richtaur

This is long overdue! It’s been almost two years since this website’s last redesign. Long story short, the old design looks dated as tits and I wanted something that more accurately reflects both who I am and what I do. I think I’ve accomplished that.

For starters, the design is not great, which is actually accurate because I’m not that great of a designer. I also borrowed pretty heavily from Raptr, which also makes sense because I’m almost always heavily influenced by my surroundings (I also wanted the badge at the bottom of the sidebar to look cohesive).

And I wanted the mechanics of the site to reflect that I am primarily a frontend engineer, and that I adore and am quite good at JavaScript. To demonstrate this skillset, here are some of the features I implemented:

• This website is time sensitive, meaning that the scheme changes based on what time of day it is (in San Jose, where I am). The following schemes exist: night, sunrising, sunrise, day, sunsetting and sunset (click to view). This is updated every 10 minutes so if for some reason you leave your browser open, you’ll see the site change.
• This website is also weather sensitive. It fetches San Jose’s weather conditions every 10 minutes using the Yahoo! Weather API. If it’s foggy, a fog overlay appears. If it’s cloudy, clouds will drift across the screen according to how cloudy it is and their speed is based on the current wind speed.
• You may have noticed the little sharks in the footer! The number of sharks changes throughout the day (sharks are more likely to be hunting near dusk and dawn). There’s also a 1% chance that Jaws may appear! (There’s an Easter Egg hidden in the footer too — click around to find it!)
• The modules have maximize, minimize and close buttons. They have contextual tooltips, with a little help from Lakitu!
• The Mega Me in the header is wearing a shirt of my favorite game of the moment (I really want a real one) and he lets you know when I begin playing a game according to Raptr.

I’ve noticed that all the crazy animations can really slow a browser down (especially during a cloudy dawn or dusk). If this is a problem, try the red close button in the navigation towards the upper-right. It toggles all animation on the page on/off. (The other buttons within the nav do stuff too, try ‘em out!)

I have a whopping 16 ideas in my little Google doc that I wanted to implement before pushing this out the door, but I’m all about rapid releases, especially when programming for the web. So I’ll be updating again soon.

Anyway that’s all I’ve got for now. Please enjoy!