In this series of profiles I interview the Masters of MySpace – individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the development of MySpace profile customization, whether it is by developing programming techniques, coming up with amazing designs or contributing to the MySpace community.
Dan Hill
- Name: Dan Hill
- Age: 20
- Location: Los Angeles, CA
Profile
Dan’s Top Myspace Profiles
Dan keeps the explanations short but be sure to visit these profiles and see what you think!
The Al
“I have always loved Al’s profiles”
Mikey Angels
“Mikey Angels is also one of my favorites.”
Herpe Hancock
“Herpe Hancock was constantly a profile which inspired me.”
Current Myspace Trends
Dan has very similar feelings about the current (and past) Myspace trends that I do:
“I feel like the birth of Myspace customization was CSS tableless construction. I feel like the trends migrated away from that for a little while and ended right back where they started. There was a brief time period where flash took precedence in layout customization, but I feel like web 2.0 styles have made a comeback and a lot of DIV profiles are moving in this direction.”
Current Myspace Profile
Dan says he created his current profile with the aim of it being “ironically dark and grungy”:
“My current profile is meant to be ironically dark and grungy. I am not a dark person, but I feel like the layout I have now is tastefully dark. It has more of a rock and roll, hardcore feeling than it does a “SAW” movie feeling. Both, however, are cool in my eyes.”
To create it he used Adobe Photoshop to design it and then Flash to create it along with a number of programming languages that allow him to change the content easily:
“My current profile is a blend of actionscript, photoshop, php, and some mysql. All of the content on the site is pulled from a database, which is then compiled into a php-generated xml file. All of the content is also editable via a server-side Content Management system on my server.”
Background
Dan first got into Myspace when he was 14 “because it was becoming the new fad in the teenage communication realm” and soon found himself enjoying the “ease of communicating with new and interesting people”. Not long after that Myspace “soon evolved into a domain for me to learn customizing and web design” and says that “It was the beginning of my career as a web/graphic designer”.
Dan started to customize his profile simply because he wanted his layout to be like everyone else’s with cool colors and graphics. He started by using Thomas’ Myspace editor to generate the CSS to customize the default profile and moved on to editing and writing the CSS code to make his profile look the way he wanted it to. After making his profile look on par with the general Myspace community he still wanted to create something even better which lead him on to DIV Layouts. Even after that he still wanted to create something better and he moved on to making Flash layouts. From there he was relatively limited with what he could do on Myspace and so moved off of Myspace learning more about web design and development such as server side programming and databases.
Although he doesn’t spend as much time on Myspace as he used to he still checks in every so often to check messages and friend requests mainly because “I actually generate quite a bit of revenue off of Myspace layout designs”. His profile is now somewhere for him to show off his skills and occasionally get some work. He says that for him “the social networking aspect of Myspace is gone” and that he feels “it is more-so an advertising and marketing domain for large companies”.
I have already mentioned Dan’s profile URL at the top of this blog post if you would like to check out his profile. Other than that Dan also has his portfolio site that you can have a look at to see his web and graphic design work:
Dan’s Myspace Tip
“Get a facebook to keep in touch with friends. Keep your Myspace to play around with and learn new customizing techniques. The challenges presented by Myspaces filters and code rules make for a wonderful learning environment for testing your skills when it comes to CSS and HTML practice.”
Related:
May 26th, 2009 at 2:55 am
[…] May 25th, 2009 // 19 Comments // Personal Masters of Myspace - Dan Hill - myspaceismyplace.com 05/25/2009 In this series of profiles I interview the Masters of MySpace – […]