About This Site
I put most of the explanation for version 4 in this post, so look there for a long, detailed look at what changed from three to four.
Looking back
Version 3. v3 definitely earns the title of "most artistic," but it had a lot of room for improvement on the organizational front. Part of that was intentional--I really wanted to eschew order and planning in favor of a specific artistic expression. If I remember correctly, I realized the look I had imagined nearly exactly, so v3 was very successful in that regard. Though for the few regrets I had about the aesthetics of v3, I again overestimated my willingness to maintain old code instead of writing new code. I spent a lot of time on the hyper-generic and turbocharged "resource" model, which wasn't so appealing anymore with newer versions of Rails, which are all about REST. I suppose I could have made the "resource" model RESTful, but that would be far from free. I figured that with the effort to do just that, I could be getting a refresher on the most recent version of Rails and get cool with REST. So that's what I ended up doing. As a result, I also re-evaluated what the purpose of my website really is, and decided that I just want to show people stuff--all stuff equally, not just stuff I write. So that's basically how version 4 was born.
Version 2. v2 was the longest-standing version of the website, since it did its job fairly well. I received a lot of kudos from various folks commenting on the elegance/aesthetics of the design. In fact, it even caught the attention of an interviewer and consequently (though indirectly) landed me a summer internship!
Version 1. The original design that inspired it all, starting with my favorite composition: the lonely tree overlooking the sea. The concept behind this original version was the idea of being a rails application portal. On the left was the entry point to my client management application (back when I was on the market as a freelance web developer and designer); in the middle was my favorite phrase "Somewhere In Between," which linked to a rather primitive portfolio app. Finally, on the right were some apps dreamed up for personal use (e.g. blog and pick-up volleyball game scheduler) that never really made it into production. I also toyed with a single sign on (SSO) app that never made it past alpha testing, but let's just say it was no Kerberos :)
