Big Blue
So, if I may take just a moment to state the obvious, I scrapped the first overhaul of my website. While this may seem like a lot of work wasted, it really wasn't. I've become somewhat conversant with CSS, and now that I pretty much know the vocabulary, the structure, simple to begin with, pretty much falls into place. I still have much room to improve.
While my trusty blog background was great on one page, I wasn't feeling it nearly as much when extended to the entire site. So, I went to something that was sleek and white, but the consensus was it was just too white...like that bright white neatherheaven where Christopher Reeve is finally united with Jane Seymour at the end of Somewhere In Time. Yeah...I know ya feel me.
Once I settled on a damn masthead I could live with, the rest of the site was no sweat. The changes aren't that radical; this is the web design equivalient of painting the Enterprise bridge blue and calling it the Reliant.
If any of y'all wanna send me screen shots of anything that looks particularly ugly on your operating system of choice, I'd more than welcome the quality assurance.
It's going to take a little more time to bring the Imageplex pages under the new livery. Gallery's CSS is a little more complex than all these little boxes. While I've no intention of scrapping Gallery, I am taking this opportunity to try out some other image display tools for potential use in portfolios and such.
I've been pleasantly impressed with this free applet from Japan called zphoto, which integreates an rendering enging for simple, but very attractive Flash galleries that sit on a more conventional HTML-based picture viewer. The Windows GUI is extemely easy to use, though I've yet to do a run through where I haven't had to hack a little at the HTML afterward. I'm still fine tuning the templates.
I was easily able to integrate zphoto's control links with my style schema. I've set up some test galleries here. For the best results, you'll need a browser with the Macromedia Flash player plug-in installed. It's not required, however. I've placed zphoto's controls on the left side o the page, underneath the standard links. You can switch a Flash-free interface, full-screen view, or quickly return to the gallery at any time during the slideshow. Flash is (for our purposes here today) platform-independent, so the gallery works the same on my desktop as it does on my web server.
If you know of other cool applets like these, please let me know!
Links:
http://namazu.org/~satoru/zphoto/
http://www.jasonbentley.org/nybw
http://www.jasonbentley.org/cd_covers
While my trusty blog background was great on one page, I wasn't feeling it nearly as much when extended to the entire site. So, I went to something that was sleek and white, but the consensus was it was just too white...like that bright white neatherheaven where Christopher Reeve is finally united with Jane Seymour at the end of Somewhere In Time. Yeah...I know ya feel me.
Once I settled on a damn masthead I could live with, the rest of the site was no sweat. The changes aren't that radical; this is the web design equivalient of painting the Enterprise bridge blue and calling it the Reliant.
If any of y'all wanna send me screen shots of anything that looks particularly ugly on your operating system of choice, I'd more than welcome the quality assurance.
It's going to take a little more time to bring the Imageplex pages under the new livery. Gallery's CSS is a little more complex than all these little boxes. While I've no intention of scrapping Gallery, I am taking this opportunity to try out some other image display tools for potential use in portfolios and such.
I've been pleasantly impressed with this free applet from Japan called zphoto, which integreates an rendering enging for simple, but very attractive Flash galleries that sit on a more conventional HTML-based picture viewer. The Windows GUI is extemely easy to use, though I've yet to do a run through where I haven't had to hack a little at the HTML afterward. I'm still fine tuning the templates.
I was easily able to integrate zphoto's control links with my style schema. I've set up some test galleries here. For the best results, you'll need a browser with the Macromedia Flash player plug-in installed. It's not required, however. I've placed zphoto's controls on the left side o the page, underneath the standard links. You can switch a Flash-free interface, full-screen view, or quickly return to the gallery at any time during the slideshow. Flash is (for our purposes here today) platform-independent, so the gallery works the same on my desktop as it does on my web server.
If you know of other cool applets like these, please let me know!
Links:
http://namazu.org/~satoru/zphoto/
http://www.jasonbentley.org/nybw
http://www.jasonbentley.org/cd_covers
leave a response