Dean (Zhuiyang) Chen

I finished designing my portfolio page. You can check it out under the about me section on the left nav.

I started this project more than a month ago as a Christmas present for my girlfriend Jane. The general layout is inspired from this site but I definitely like the design better and will most likely update the dark backgrounds of this site in to something a bit more vibrant along the lines of dark blue and white. The biggest challenge was getting those thick green and white lines to line up, I ended up resorting to transparent pngs but as most web developers know it doesn't work in internet explorer 6 so I specified a non-transparent png for the ie6 stylesheet and still need to line it up. I realize that there's a couple of hacks to get around this limitation, one of which I'm using on this site, but the transparent header refused the align correctly when hacked. Other than that, everything else worked out pretty smoothly and this is definitely one of my better designs.

I also made a PHP powered RSS feed that automatically updates as I make new posts and am to alert google and some other sites that my page has been updated... very convenient. You can subscribe to the feed on the left menu under subscribe or by clicking the orange RSS icon near your browser address bar. It was initially created so that Jane's new posts will sync directly with her facebook notes through RSS, but it wasn't very hard to copy the code for my uses. I'm trying to find the best way to present source codes on this website but I'll definitely publish the source of my RSS generator in the near future. It pretty much involves outputting posts, much like my index page does but in XML tags. I also implemented two classifications, popular and favorite, the former based on the view count which is stored along with the post in the database and the latter just a check box when the post is being edited.

There's also some small cosmetic changes such as the green back and forward buttons instead of the boring text and the pencil on the top right corner for my personal use.