Valhalla Island

A little while ago I saw this camera tossing thing on ten years of my life. It linked to an amazing flickr gallery. I knew I’d never get any that good, even with the flash on, my camera takes bad night shots but I tried anyway. Out of about 30 I took there’s two I like:

The second one looks like I didn’t throw the camera at all but after that one I tried just taking pictures of the sky and none turned out as nice.

Jeffery Zeldman said something about RSS a long time ago on an old about page:

Person: If you offered an RSS feed, I could read your stuff without visiting your site.

Zeldman: If you stored your groceries on the sidewalk, I could eat your food without sitting across the table from you.

I feel the same way. I personally dislike and don’t use them because in a lot of cases I am more interested in how the information is displayed rather than what is said. I am also a firm believer in ‘I know what the user wants better than the user does’. RSS is almost like stealing. It’s like seeing a pirated movie before it’s realeased at the cinema. Sure you still get to see the movie but you miss out on the cinema experience.

In a way I see it as a step backwards. Just like we moved from command line operating systems to GUI’s we improved upon HTML 1, with no design specification at all, to presentationally sophistocated CSS that turned the internet into a visually interesting place. RSS strips the design, images and even navigation converting sites back to the way they looked 15 years ago, plain text.

People like RSS because they can organise their many, daily visited sites within one application. I argue that this is what bookmarks were invented for and with Firefox’s ‘Open in tabs’ feature you can quickly cycle through all your daily reads with only a few clicks, all within the same window and you get the added plus of something pretty to look at.

‘But RSS tells me when sites are updated’ is maybe RSS’s only plus in my eyes. Even this is not wonderful technology. It only knows when sites are updated because it checks every few seconds or minutes.

I don’t know when everyone decided how great it was that we can all now read the content on a site without having to actually go to it. I hope that the hype over RSS dies before there’s no such thing as a graphical interface on the internet anymore and it’s back to being a huge mountain of text.

It was over a week ago when I decided I was going to re-design Fightingfriends. Normally, a re-design would entail me staying up all night from the time I decided it was going to happen and finishing it at about one in the morning. That method usually created something I was initially happy with but very soon got boring.

Because I’d do it so quickly I’d spend most of my time making the front page look pretty and neglect finer elements either very crudely styling them or not touching them at all. This time I decided to take my time and I did. For about a week and a half I have been meticuously style every tiny detail of this website. All up spending about 5 or 6 times that I would normally spend. I finally have something I am not embarrassed to have writing displayed within.

The biggest change was dropping the sidebar. The sidebar was superfluous, I doubt any body even used it and it cut into the space used for posting. If anyone did ever want to read the archives for a certain month or read posts out of a certain category the search box can be used. Sure people can’t see what categories are available to view and they have to manually type the word so it’s less usable but who cares when nobody uses it in the first place.

Another addition was something invisible to the end user. My own PHP is used extensively and now changes can be made site wide by editing single files which is handy.

I want it to stay this way for a while now.

… and I want a redesign. Just very lately I have been reading a lot. Much more than usual, which on it’s own is heaps. I’ve been reading nearly every article to come out of the 9 Rules Network, every design article featured on A List Apart, I’ve just started ‘Designing with Web Standards’ by Jeffery Zeldman and ‘The Zen of CSS Design’ by Dave Shea is on it’s way in the mail.

Because of my disbelief in RSS feeds (which I’ll save for another post) all this reading hasn’t just been wonderfully informative but has been inspiring. Even as I’m typing this, I’m not happy with how it’s going to be displayed once it reaches my front page. No matter how professional I thought this site looked two weeks ago, it’s now obvious to me that it’s very far off. Basic things like my font size, spacing and line-spacing look terrible. Actually, just changing that would make a big difference but there’s a lot more I have to do. Things like the ugliness of my sidebar for one. I don’t know if I styled it at all. It even comes down to content. My writing on all the static pages accross the top is shit.

What I have to concerntrate on is detail in smaller CSS elements. I always put a lot of work into the larger picture, the overall layout and basic navigation. I need to put this same effort into each individual element. This is what makes 9 Rules look so great.

If there was one site that really did it for me it was Mark Rundle’s personal site. On a different level Download.com was a big inspiration. I want to lose the sidebar. I’m worried about implementing this new design as a Wordpress theme because very soon I’d like to create my own platform. The versatility of CSS means I’ll be able to reuse most of my code anyway.

So I’m going to read some usability books. I’m going to learn more and more about object orientated programming in PHP. I’m going to learn about XML, XSLT and create some of my own XML parsers. Then maybe this site will be at a level I’m satisfied with for more than a month.

School is almost over and is dying down in a way. I’ve been thinking for a long time about the time between finishing school an starting university. It’s this blank 3 - 4 months where you really just have nothing, it’s a time that we’ll probably never experience again in our lives. Except maybe until retirement but that’s the beginning of the end.

I figure there’s two things I could do with this time. I could relax, three months of working 1 or 2 shifts a week and not doing much else sounds good. Or I could get a head start on the rest of my life. For so long I haven’t had the time to work on my own projects, this might be my last ever oppurtunity to work full time on exactly what I want to do. I think I might even quit my part time job. There’s sort of another option to work paid full-time at my current job and raise lots of money before I start my first year at university. But I couldn’t think of anything much worse.

So once school’s over fightingfriends will be switched to run on my own platform, which I hope to bundle together and distribute as my own blogging platform, similar to Wordpress or Moveable Type. The step from using it myself and preparing it as a complete system for others to easily download, set up and run themselves is a big one though. The other problem is support which John Gruber wrote a wonderful article about.

The other project is a short story showcase and community. Where users can login, post their short stories to be rated and commented on. There will also be features like profiles for users and a weekly featured story style thing, as well as, most popular stories and most read. At the moment it’s all beautifully pictured in my mind. I imagine this will be easier than a Wordpress style CMS because the code won’t be visible, it’ll only be a graphical interface to everyone else. But in saying that, I still want to do it properly keeping it easily updateable and future proof.

At the moment I’m really liking The 9 Rules Network and A List Apart. So much there is worth reading and because A List Apart have a big focus on Style Sheets for print they are great to print out and read at breakfast or whatever.

I really like this picture from low resolution and the poem that goes with it. The latest Slower photo is great too.

I came accross some pictures of the latest Vista builds. It’s all very transparent. It looks like the new Media Player is trying to copy iTunes with the buttons centred but I like the look. Internet Explorer 7, what I am most looking forward to, now has Firefox style tabs. The top bar accross IE is very Mozilla like too.

Media Player
Internet Explorer
More IE and Messenger

What I found most amazing was the system specs shown in that second screen shot. 1.98GB of RAM is scary. They must be running it on a massive monitor too because the screen shots are huge.

Most of this stuff has already been said by John Gruber in his latest post at Daring Fireball but I still have some things to say.

Apple today made many new annoucments. Including announcing the new range of iPods. It seems that new generantions of iPods are being realeased so quickly that before people have stopped talking about the previous generation a new one is out. The latest have larger screens, the ability to play TV and video in 320 x 240 and no longer support FireWire or remote ports. Of course you can see pictures in an always prominent position on Apple’s front page.

I like the new size screens. I like the thinner border around the screen too. I don’t like the size of the clickwheel in relation to the screen and area around the clickwheel. It seems as though they’ve made it smaller. This may not be the case, it just might look smaller because of the bigger screen but I think that either way it looks funny and they could have enlarged it. Maybe they thought of that and a thought that a bigger clickwheel would be poor ergonomics and defeat the original purpose of the clickwheel.

There’s a bunch of other Mac announcemnets too. Listed very nicely on Daring Fireball, my favourite Mac discussion website.

I’ve switched all the layout images on fightingfriends to PNGs from JPEGs. Personally, I notice a huge difference. The blur on leaf style thing was bothering me but now it’s crystal clear. The text also appears more clear.

It’s sometimes a hard decision whether to use JPEGs or PNGs. I never use GIFs, not sure what made me stop using them. I think they are the web standard but I just dislike them. I love the PNG quality. There’s no loss at all but generally they are around five times the size of a JPEG. I think that, especially with the header image being so large on the index page, it is worth the extra download time in exchange for higher quality. With everyone in IPT boasting how fast their internet connection is these days I doubt many people would notice the difference in download time anyway.

Of course the section 508 speed report thinks it’s the worst thing anyone could do but that stupid speed report complains if you have a page with over 10 lines of code. I’d like to know if anyone noticed a big different in download time or a large difference in quality.

If my weather widget is right, which it usually is, we are finally going to get some rain. It’s been so long since I remember seeing it rain really, really heavily. I’m looking forward to it.

I don’t know what all the fuss is about AJAX. Maybe in the right situation it would work well and feel appropriate but it’s really browser intensive.

Here’s an example. It’s definately the best I’ve ever seen it look but what’s the point? The only reason I moved things around was to see how it was done and how it looked. I don’t know why anyone would want to move a post up and down or expand and collapse them. Having to expand every sidebar item is slow and annoying. I think it’s unecessary.

It just makes me feel like I’m using a dumbed-down version of Flash. Maybe it’s just that I havn’t seen it used in a practical application yet.

All these people turning 18 lately has got me thinking about turning 18. I didn’t think there was anything I wanted to do that I couldn’t because I wasn’t 18 yet. But as I spoke to everyone more I realised just how many doors it opens. So I’m going to make a list:

• You can buy alcohol
• You can buy cigarettes
• You can drink alcohol at a bar
• You can gamble - including
• Buying scratchits
• Entering the Lotto
• Going to the casino
• Playing Keno
• Betting at the TAB
• Playing pokies
• You can see R rated movies at the movies, by yourself
• You can buy R rated movies
• You can hire R rated movies
• You can buy goods from an adult store
• You can legally have anal sex
• You can enter a contract
• You can apply for a credit card
• You can go upstairs to gigs at the Arena
• You can see over 18 gigs
• You can drink at all ages gigs
• You can book a hotel room
• You can book a plane ticket for yourself
• You can go to clubs, like The Family
• You can play snooker at the RSL without a parent
• You can vote and have a say in how the state or country is run.
• You can go to a REAL jail if you commit a crime.
• You can apply for a passport in your own name.
• You can apply for hire purchase.
• You can apply for a rental (flat etc.)
• You can get married
• You can join the army and go to war & maybe shot.
• You can take control of your life and try not to make the mistakes that other people (supposedly older and wiser) do.
• You can get a tattoo.

I’m sure there’s more. There’s more that we’ve all spoken about in the last week but I can’t remember. If you have any to add, tell me and I’ll add it.

Update - Thanks to Dad for the extras.

I’ve just added a massive snowies gallery, 186 photos all up. The best part is that it’s an entirely thumbnailed gallery.

The best part after that is that it didn’t take me hours of excruciatingly repeatative coding. It only took me about 2 minutes from start to finish using a wonderful new invention of mine. Thumbnail Gallery Maker v0.3 is a program I finished off this afternoon. It even comes in a zip file with documentation! It’s v0.3 beacause I’m hoping to have it web based by version 1.0. Really though, it’s pretty shitty but the main reason I made it was to save myself time. I thought it might save others some time too. It’s to shit I was thinking about releasing it as beta, hahaha.

Basically how it works is that you make up a directory of images and thumbnails of those images using a program like IrFanView, then you type in the directory, the number of images and you’ve got lines and lines of valid xHTML that prints thumbnails that link to the larger version. Pretty spiffy.

Update -

There’s a wierd bug in that snowies gallery that the thumbnail is a link to the next picture not it’s own picture. It’s not a problem with my program I think it’s something to do with how they got numbered, I don’t know, I’ll check it out later.

I forgot that comment moderation was on by default in Wordpress. Emailing whenever a comment is made is also on by default. I think comment moderation is being over cautious, maybe it’s good for fighting spam. The ‘allow if been previously approved’ thing is cool but approving everyone at first would just take way too long.

My Dad emailed me tonight saying that he was impressed with the site and asking a few questions about putting a site together for his hotel. I thought that was really nice. Court’s comment on the last post was great too.

There’s still a few bugs with the layout. The footer is pretty bland. There’s some CSS effects I’d like to try but I’m waiting for my copy Zen of CSS Design to arrive that I ordered a month ago. Booktopia has been very slow but I don’t think it has been their fault, the supplier was out of stock. $6.50 shipping on unlimited books is very good though.

After a lot of work the Fix-26 site is up. It uses some PHP I’ve recently learnt and uses a cool VB script I wrote to create some fast thumbnail galleries with IrFanView. I’ll put it up on the projects page for download. If you ever have had to manually code thumbnail galleries you’ll love this tool. Also on the projects page I might list some of the free software I use.

Soon I’ll be learning how to set up a Linux machine running Apache as a host which I am excited about. I’ll be able to host everything I do. I’m going to start researching Distributions. I hear Ubuntu and Mandrake are very good.

While I think of it, there’s a program called publishPDF which is only $45 and looks like it’d be good. Everyone argues about PDFs but I like them and this program would make it very easy. There’s something really nice about being able to publish something that will look identical on any computer. IE doesn’t even support the CSS :hover function on anything except anchors.

I also almost forgot to say what I was doing about that short story community/showcase idea until Bill reminded me. It’s still going ahead. I’m about 1/8th of the way through a course at TAFE that will hopefully give me the skills I’ll need to make it. It’ll be a huge project though and will take time and extensive testing. It’s definately going to be done and finished though, I have big ideas.

Five hours ago I decided that fightingfriends was going to be mine again and that I was going to redesign it. Now it’s done and I’m happy. It’s really late but there’s one thing I want to do. I think I remember saying something like this five hours ago:

Whatever this new design has, it must have a nice blockquote. I am just so sick of shitty looking blockquotes.

I finally have one but I have to get in bed. I’ll delete and reorganise the other posts sometime later but for now they are a nice filler.