Brendan Doms

Shopkick is the first product that my startup company, Mod Four, has released. It's a place to make guides about products to share knowledge that helps people shop online. I did a lot of server side programming for it in Python - we used Pylons for our framework - and I was also responsible for most of the JavaScript, where we used YUI as our library to do AJAX and other Web 2.0 esque interactions. I'm really proud of this site, as it's the most technically advanced that I've worked on. I'm still continuing to work on it, fixing bugs and adding features as time allows.

I joined this group blog shortly after its inception, and have been writing for it ever since. It's been a source of fun, information, and job offers. The site is totally random, though bearing towards the technical web-savy side of things. I write mostly about programming and video games.

This is my current professional portfolio and web space. Although I've had other sites that we're about me and what I do, this is the first to actually be at the brendandoms.com domain. It shows off what I've done and what I can do. I'm quite proud of it so far, but it is still actively being worked on.

The design is something that I sort of happened upon after playing around with some pictures and CSS. Essentially, I wanted to make this site aesthetic, simple, original, and still readable. Finding the balance between those things is what led to this design. I've recently included some JavaScript to expedite only reading the descriptions of projects that are interesting to the user. This should make it easier to just browse projects and then dive down, rather than having to scroll through everything about all of them at once.

The third and final version of my video game blog saw its design outsourced to my good friend Sean McBride. He had recently designed his own personal blog and that of another friend of ours, so I asked him if he would do mine. He took what I already had done along with some source material I provided (that explosion is a screenshot from Call of Duty specifically captured for use in the header) and turned the design into something that worked. It wasn't too fancy and it was readable, so I was quite happy and stuck with it for the rest of the life of the site.

Gamer Journal's development doesn't end there though. I was simultaneously writing for the group blog alwaysBETA, and found it hard to write quality posts for both blogs, even if their areas didn't exactly overlap. So, around May of '06 I tried to revitalize the site by bringing in other authors and sprucing up the design with some JavaScript. I made a new "Now Playing" side panel to show what me and the other authors were playing - the idea may have come from seeing the "current task" at the top of Old Grandma Hardcore, but the implementation was all my own - JavaScript doing AJAXy looking things based on PHP pulling from each of our Wordpress profiles - who uses those IM spots anyway?

Unfortunately, this revitalization attempt didn't address the real issue: I still couldn't find time to post to both blogs. Like everyone else at alwaysBETA my personal blog suffered, so when the domain ran up in November of '06, I officially stopped updated the site, and spent my time focusing on the more successful alwaysBETA, which - consequently - doesn't have required posting topics, so I'm still writing about games, just on a group site.

This is the second version of my personal blog design, and the first to go public at GamerJournal.com. The biggest change (other than the name, which was forced on me due to domain availability) is that I did away with the tiered menu system in favor of just making separate pages rather than troublesome folders of links. The design itself (now based on K2) is unfinished - I had this idea for an icy theme that I didn't have time to realize to the extent that would have made it good. And after consulting some others, I realized that the ice had nothing to do with my topic of video games. So, although it was closer to what I wanted and I just began to use it, I knew that another round of design was needed for.

This site was going to be the start page on my browser until I realized that a list of links or favorites works just as well as an actual site. However, it was useful because it gave me more experience using CSS. I arrived at a header and left navigation combination that I like and have mimicked in a lot of sites since this one's creation.

My mom was trying to start a Life Coaching business and this is the first version of the site that I made for it. Although incomplete, it was online at rocksolidpraenting.com for a while. As the business wasn't started yet, and she didn't want to pay for hosting out of her pocket, I threw Ubuntu on an old home machine, set it up with Apache, and hosted the site out of our basement using the bandwidth already provided by our local ISP.

In the midst of all the blogs pervading the internet, I decided that I needed to jump on the bandwagon. I've always considered myself an expert gamer and a hardcore gamer, so that was an easy area to identify as my central focus. I installed Wordpress on a development machine at home and went to town. I used No-IP to create a static address so I could work on it from anywhere. The result is this initial concept design. I used CSS to give the page this ying yang with blue feel, although the most challenging aspect by far was creating a CSS only top bar that had tiered menu folders. Getting that working took a while, but after looking at the whole site, I realized a redesign was in order.

At the end of my sophomore year in college, two friends and I heard about the Contagious Media Showdown. As it was the end of the semester (during finals), we didn't have much time, but wanted to enter something anyway, so we made the video over a single weekend. I did the website design (it was built with a table, but we were so rushed that I didn't want to spend time worrying about any cross-browser positioning with CSS, which I was still getting the hang of) and all of the Flash coding (including converting the MPEG we put out to Flash, which was...fun). We scored 47th out of over 80 original entries, which we were fine with, as we had just done it for fun. You can still view an archive of the site (video included).

At my college we were supposed to create a portfolio page that demonstrated how good we were with certain school-defined competencies. Although the idea of a portfolio site is not a bad one (indeed, you're viewing one now), we were forced to use the school's pre-provided HTML. So, as you might guess, it was a mess. The code they gave us was a wreck to begin with - unclosed, unnecessary, and forgotten tags abounded, so it certainly didn't validate. Just getting to a workable, cleaned up version took a couple hours. That said, having to use their markup forced me to make the switch to CSS for design. Since this site was my first experience with using CSS for layout (I had used it previously only for some basic styling or font effects) this site is really just me playing around, and doesn't demonstrate anything particularly amazing. The idea of this mandatory portfolio site was dropped the semester after its inception, so I stopped updating it.

The fourth version of my first personal site is where I struck gold. It is the first version to actually be used online and have content added to it. The evolution of arriving at this design is incredibly interesting, as it combines elements from all of the earlier versions below. The original concept of three categories comes from the first version, what those categories are called and what the main header is come from the third, while the colors and centered layout come from the second. Although I was still using frames, I had gone back and simplified everything while arriving at a better color scheme. I was happy with this site, and I started to catalogue what things I had accomplished on it. I focused more on artsy stuff like poems and pictures, while just alluding to projects in software or movies. In both that focus and the design, it differs dramatically from its successor, the site you're viewing now.

Never satisfied, for the third concept design of my personal site, I went back to the layout of version 1 and tried to simplify things. I started using my real name rather than a screen name, and that freed me from using just black and red. I remade all of the images (as that was all the site was, really). Even after all this time, I wasn't happy with it.

This is the second concept version for my first personal site. I finally decided to try moving away from black backgrounds and frames on the borders for navigation. If you view the page in IE, you'll notice that I was also playing around with Microsoft's proprietary gradient filter.

I started working on a personal site at the end of high school. This version is just the first concept page I made. I primarily spent my time playing around with the texture of the letters, and got something I liked, but - as happens so often - after a while I felt the need for a complete redesign.

I wanted to do something different with this site; something that wasn't frames or like anything I had done before. This version came out of that desire, and it was somewhat hit or miss. While the overall design is definitely an improvement on the below version, the usability of the concept leaves something to be desired. I used JavaScript to have the main window control a child window (a concept I developed first on the Firestar site below) and resized the original main window to make room for the child. The code still works in modern browsers, and you'll notice that it is really jarring and forces you to manually expand the window if you want to go back to browsing other sites. That said, we really enjoyed it and got a lot of good use out of this version after it was up. I've removed the videos we had online for bandwidth reasons, but you can still see some neat screenshots and funny bios of the chapter members.

Something plaguing this site from the beginning was the fact that we wanted to include background music to make it more of a multimedia experience. This only created problems. Someone would inevitably look at the site in the quiet library at school with the computer's speakers unknowingly turned up to full volume. Additionally, even an MP3 was kind of a large file to throw up on a website when we were using free hosting with very restrictive bandwidth. I did manage to reduce the quality on a song, cut it down to around 30 seconds, and loop it as best I could. The result was as you might expect - it sounded awful, but my friends were psyched about having loud rock music on their Halo website (this is, of course, before the ultra-pervasiveness of MySpace and the songs on people's profiles on that site). The song has been removed here for reducing bandwidth and annoyingness.

This is the much more refined version of the below site. It includes images for navigation, a much better font choice for the headers, and a name change. It was functional and good-looking enough for us to start using it, but I still wasn't happy with it. So many of my websites had been based on the frames mantra of navigation on the left and a header on top. It was getting boring and too standard, so I made the above site.

Every Saturday in the spring of 2002, my high school friends and I were getting together to play Halo. It was a lot of fun and made me really good at the game. Eventually, the leaders of the group decided that they wanted some sort of online space for recording and sharing their memories. Knowing about my experience with web design, they drafted me and one afternoon in the school computer lab I whipped up this site. It was only a preliminary concept design to go over parts of a website with the others, and thus didn't last for long.

I wanted to create some sort of online game, perhaps a MUD, that was web-based, and not strictly about Star Trek, like the site below and most of my other experience revolved around. To that end I created this initial website, which would be a gateway to the game proper and include all the necessary history and background information such that someone could get enough of a grasp on the world to play. The site didn't ever make it past this first design stage - despite the fact that there was some vocalized interest in the concept from others. Really, I didn't know how to build the back end for such a project at the time and moved on to other things. This site does have a few noteworthy aspects though: I spent a lot of time on the banner and navigation images and even made some of my first (and last!) animated gifs.

The years of middle school put a lot of website design experience under my belt. I was hanging out with like minded friends who were always trying to make their own websites look and function better. I was also a part of various online simming groups centered on Star Trek, which gave me a reason to make new pages every so often. This page was such a one. One of my other friends was responsible for most of the graphical work while I did HTML and JavaScript programming. This site makes me proud, as we achieved several things that were quite novel for our experience level at the time. These include complex image maps, coloring specific table cells differently (you can see the need for CSS here), and an external window that can still control the main site. There is a whole slew of sites that led up to this one, but sadly I was unable to locate them. This was a huge undertaking and took up most of my summer after 8th grade, but looking back it was definitely worth it.

This is the first webpage I ever made. I used an online wizard to achieve the classic combination of bright red text on a bright green background. One of the "in" things to do back when this was made was to create pages that had cheats and secrets for your favorite video games. Since sites like GameFAQs either didn't exist or weren't known about, the information was scattered around the net on sites like this. I had some grandiose plans for this site, but you can only do so much with an HTML wizard online when you're in 6th grade.