advent

Every few years, I spend some time trying to trim any excess off my online presence (sites and social media profiles). For some time, that resulted in consolidation of many websites into one. Lately, as I've built up a larger network of sites and services, I've simply tried to ensure that all are manageable and don't require too much of my time to be effective.

My bandwidth for managing multiple sites and accounts has been reduced this year as I've started a new 'in-the-office' job, and also have a beautiful baby (almost 1 year old!) to care for.

Thus, I'm trying to whittle things down again during this Advent; what better time than the new liturgical year to refocus my online presence and work on making it align with my calling in life—to be a good husband and father, and to give honor to God in all things.

I was recently inspired by Jeffrey Miller's embeddable Advent Wreath widget to try my hand at illustrating and animating an advent wreath in HTML5 with the <canvas> element or by animating an SVG.

My heart was in it for a while, but I ultimately gave up on the project due to the fact that I had already spent a couple hours on it and wasn't happy with my progress...

However, I did end up with a fairly good illustrator/vector wreath and candles (I spent a bit of time trying to get the flames looking just right), and also created a brush to create the actual wreath, making it look somewhat like an evergreen wreath.