E-Mail contact formA (somewhat) brief history of bFusion.net
I don't really have a specific place to put this, but I felt the overwhelming urge to chronicle the history of this humble URL along with how it's intertwined with my life.
bFusion.net began while I was in college back in 2001. Its inaugural first post was at 8:04pm on January 25th. Back in those halcyon days of the Internet, we wrote something more intellegent than "OMG FIRST!!1!". Mostly, I talked about finally getting my own server and how a new design is forthcoming. The site housed a personal blog, which acted more as a journal and a source to vent my teenage and post-college melancholy. It was lashed together through tables and SHTML, the latter of which I'm sure is buried somewhere in the antiquity of coding.
Several iterations came and went over the following years. Mostly, the site remained to be a repository for personal projects and thoughts. By mid-2002, I was dabbling with CSS and Javascript and began to see the light of clean, simple design. Unfortunately, the veil that briefly parted was quickly shuttered when I discovered Flash.
Now, I don't have a lot to say about Flash that is bad. At least, I didn't in the mid 2000's. Back in those days, I was able to generate clean, universally viewable designs that didn't shift pixels on different browsers or simply not display. Even in it's infancy, Flash was a powerful device for bFusion.net. It allowed for my music to play while the user browsed the site, which was a huge feature for me. bFusion.net v4 was unleashed mid-2003 and featured full-screen Flash, but never really got off the ground. Even at its inception, I was starting to realize the folly of using Flash: content on a page was far from easy to access or manipulate without heavy scripting. It was a frustrating dichotomy I continued to wrestle with for years. At this time, I was unable to fully integrate a dynamic journal and instead had focused more on my music and portfolio.
As my ability to manipulate Flash expanded, so did the dynamism of the website. Late 2004 heralded a minimalist racing green site, but it's cultivation was cut short by an unfortunate hard drive crash. When I was able to recover some of my data, I was dismayed to find I would have to re-create over half of the site. My passion for this design faded and the site as a whole went dormant for almost a year.
During this year I had become integrated in a design community named Shaved Platypus (which I assure you is not an unorthodox porn site.) With them as inspiration I ventured out to compose a more mature version of bFusion.net. I had been starting to take a shining to photography at this point and my design heavily reflected that. Content for the new design focused mostly upon my design portfolio and acted as a living resume for potential employers. At this point in my life I was doing my best to keep afloat as a freelancer, which worked nominally at best. I just didn't have the right mindset to handle 2 weeks of furious unending work pillowed by a month of nothing but job hunting.
Eventually, I had garnered a stable job and devoting bFusion.net to purely a portfolio was less of a necessity. Around this time I had also finished my first full-length album, Nature's Echo. I poured my energy into a site with a new design focusing completely on the album. This design resided proudly as the home page for well over three years.
What brought on the change back to a journal? Mostly, I missed having a public outlet (in this case, I mean viewable by the public, not necessarily publicly popular) to write. Music is still a huge facet of my life, but so are many other things. This design was also the inevitable shucking of Flash's bondage. Driven by a table-less design in pure CSS, I am incredibly proud of this layout, and very impressed at the ease in which I was able to construct it.
bFusion.net began while I was in college back in 2001. Its inaugural first post was at 8:04pm on January 25th. Back in those halcyon days of the Internet, we wrote something more intellegent than "OMG FIRST!!1!". Mostly, I talked about finally getting my own server and how a new design is forthcoming. The site housed a personal blog, which acted more as a journal and a source to vent my teenage and post-college melancholy. It was lashed together through tables and SHTML, the latter of which I'm sure is buried somewhere in the antiquity of coding.
Several iterations came and went over the following years. Mostly, the site remained to be a repository for personal projects and thoughts. By mid-2002, I was dabbling with CSS and Javascript and began to see the light of clean, simple design. Unfortunately, the veil that briefly parted was quickly shuttered when I discovered Flash.
Now, I don't have a lot to say about Flash that is bad. At least, I didn't in the mid 2000's. Back in those days, I was able to generate clean, universally viewable designs that didn't shift pixels on different browsers or simply not display. Even in it's infancy, Flash was a powerful device for bFusion.net. It allowed for my music to play while the user browsed the site, which was a huge feature for me. bFusion.net v4 was unleashed mid-2003 and featured full-screen Flash, but never really got off the ground. Even at its inception, I was starting to realize the folly of using Flash: content on a page was far from easy to access or manipulate without heavy scripting. It was a frustrating dichotomy I continued to wrestle with for years. At this time, I was unable to fully integrate a dynamic journal and instead had focused more on my music and portfolio.
As my ability to manipulate Flash expanded, so did the dynamism of the website. Late 2004 heralded a minimalist racing green site, but it's cultivation was cut short by an unfortunate hard drive crash. When I was able to recover some of my data, I was dismayed to find I would have to re-create over half of the site. My passion for this design faded and the site as a whole went dormant for almost a year.
During this year I had become integrated in a design community named Shaved Platypus (which I assure you is not an unorthodox porn site.) With them as inspiration I ventured out to compose a more mature version of bFusion.net. I had been starting to take a shining to photography at this point and my design heavily reflected that. Content for the new design focused mostly upon my design portfolio and acted as a living resume for potential employers. At this point in my life I was doing my best to keep afloat as a freelancer, which worked nominally at best. I just didn't have the right mindset to handle 2 weeks of furious unending work pillowed by a month of nothing but job hunting.
Eventually, I had garnered a stable job and devoting bFusion.net to purely a portfolio was less of a necessity. Around this time I had also finished my first full-length album, Nature's Echo. I poured my energy into a site with a new design focusing completely on the album. This design resided proudly as the home page for well over three years.
What brought on the change back to a journal? Mostly, I missed having a public outlet (in this case, I mean viewable by the public, not necessarily publicly popular) to write. Music is still a huge facet of my life, but so are many other things. This design was also the inevitable shucking of Flash's bondage. Driven by a table-less design in pure CSS, I am incredibly proud of this layout, and very impressed at the ease in which I was able to construct it.