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Somehow, I am not very good at pretending I don’t know anything about computers, and I recently ended up building a essentially-simple but constraint-complex portfolio site.

Hoping that it could be useful for anybody else that frequently finds themselves in a “friend / relative / XXX” who is a “computer guy / gal “ kind of role, and who is expected to easily and quickly solve any computer related task, here goes one possible quick and simple solution for building the aforementioned portfolio site.

Building a portfolio website is certainly not the most complex of I.T. tasks nowadays, however, the constraints surrounding my business case did make it quite challenging:

• My knowledge on Web Design and Website construction has not advanced since the early 00’s (CSS effects, Flash and HTML5 remain quite a mystery to me)
• The total cost of construction / hosting….and anything else, must be 0
• No ugly side effects of free hosting (such as popups) are allowed
• The portfolio must allow easy album management: uploading, coding and any other technical aspects are to remain transparent for the end user

Transparent Album Management

The most challenging requirement for me was to find a solution that offers easy and trivial album management.

FTP Uploading, remote directory creation or html coding were definitely out of the question, as all these tasks require specific knowledge that could not be imposed on the end user.

Fortunately enough, I stumbled upon Jalbum.

Jalbum offers free hosting for photo albums and, more importantly, jalbum also offers a great java client application that allows the user to easily create and manage the photo albums of their site.

Clicking, dragging and dropping are the only three basic operations needed to successfully use jalbum.

The client is freely downloadable, and it is possible to have a nice ad-free, popup-free 30 mb (more or less 200 photos, which is enough for the business case) account for free.

Custom and “nice looking” Portfolio Website

The business case required a nice flashy home page, and a top menu to connect the different albums.

Flash Catalyst came to the rescue when my complete ignorance of flash became a blocking issue towards providing a simple animation for the front page.

Although a bit buggy (perhaps due to the fact that it was still in a beta phase when I tried it), if equipped with a nice layered PSD, it is extremely simple to create nice flashy animations.

(Ryan’s “Geting Started with Flash Catalyst” tutorial should get you towards the path of simple animations in only a couple of hours)

(As a side note, sadly enough, I had to find a Windows PC to use Flash Catalyst: the prerequisites state that “cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system”, which unfortunately is the (bad?) choice I made when installing MAC OS…. Maybe something to be solved in the future?)

After fiddling around with Jalbum’s skins, I managed to modify azarai’s great Imago skin, inserting the different top menus, allowing for the desired effect of linking the albums together on one site.

Hosting

Jalbum’s hosting is not intended to allow for flexible and custom websites, but rather only for hosting of jalbum-friendly sites, which meant that it was not possible to host the front page together with the jalbum photo albums.

The last time I had searched for a nice free clean hosting solution, I believe the now extinct Geocities was the best choice, which can give an idea of my knowledge on the current state of free hosting possibilities.

After some googling, I ended up setting up a Google App Engine account.

This option offered more than needed, and after downloading the SDK, creating my project and a simple “../appengine-java-sdk/bin/appcfg.sh update war”, the portfolio was up and running in the cloud.

I have to say, that I consider the final result to be not bad for a 0-cost-sunday-morning-built portfolio…

Tags: Hosting, The Cloud, Web Portoflio