New Confidant Website

I’ve had a slow couple of months business-wise, but the benefit of that is I can work on my own projects. I am happy to report that I have just completed a new website for myself. My WordPress blog (you are here) has not changed, but you will notice that my top-level site has been updated to be completely mobile-compatible using modern day technologies. My previous site used Flash for its primary experience and did have a mobile-compatible fallback but this was never ideal, especially as today’s browsers are making it more difficult to use Flash.

So—the new site is built using the UFront framework. This is a very interesting and useful tool because it uses the same Haxe source code which compiles for both client (Javascript) and server (PHP). The framework is able to cache resources such as the site template, and it builds pages client-side whenever possible. It will remotely load only the data it needs to build each new page. The result is that the site is super fast. If you watch your network activity as you browse my portfolio, you will see that each new page requires only a few kilobytes, and browsing previously viewed pages will have nearly no network activity at all. If JavaScript is disabled, the site looks identical and pages will be built server-side instead.

For graphics, the site detects high-resolution (e.g. “Retina”) devices and serves high resolution images to them if they are available on the server. The top-level site navigation features a single SVG graphic for the menu. The graphic is embedded in the site template, where it serves as a graphic library allowing me to have the same display code used for both the menu and the headers. Animation effects are achieved using only CSS3 transforms, which saves the user from having to download any JavaScript libraries.

Something I wish was different is that Webkit-based browsers like Chrome and Safari for desktop don’t render fonts nicely when perspective transforms are applied to page elements. I was able to remedy this fairly easily for portfolio items, but pages at the second level of my hierarchy are a bit fuzzy. My hope is that these browsers make improvements which remedy this for me.

As a benefit to the Haxe community and a thank you to other people who provided coding help, I have released my full UFront source code on Github.

Thanks for reading!