Personal website of a high school student.
Hi, my name's Ryan Lin and welcome to my personal website. I'm currently a high school student living in the United States, soon to be leaving for college. Here you can find my personal projects and websites as well as some others things I've done in the past. Web development is one of my favorite hobbies and I devote a significant portion of my leisure time to it, working on interesting projects and building my skillset.
The college application season is coming up very quickly. After doing quite a bit of research I've found that I'll have to write at least three essays (two main, one supplemental) and fill out three different forms for the schools I'm applying to. So, that's quite a bit of work and along with my heavy course load for this year, it's unlikely that I'll be able to update my site as frequently as I want it to. My current plan is to focus mainly on college applications and school until the end of December 2010, and then after the new year, I should be able to get some more free time on my hands to work on some new projects.
Another thing I'm also trying to do is look for an internship in a computer or technology related field. I'll be posting my resume here (with personal contact details removed, of course) for viewing. I'm expecting my site to get quite a bit of attention since I'm already out there looking, and this site ranks second in a Google search for my name. If you think you can help me on that, please contact me.
That's it for today. If all goes well, I'll be back to my usual schedule by the start of 2011 (and accepted to my first choice college).
You will now see that the portfolio and code pages have been updated. Instead of the previous mundane listing of projects, both pages now have the name of a project accompanied by a brief description. I also moved some of my old and outdated projects to a new page. At first I thought about deleting them but eventually decided to leave them up in case anyone still wants to see them.
The FAQ was updated as well. It might answer some upcoming questions you may have.
I've just finished work on one of my projects - Flick DB. It's a PHP-based XML flat file database. There are still a few quirks that need to be worked out, but it's fully functional and can be used without any major problems. For those of you who have web hosts without support for MySQL (or any databases at all) or prefer a more lightweight alternative, this will be especially useful. More information as well as download can be found on the project page.
Also, you'll be seeing some minor changes to the portfolio page in the next few days, and possibly some other small revisions as well.
There's been a new addition to the site - the Flow MVC framework. For anyone who is interested, the code and files for it are available on this page.
I've finished adding a few pages under the "About This Site" menu. Also, if you look around the site you'll notice that the gallery has over a dozen new photos, and there are now screenshots for most projects.
The source code for my web projects that I promised you in my previous post is now available. Look here, here, and here for them. You can also find the links on the side bars as they have been updated to reflect the new additions to the site. Next to come: the "About This Site" pages.
I'm planning to release the entire source code for some more of my web projects within the upcoming week. The projects include a virtual grocery shop application, a website checker and something called Project Hail, which I'll go into once I release it. For the next week I'm also planning to add a few new pages to the site, all of which are under the "About This Site" menu. More to come soon.
I just released the entire source code, including all the images and everything, for the old version of Rx Chat. You can find it on the Rx Chat project page and download it. The only thing that it doesn't include is the database schema, however I'm planning to put that up soon once I get the time.
The new version of Rx Chat is going fairly well. At this stage the web application is functional, although users may encounter connectivity issues when trying to chat as well as a few problems that need to be fixed. Due to my lack of time the project will be postponed till further notice.
I'm currently working on a new, improved version of Rx Chat. The new version contains numerous new features as well as fixes for most of the glitches and problems that users have previously encountered in the current version. At the time of this writing, there is no predicted date of release, however I'm expecting to finish the alpha release within the upcoming weeks. More information will be provided later.
Today I've completed a second mini-project - Password Manager v1.0. More information can be found on the project page.
The compatibility issues when running DirectMouse Recorder on Windows Vista and higher are now fixed with the release of DirectMouse Recorder v2. I rewrote the entire program in C# in about two days. None of those compatibility issues should come up again if you're running the new version with .NET Framework v2.0 or higher.
To start off, I began learning C# a few days ago. Yesterday I thought about this and decided to create a new version of the program. Today I have finally completed and it has been uploaded to the site. DirectMouse Recorder v2 has all of the features that the older version has; the only difference is the user interface, which is slightly different. The windows and form controls also behave slightly differently but you shouldn't notice that much of a discrepancy between this version and the older one.
You can download the new version now or go to the project page to see the new updates. Enjoy!
A browser test conducted using BrowserShots today showed me that most browsers rendered the new design just fine. Unfortunately there was one problem - the font. It appears that the Sans-Serif font looks a bit strange and fuzzy for a few of the browsers. I'm planning to add in alternative fonts to make reading this site easier for any of you who are using one of those browsers. Expect that update soon.
I'm also planning to improve the gallery's design to make it more user friendly. Most of the layout and color changes are targeted at the blue header at the top of the gallery.
The final update is new pages. I started work on that today and created a frequently asked questions page. I also posted another page describing how I got started in programming.
For next week, expect the pages under the "Other Stuff" side menu to be finished. That's all for today.