Timothy's Blog

So I recently became disenchanted with web development (serious web development) and wanted to find something more visual/creative to do. Not that web development doesn’t take creativity. I had tried to get accepted as a stock photographer to istockphoto.com years ago, in which you have to submit a few images so they can evaluate if you’re good enough and if your’re images are the type they want. So I decided to apply again because I thought my photography had probably improved and lo and behold, I was accepted!

So this is a new way to make money for me; I’m simply adding it to the other ways I make money (which currently consist of web design and doing yard work for neighbors). I’m hoping to pursue a career in photography so I’m not just interested in stock photography, but it’s a great way to make money sometimes (if you have a really good image that stands above the rest you take).

I decided I needed a website for my pursuit of this career so I created one yesterday and today that you can see at photography.timothygrindall.com (notice this blog is at wordpress.timothygrindall.com). It’s not a perfect or necessarily complete design but I can always change it. If you’re interested in seeing some of my best photography, check out the site!

I’d also love to get into portrait photography but I have plenty to keep me busy (though not to fill my days necessarily). I love taking pictures of people but I don’t get to do it so often because people are so camera shy (and so am I)!

I’m also hoping to get into filmmaking as part of my career. I own my own businesses so there’s no reason not to do more than one of them. I’m currently looking for clients who would like me to make advertising films/videos for free (just for the experience). So I have some ideas of what I want but other than that, I’m leaving it up to God. Worry about one’s future does no good.

I think getting a driver’s license will be a top priority so I can drive around Washington/Oregon/California to different places where I can take pictures. Also that will allow me to visit clients for webdesign and filmmaking jobs (and would really open things up for me).

So I recently embarked on the journey to create a forum website using Node JS which is a back-end programming environment for Javascript. I started this project on December 15th and mostly finished by the 19th but I did spend a few days before that watching a tutorial on Youtube to refresh my Node.js skills. I had considered it finished but recently started working on it again to add an image modal window to the project so when users click on images they get enlarged. I created the whole project in Node.js using the Express library and Mongoose library and I used Passport for user authentication.

Screenshots follow below:

So how does this forum work? Well, when a user wants to make a post the page sends a request to the server where my Node.js code handles the request and stores the post contained in the request in a database. This post is then listed in it’s correct sub forum and is pulled from the database when it is needed so viewers can view it. So the website is entirely dynamic.

I included the ability to log in and make posts, delete posts, reply to posts, upload images, and upload post thumbnails (automatically created from first image in a post). You can also create a user profile for your username and others can see it when they click on your username. I created a section to display the most recent posts from any of the sub forums on the front page and used AJAX requests to update how many unread new posts there were in each sub forum. Overall I tried to make it a full-featured forum site.

I modeled this site after the http://www.blenderartists.org site which is a site I’ve used a lot and highly admire. I had to use some site to emulate because I don’t have that good of an idea of what a good forum site looks like off the top of my head.

I had a lot of fun with this project and really was able to apply a lot of what I had learned about Node.js and back-end programming from tutorials. You can’t learn everything from tutorials though and sometime you need real-life application. I didn’t put a lot of work into the styling of the page but I did try to make it make sense at least. I don’t know when this knowledge of Node.js and back-end programming will come in handy, but I’m sure it will come in handy someday. Maybe somebody will want to have me build a forum for them?

If any of you need a website done for you even if you don’t need a full-featured forum, email me because I can create custom websites for small businesses for a low cost! Click the link ‘Web Design’ at the top of this page to see my portfolio and learn more.

If you have any questions about this project or how I created it just leave a comment down below!