About

This site was originally conceived to allow me to share my more meaningful projects with the world, and to this day it continues to primarily serve that purpose. There may be some changes here and there, but fundamentally, it'll always be a public portfolio of sorts.

The current version of the site aims to deliver a bright, comfortable experience. The "glassy" elements give the impression of looking through colored glass at the bright, blue sky.
The header text is an (amateur) attempt at a Latin rendition of the phrase "Look to the blue sky, and know that freedom is yours!" It hinges on the classic association of flight and birds (and therefore their dominion, the sky) to a real understanding of liberty; something which does and likely always will mean a lot to me.

That's it about the site itself. Read on if you're interested in some history about how it came to be and how it wound up where it is. Otherwise, enjoy the site!

This site really began around 2004, when I started working on Quantum Phoenix in my middle-school multimedia class, largely because I was learning next to nothing from the class and figured I may as well spend my time productively.
I figured that, since a lot of other kids weren't really doing much either, I could at least give them a fun game to play (since the rule was that no games were allowed lest they be student projects) while at the same time getting some good testing done on it.

At the time, it sufficed to upload to a shared drive that was more or less available. However, as time progressed, I thought I'd share the game with some online communities as well--the more testing and feedback, the better, right? So, I discovered MyFileStash, which had a 25MB upload limit, which was fine--the final project never went over 4MB, and it wasn't even close to that at the time.
Sometime in 2005, I thought I may as well make a page for the thing, so I did, and included some directions as well as an update log. I highly doubt the number of people who actually kept up with it ever exceeded 10, if that, but it did make for good bookkeeping.

Unfortunately, as time went on, MyFileStash proved to be rather unreliable. Frequent down-times plagued attempts to play the game, not to mention that upload times also became rather absurd. So, I left MyFileStash, and moved over to Xoompages, which at the time offered 5GB of space and comparable bandwidth to boot.
Things went smoothly for some time, but again, frequent down-time began to plague Xoompages as well, and it became completely unmanageable. By this time, it was late 2006, and Phoenix was complete and I wasn't really producing much yet. Nonetheless, it was rather annoying to point people at it, only to have them tell me they get nothing.

Thankfully, a friend of mine on the FlashPlayer forums (UGOPlayer is the recent name, but we all know the real stuff happened at FlashPlayer) whom I occasionally advised on ActionScript stuff said he was putting up a website to share his stuff, and offered me a subdomain.
That friend was Thomas Francis (or, as I knew him then, RPGMonster356), and I naturally accepted.
Of course, since there was now a whole subdomain involved, it made a lot of sense to feature a full-fledged website rather than just a few disconnected pages. Hence, I took the opportunity to share my other projects, too, at least anything I thought someone might enjoy without a purely technical perspective.

The first incarnation of this site rolled out maybe mid to late 2007.
It was horrid.
There was a title page with some comments and red header text. Blue background. Navbar with per-link coloring, with links to Flash projects and C++ projects, each of which was a manually maintained HTML page.
There are no screenshots. You don't want screenshots.

Of course, the concern at the time was purely utilitarian; I wanted a way to share my projects with people, and I didn't really care about doing much else. In late 2009, that changed. After a couple of years of that format, I figured it was time for a decent theme or something.
So, that was what I did. I picked up some CSS, some more PHP, and I styled everything. There was a fancy "abstract-ish" site border, along with color-theming; namely, dark colors like black, maroon, forest green, etc.
Per-link-colored navbar remained. Red front-page header thing remained. Pages were still pretty much manually maintained in HTML.
You don't want screenshots.

Finally, in early 2010, I realized just how uninteresting the theme was, and how annoying it was to have no coherent system from the projects and have to manually update everything. So, I undertook a brighter, more interesting theme alongside a slightly more robust backend.
The results were favorable: A bright, blue sky background; semi-transparent background for elements; rounded borders; coherent navbar. On top of all that, updating projects and even adding new ones became completely detached from any HTML whatsoever. Other page-management stuff became a snap, too.

And thus, as of early 2010, the website you now navigate was realized.
If you've read this far, then you must be genuinely interested. I strongly encourage you to check out my projects, then! While the site is a project in its own sense, the real meat is over on that page. ;)