Beauty of Simplicity: Cabins

Laurence Elsdon — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 17:36:54 +0000

There’s something deeply attractive about the thought of cabin living. We live in a world reliant on other people and technology to serve our every need, this is why the outdoors is so attractive to me. In Easter 2011 I went on an expedition with a few friends to Narvik, Norway, the most Northern town accessible by rail in Scandinavia and 140 miles inside the Arctic circle. We spent a week living in a simple Scandinavian cabin. But we still had the amenities of modern life available to us: fridge, oven, central heating and of course the all important supermarket. Maybe some day I will be lucky to take part in a truly self sufficient expedition.

For now I’m just going to stare awestruck at the beauty of these structures, and I encourage you to find more at the wonderfully titled Free Cabin Porn Tumblr.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel

Laurence Elsdon — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:32:50 +0000

Here’s why I, as a professional a web designer, decided to buy a pre-made WordPress theme.

I first decided to put together a proper website in 2009. I’d been toying about with web design for a few years, and I had finally got the hang of it. I created a simple HTML site with some jQuery features. It was alright but nothing special, and because it lacked PHP it was pretty tedious to update. So I began on version 2 (in reality version 11 but to simplify things..), version two was a single page portfolio with a neat little custom made jQuery carousel.

A lot simpler to update, and the carousel portfolio was fed by a database so a lot easier to manage, but it was quite buggy, and found out during a job interview that although it worked in IE8 it was a bit of a mess in IE7.

Thankfully my interviewers were kind and I managed to guess where I’d gone wrong (using display: inline-block if I recall correctly) and I got the job at the end of the interview.

Even with a job for a professional design practice I wanted to maintain my own portfolio, after getting used to the company CMS I began developing my own. Using the CodeIgnter library I got quite far, and learnt a great amount of PHP along the way, but I never reached a finished state because I’d over-complicated it so much.

Through my experience I’ve come to the conclusion that rather than reinventing the wheel I should follow Occam’s Razor to paraphrasse:

”The simplest solution is usually the best”.

In this case the simplest solution was to use WordPress as my base. This was great to begin with but straight out of the box WordPress isn’t perfect for a portfolio, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to fit it to my needs. In the end I decided to buy a pre-made portfolio theme and work backwards from that finished product.

So yesterday I purchased the wonderful Airfolio theme by IVY Studio; I now don’t have to worry about fiddling about with the backend and I can jump straight into collating my portfolio with little hassle.