November 1999
+ Monday - November 29, 1999
There's a few good stories over at A List Apart. One is Where Have All The Designers Gone, the other, How to be Soopa Famous.
The former is an interesting article about the increasing concern that web designers are becoming sick of "web design", and thus are looking to other avenues such as more experimental sites. The outcome of this, as the column states, may be that the run of the mill sites (you know, the one's that actually make companies money) will end up being designed by "mediocre" web designers. It brings up some good points, but like most things (unfortunatly) if you just throw some money at it, the problem can be solved rather quickly.
The latter is simply a hilarious article poking fun at all those experimental designers who've given up on their "day job" and are now part of the "underground".
For those of you who have websites running Linux (or a variant) try running the Tail command. It's called like this:
tail -fn 50 /accesslogpath
Where "accesslogpath" is the path to your sites httpd access log file. This will show you the last 50 entries in your httpd log, and it updates whenever someone hits the site. It's interesting to watch people go through your site, and examine where they're going (assuming you don't get so many hits that it scrolls by too fast for you to read). Just today I was glancing at mine and I noticed someone trying to find an old page that I have since moved. It was interesting watching them try to "guess" the new path to where it is. Of course after about ten 404 errors, they gave up. Nothing like being the stealth admin.
version 6 progress:
*contact page and script done.
*about page written.
*RCM now fully secure.
+ Saturday - November 27, 1999
I decided to get the nav out of the way finally. At first I was going to use text for the nav, but instead opted for graphics using a font made by Jason Kottke called Silkscreen. After a long struggle to get the JS working with the images again, I've finished the nav, and for the most part I'm happy with it. The way I have it set up, the top frame will never have to reload. It simply does image swaps to get the disired effect. Lots of image swaps actually, which is why it was such a pain to code.
It's not the most error free code however (or clean for that matter, just take a look at what a mess it is). Here's a simple way to break it: Hit Reload right now. Oh dear, you're in Plan, but it says you're in Index.
So much for "intelligent navigation".
version 6 progress:
*final nav images done.
*nav JS done.
+ Friday - November 26, 1999
With a full day off and too much time worrying about the front end, I decided today to start the back end. The first thing was to write the Plan RCM so I don't have to update these entries manually. Luckly that was easy since I could just reuse my old Thoughts RCM from v5 and with a few tweaks (2 to be exact) I was up and running. Since the other pages (namely Project and Docs) will have a similar layout, creating the RCM's for those pages should be a breaze. Reuseable code: Learn it. Love it.
version 6 progress:
*CSS done.
*Plan page layout done.
*Plan RCM done.
+ Tuesday - November 23, 1999
As I've been doing my CSS for version 6 (my first time using it for a "real" application) I've noticed that Netscape and IE seem to have differences with the fonts...(duh)
First of all, while IE seems to do:
.text2 {font-family:Arial, helvetica;
font-size: 11px; }
correctly, Netscape seems to want to just put the 11px font at size="1". So I guess at 11px or 10px, Netscape plays no favorites, and makes them the same size.
Secondly...With this small Arial font, the kerning isn't the greatest....So I used "letter-spacing: 1px;". Works fine in IE, but doesn't do squat in Netscape.
Mozilla, please hurry.
version 6 progress:
*CSS almost cross platform complient (ie almost done)
*JS nav now includes intelligent rollovers.
+ Saturday - November 13, 1999
The original frame setup that I had invisioned has been scraped. I felt it looked too much like Yugop, and realistically it is not going to work for the RCM I will be writing on the back end.
Since I'm planning on changing the color scheme at will, the site will have to use CSS or #includes, or a combination of both. I've implimented a new frameset and am starting on its construction.
version 6 progress:
*old frameset ditched.
*new frameset added to allow greater RCM flexibility.
*CSS starting to take form.
*working on unique JS nav combination.
+ Monday - November 8, 1999
Inspiration lately has been tough. I think it's because I've been looking at other websites. To be truly original I feel that's a no-no (but who doesn't do it?).
I've also been working on new logo options. The old logo isn't going to cut it for the new design. I've been trying various things. From simple type treatment to MC Escher wacked up 3D stuff. I like none of it (go figure).
version 6 progress:
*initial template created.
*frameset created.
*bug in netscape frame implimentation that must be fixed.
+ Wednesday - November 3, 1999
I've begun writing down some ideas for version 6. My main focus now is nav and section names.
Nav ideas:
*.plan - thoughts on web topics, and current projects.
*project - all art, .js, perl, flash, etc, experiments for the web.
*man pages (docs) - How To's for various web stuff.
*interviews - interviews (duh).
*polls - top 10 web sites, daily weekly, etc.
*opinion (columns) - random stories.
*forums - user opinions.
*about - about the site.
*contact - form for contact.
*href - links to other sites.
Expect some of these to get scratched along the way.
+ Monday - November 1, 1999
For a while now I've really been fed up with web design. I'm not sure why, possibly work burn out, but it didn't excite me anymore. That is, until I started talking to Mike Young. Besides being a good designer, he can spark creativity. And I've been feeling better about web design as a result. So much in fact that I've decided to do version 6 of vitaflo.
I've basically just placed a splash page out front announcing that fact. Just a little something I cooked up to get the ball rolling again. The image itself isn't anything special, just a ferris wheel with a motion blur, and some Slashdot text for effect, but I think it does the job for now. I'll probably add it somewhere on the site when it launches.