Recently I ported my WordPress blog to Hexo. I became frustrated with the invalid login attempts to my site driving up the costs of hosting on my Pay-As-You-Go plan with Azure. The benefit of a static site created by Hexo is that I do not have to worry about those attacks, however static sites do come with some drawbacks.

The first drawback I encountered was creating a contact form for my site. Since there is no communication between the browser and the server to send an email from the form I used a third-party client FormSpree. The benefit here is they check the message before sending it to me. I have since used their service, which is free for under 1,000 messages per month, for a couple of clients wanting static sites.

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A few months ago I had a client with trouble deciding on a font for the title of his website. The problem he was having is that he knew what he didn’t want but not how to express exactly what he wanted, nor did he have any examples of fonts he liked. After many attempts to find the perfect fit for his site and learning much of what he didn’t want and little of what he did I decided to make the process a little easier for both of us.

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My first freelance site. The client had a WordPress blog and started a podcast which he wanted added to his blog. I set him up with a Blubrry and installed PowerPress on his blog then redesigned the layout to a more responsive design and found a creative commons header image. This project was a great learning experience as it was the first project where I was not the customer. It is an interesting experience to design something based on another persons preferences. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It’s easy to not get upset when a design aspect isn’t liked when the design isn’t personal. It was easier to be objective in design decisions. I look forward to working on more projects where I am able to be so objective.

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After creating a calendar on Google for the podcast we needed to add a recurring event that included enumerable episode titles. Unfortunately Google Calendars does not have a function for this. I found this site written in php but it made week long events. Seeing the output though I decided to create something similar for single day events that occur weekly and need to be numbered. This is the code I wrote to do that. The initial code wasn’t difficult however I did have some trouble because JavaScript assumes all months are 31 days long.

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In July of 2015 we began working on the podcast. We wanted to do it correct the first time and were under no time crunch so we took until September to set everything up. Here’s Will’s description of working with me on the website:

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This is a simple little game I designed for my niece’s fifth birthday. My mother takes the kids on wagon rides down the hill beside her house. I took the concept and fashioned a game out of it for her and her little sister to play whenever they want. I built the game using Construct 2 so there wasn’t much actual coding involved though I did change a few things on my own. It was fun and enjoyable process. I would recommend Construct 2 to anyone interested in building 2D games that is not a coder or is new. I’m hosting it on Microsoft Azure in a free account. Check it out but please don’t overload it as it is for my nieces.

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