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I would like to welcome you to the personal website of Motion Designer and Visual Effects artist Erwin Santacruz (That's me...).

Well, after years of procrastination and just being "too busy", I have finally sat my ass down, read some books, googled some info, set the coffee maker to "brew infinitely", and built my website! While the site is not 100% complete at the moment, the bulk of the work is done. I will definitely still be pushing pixels around, uploading content, and fixing some layout issues that I am sure I missed along the way. Building a dynamic site from scratch is quite the learning experience. I picked up many great programming techniques and just good overall software development habits while I constructed the site. Oh... On the front-end, it was fun testing the site on one browser just to find out my layout totally broke in another. Awesome!

To be honest I didn't even check the site in Internet Explorer. I'm afraid too.. I apologize to all IE users if the layout is a mess or your toilet clogs but at the moment I have no plans to optimize for IE. Seriously, what a pain in the ass that is. I would spend hours tweaking something to make it work just right only to find out it only looked good in Firefox! My sympathies go out to all web designers who have to deal with this on a constant basis. I rather roto or key poorly lit shots all day!

Foundation

For those interested, the site was built using Django. A lovely little web framework based on Python. I guess I could have gone the Wordpress route with a gazillion plug-ins but I found with that solution it was all or nothing. If I needed a specific feature I had to modify way too much of the code to make that feature work. The lack of control drove me nuts as I rummaged through the code not understanding why things worked a certain way. Instead of spending time learning something I would never really use again, why not work on my Python skills by using Django. After all, a great deal of the software I use makes use of it. Think Houdini and Nuke. Soon, Cinema 4D will have Python integration.

By no means am I a web developer but I plan to use Django for some future project ideas. While not perfect, the framework does make building a database-driven site quite easy. If you like to take up these sort of challenges, I highly recommend trying out Django.

Future and Beyond

I'm happy with the way the website turned out. I believe I have a solid backend that meets all my requirements and makes updating the site a snap. I'm especially happy with the main portion of the site that deals with my projects and photography. I feed it an image and Django automatically slices and dices the image to get it ready for display. As I mentioned, the site is not 100% complete so I will be working towards that goal. In addition, I want to have the site optimized for the iPhone and iPad so that will come soon. Hopefully I can post some useful material on the site, for instance, how to make banana bread with chocolate chips.

With the main site almost out of the way, I can concentrate on the countless other projects I have burning on the stove.