I had bought prior to that. You can think of it like buying a Haynes manual, while trying to learn to drive a car. Ian’s book was that learning to drive book I had been looking for. You can read a review I wrote on the SitePoint forums here. I signed up to the SitePoint forums in November 2006, and so I believe I bought that book sometime around then. The learning curve was quite steep for me in the beginning, mainly as I’d never touched any kind of computer language before [ever]. Over time, I grasped the basic concepts of building a website, and having long abandoned my website ideas for the band, I created the Shantaram Forum, roughly around June 2007.

This site has been my pet project by which I’ve expanded my knowledge and tool-set, going from plain hand-authored html based pages, to adding a forum script, and finally upgrading the main site into a wordpress install. You can see the very first incarnation, which I’ve kept online for fun, by visiting this link. And I’m very sorry, but it’s fugly. If that hideous mess only just pleases your appetite for all things, try this too, it’s probably an early ‘blog’ of mine. More than that it was just an experiment with building web pages.

There were more than a few pot holes in the road, but having signed up to the SitePoint forums after buying that book, I not only received the kind help of many of the forum guru’s (It certainly greased the way for a very quick learning experience) but also bought a number of other great SitePoint books. And so the learning continues.

I was made a mentor on SitePoint on the 13th of February 2008. Later that year, I was promoted to Advisor which I currently still hold as of 4th May 2009.

Design

Somewhere along the way, probably owing to my GCSE A grade in Art & Design) I became hung-up on design and making things look real nice. I’m still learning, and apart from my attitude that the learning never stops, these days I’m approaching web design from a traditionalist perspective. Grids, Typography, Colour, and all the other design basics. I look at this approach as a continuation of that GCSE, and learning the classical principles of Graphic Design is partly to ensure that every design choice I make, I do it consciously. Not just pushing pixels around until it feels right. I feel that taking an ‘artists’ approach such as this helps me know what I create has value, and it provides a foundation for all criticisms I can make about my own weaknesses.

Photography

I always liked taking pictures. Here’s one I took on a holiday in Barbados in the summer of 2002. Since then I’ve upgraded my camera to a Fuji Finepix ‘bridge’ camera, which if you are unfamiliar with the concept is like a DSLR but has a fixed lens. It has enough controls to become familiar with before I part with the expense of a real pro SLR. You can find me on flickr too.

Classical Guitar

I slipped away from art and design when I took music and a bunch of other, miscellaneous A’Level’s. The result of this little diversion in life is that I play classical guitar, mainly as a hobby. I’m quite a fan of the South American guitar composers, and do stick my toe in the waters of the popular music from the region too. It’s quite fun to play, and that’s why I enjoy playing it.

Writing

So.. I appears I started ‘blogging’ in July 2007, and from that time I’ve published quite a lot of posts here that probably have no interest to anyone but me. I decided I’d bung it all together anyway, as reading some of that trash makes me smile. Perhaps someone else will smile too.

These days, I probably think about what to write a whole lot more than I used to, and occasionally I post something here that might be of interest.

Also, this blog has been on a few different domains, and as I have now retired the most recent URL [http://armchaircritic.declarationend.co.uk] I came up with this one [sublimed.be] as a much needed shorter url, and a chance to ditch the hosting it was on. I’m not from Belgium, so please excuse the “web2.0ness” of picking an alternative TLD. What can I say? I have a weakness when it comes to Domain Names…. It’s probably wise at this point to say, by way of a disclaimer, that this blog is also my experiment, a learning experience, with writing. Just like anything, practice is the key.

Credits

The background image on this site is a modified version of this flickr pic http://www.flickr.com/photos/chorando/2922127733/ kindly distributed via CreativeCommons from http://seamlesstextures.net/