What is (zen punch)?

(zen punch) is the personal home page and virtual playground of Indro De. It used to just be a tumblelog, which still exists on the homepage. Tumble what? Read Jason Kottke's explanation or just take it as it is: a messy, random, unstructured blog for lazy writers (such as myself). Formerly updated daily, but I gave up on that a long time ago.

Apart from the tumblelog, (zen punch) only consists of three other pages which can all easily be reached through the navigation menu on the top right. I intentionally kept the hierarchy flat by using AJAX calls to update content on the website.

As previously mentioned, (zen punch) is my virtual playground, which means that I am using this webspace to try out new practices in web development. (zen punch) was built from scratch using the Rails framework and will always be a work in progress. Expect new features from time to time.

On a technical side, apart from the fact that I used Ruby on Rails to create this site, (zen punch) is fully XHTML 1.1 compliant and is hosted by the fun folks at Dreamhost. My development tools are Photoshop, MAMP, Locomotive, CocoaMySQL, TextMate, and Transit. I hand-code my pages and don't use WYSIWYG-editors, because WYS is rarely WYG (and WYS is not WYWTG).

About ZENCORE

I was tired of using the usual content management systems that are available online and instead decided to build my own one. Also, I thought it would be a good way to learn a new language (Ruby) and development framework (Rails). I have used and customized content management/blog systems like Movable Type and WordPress before, and I'm sure that those systems provide a lot more features, but ZENCORE does exactly what I want it to do. And it's directly integrated with (zen punch).

About Indro De

Indro De is a web developer/designer, currently based in Pennsylvania, USA, who randomly switches between first and third person when referring to himself. He likes designing usable, accessible, and standards-compliant interfaces for the web or developing stable database-driven web applications using the newest web technologies and techniques. Currently he really enjoys learning and using Ruby on Rails.

You can hire him for web development gigs. For more information about what he can do and what he has done, and how he can assist you in your web project, take a look at the portfolio section of this website.

If you feel that I can help you in one of your web endeavors, feel free to contact me. I currently don't have a contact form in place, so your best bet would be to just drop me an email at indro dot de at gmail dot com. I would love to hear from you.

You can also find me on Facebook. I'm the only one there who's called Indro De.

About Lucid Heavens

Lucid Heavens is my photo site. Once in a while I upload new pictures. That does not happen on a regular basis, so I usually drop a note on my tumblelog when there are new pictures to check out. You can also subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up to date on all the happenings.

So far, Lucid Heavens has featured pictures from the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Spain. My camera equipment consists of the Canon Digital Rebel XT (which is called EOS 350D in Europe) with the following lenses: a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II portrait lens and a Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 zoom lens. Recently, I added the Canon EF 28mm f/2.8 wide-angle lens.