| Bloggery | Recaps

Website redesign: Juddering parallax.

For the last few months I’ve not really had a blog to post on, as I’ve been attempting to bludgeon WordPress into doing more or less what I want for an all-new iteration of the site. I’ve had to give up on the absurd pipedream of stopping it scattering a dozen classes on every <div>, as the fixes would be undone with every WP update, but it’s mostly working now. Add to that a lot of coding and recoding  jQuery and LESS-based shenanigans and I’ve finally got stage 1 where I want it: it grabs images from posts and puts them on the background, and does a gallery type thing too. Simple enough, but finding a method I liked for each bit too AGES. For example I was pretty excited about doing something with parallax scrolling, but when it came to the implementation I really didn’t like how the images juddered on scroll. Unlike iPad swiping, mousewheels don’t scroll smoothly, so instead of a *woosh* you get a *clank-clank-clank* on any javascript animations that are based off of it. So I ditched that in favour of fixed backgrounds: images stay still, everything else moves. (I might change it later)

So yeah, mechanically it works, stylistically it needs a lot of design and tweaking. Once I’ve got that somewhere relatively pleasant I’ll move the site to the root of dangovan.com, start using it as a blog and photoblog, and get on with stage two: a way to navigate the archives, and to filter posts between “photography”, “personal” and “work”. After that comes ”about” pages and maybe a portfolio/cv section, but that’s a fair ways off.

In other news:

I moved flat, which is great. It’s a bit closer to town which means I can walk to work in half an hour, and it’s only got 2 other people (instead of 7) which means it’s a little less crazy. The room’s smaller but all together it’s definitely a plus.

I got bored of Star Wars: The Old Republic. It was partly due to altitis (playing too many characters means I feel no particular affinity for any of them) and partly due to ridiculous travel times between quest points. Grinding isn’t so bad if the combat system is good, but just sitting on a speeder for minutes at a time is downright dull. Never mind though, Diablo 3 is on the horizon which I hope will be a compelling but casual multiplayer, and the same for Guildwars 2 which has the distinction of not being an outdated Warcraft clone. Yay!

| Bloggery | Recaps

I read again!

There’s a dev version of this site sitting somewhere secret. It’s an abortive mashup of flickr and wordpress and it doesn’t really work like I wanted it to yet. It was getting there though! Right up until I went and got a Kindle. I’ve read more books in the two months since I got it than in the two years before that. While it’s nice to know I still have to capacity to put books away like I did a decade ago, it doesn’t half eat up my time and attention. So yeah, that’s temporarily scuppered my new website attempts. On top of that the advent a month ago of SWTOR, my first MMO in ages, has killed it dead. To add insult to injury it’s taken a big chunk out of my photowork time too, so I’ve only managed one photoset in the whole Janurary. Weaksauce.

I still definitely want a nifty photoblog thingy that’ll inspire me to put up pics more often than words, and in a more controlled environment than facebook or flickr… But it’s not gonna happen soon. If I wasn’t a web developer I’d just get a tumblr, but I do have (web) standards. Guffaw chortle.

| Bloggery

Under Construction

Yeah it’s gone a bit quiet here, mostly because I’ve already exported all my posts into a new wordpress development environment to work on the next design of the site, so I’ll have to copy-paste all this across when I’m done writing it. But omg new blog! Exciting, right?!

Well actually, not so much. I’m spending hours and hours just getting my head around the very basics. I needed to upgrade my hosting, work out subdomains, the export took a while all by itself, then there was finding out what a “theme” is made of, how posts work, the different taxonomies. In some places it’s bafflingly freeform, allowing several ways to achieve the same thing, in others it’s strangely restrictive; things that are done with a click in Expressionengine being ostensibly impossible. Now I’m at the unenviable stage of having to individually categorise, tag and set the format for each of my seven hundred and fifty posts, and after that’s done I have to set up some custom menu thingies before I can finally get my hands on the dreaded “loop”… Except there’ll be at least three of them, because I like making things difficult for myself.

So yeah it’s going pretty slowly, and it’s playing second fifth fiddle to seeing my lovely boyfriend, socialising, deleting four fifths of the resulting photos and putting the rest on facebook, and playing a ton of different computer games (which needs a blogpost of its own). Also there’s a merger and a complete refurb ahappening at work, and I turn the big THREE OH in a week and a half, so there’s a lot on. But I’m keeping at it, in dribs and drabs. Dribs and drabs.

| Interwebs | Spotlight

Web design trends: Parallax and Responsive

I’m still eyeball-deep in the explore phase of my new site redesign, which has meant a lot of research into the state of web design trends. There’s clearly two big ones going on at the moment and they’re both tricky to visualise without a lot of examples, so I’m going to whittle down my overflowing bookmark bar and point out the dozen best examples I’ve found.

Parallax!

Linking in with the 2010 craze for one-page websites; these are sites where the backgrounds, foregrounds and/or midgrounds animate relative to the position of the scroll bar to make it look like they are moving faster or slower than expected. It started with the Nike site, and now everyone’s doing it. Easier shown than told though! Click and scroll up and down to witness the nifty.

  • Mark Lawrence Design is the personal site of a designer, it’s pretty arty and freeform with things swooshing in from every direction as you scroll down. Nifty!
  • On the other hand Quality Cabinets is a “just” a commercial, almost brochure-ware site, but it still uses a restrained parallax on their homepage effect to very nice effect.
  • I can’t decide if Dentsu Network over-uses the parallax, but it’s certainly very striking when you use the left hand navigation to get around the page.
  • A charity appeal on a sector jobs site Authentic Jobs uses a well-drilling analogy to get through the page, striking water at the end.
  • The Nizo sign-up page is slick and minimal…
  • While swiss design firm Ala decided to go in the opposite direction, showing off everything you could ever possibly want to do with scrolling-based animations. It’s a leeetle busy.

Responsive design!

In a nutshell these are sites that change depending on the width of the device, which is becoming critical in a time of increasing web device plurality. Technically they’re a combination of three techniques: auto-sizing columns (using % widths instead of px), auto-sizing images (by setting their widths to 100%), and using Media Queries to serve up a different styles at very wide or very narrow widths. To see the changes you’ll have to vary your browser width.

  • The website for the dConstruct 2011 web conference by the inestimable ClearLeft is predictably one of the quintessential responsive design sites. The columns shrink, the images resize and flow and at narrow widths it switches layout to a more “mobile friendly” design.
  • Stephen Caver has another true responsive site, using three layouts instead of two. This one’s interesting because of the CSS3 used to get some pseudo-parallax texture effects when you widen and shrink the portal size.
  • Andersson-Wise has BIG PICTURES YAY. Slightly basic layout but this demos the technique of stretching an image to fill the space, where usually the images have a maxwidth.
  • Forefathers doesn’t actually use resizing columns or images – focusing instead on Media Queries – so this an example of adaptive design similar to what I already use on my site. It’s much less fluid so it needs four distinct layouts at different widths to get it looking as good, and it’s a bit less future proof as it’s difficult to predict what portal sizes new web-enabled devices will have. Still, at the moment it still looks great. Plus there’s a monkey.
  • Andrew Revitt‘s page is another example of adaptive design with four layouts. It also uses a double background to make a better use of what space is left over at the sides.
  • The Happy Bit is a lovely little adaptive design site, but it uses five CSS layouts at different widths… On anything but a tiny site it’s a bit much.

At first I got very excited about the parallax-type sites, but looking under the hood the markup behind all those different scrolling elements is actually pretty ugly and unsemantic. I’d never be able to compress my site to one page anyway. So instead I’m going to focus on responsive design, which certainly has more longevity, though I still hope to throw some subtle parallax elements in there.

Dauntingly. what both these techniques have in common is they’re a big step away from websites being frozen HTML interpretations of static Photoshop documents; they move, they change, they flow. It makes my next stage – amateur wireframing – kinda tricky.

| Bloggery | Interwebs | Recaps

Redesign time 2011

Though last week’s dConstruct conference was a little more high level and blue sky than I’m used to, it still had more or less the same inspiring effect as it always has: once the second cup of coffee was safely put away I quickly found myself scribbling ideas that were only tangentially related to the speakers. It’s perhaps predictable then that I’m now planning a total redesign of this site.

I mean, it’s needed! It’s not really fit for purpose anymore. I originally built it primarily as a collection of my various web presences and secondarily as a archive of all the old posts on a blog I’d stopped writing on. Yeah, the one you’re reading now. If you look at the home page, it’s mainly a place to send you elsewhere: big links to my twitter (which is irreverent, irrelevant or both), last.fm (which since I mostly listen to music on my frustraingly incompatible blackberry is now completely inaccurate) and my photos.

See, I have the opposite problem with my photos. While I never used to update them, now I do often, and I’m really getting into photography as a hobby. Similar story with the blog, it’s not the redheaded stepchild it used to be. I didn’t even have a cv and portfolio section at first, and though they’re both now up-to-date content-wise, they could really do with some sprucing up. And as for the “info” pages, in spite of my adding some shiny canvas-based graphics I still think they’re kinda dry. Ideally they’d be boiled down to a less tedious series of h’amoozing infographics, but that’s for another time.

So I need to get a some more HTML5 action going, tighten up the basics and rework everything as a triptych of blog, fotos and work. Time to dust off the designer hat.

| Gaming | Spotlight

RPG Gamer Glut

I was idly playing Assassins Creed: Brotherhood the other day – collecting flags, chests, feathers and whatever other non-plot-essential side quests they generously scatter through the game – when I realised the sequel Revelations is out fairly soon and maybe I should hurry up and complete the game instead of gathering pseudo-rosebuds. Not only that but Skyrim is going to be out in the same week and by all accounts that’s going to be AMAZING and MASSIVE. Your average RPG will take me about 50 hours which I guess is about average; I’m hardly a completionist but I’m a sucker for a side-quest. Games can take a lot longer than that if it’s open world with a lot of exploration though, like Skyrim. Fun as Brotherhood is I’m also rather tempted to just drop it and instead pick up the very well received Deus Ex: Human Revolution: I loved, loved, LOVED the cyberpunk original back in 2000, but I know if I do that I’ll probably never finish Brotherhood. I just need a little more time.

One game at a time Dan. One at a time.

A gadfly-like attention span makes it difficult to play the same game more than once: my attempt to work through Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 again to make “canon” savegames (for exporting into sequels) had to be completely shelved, it just drags too much when you know what’s going to happen. The Witcher dragged too, this time because being poorly translated, so I never finished it. Which is really annoying because they fixed the dialogue and everything else in a subsequent uber-patch and the critically acclaimed sequel Assassins of Kings came out earlier this year. It sounds amazing but I just can’t bring myself to play it with the prequel on a shelf unfinished. I’ve also given up on finishing the DLC for Fallout 3, but as soon as the last of the DLC and major mods are finished for Fallout New Vegas I want to get back into that as it’s better written, more in keeping with the Fallout spirit and on top of the open world exploration there’s also a lot of sniping, which I love. I’ll find some sniping time.

I’ve not even really thought about the excellent Starcraft 2 or Portal 2, though I’m sure I’ll get to them eventually. Probably next year when they’ll be competing for attention with the likes of Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3 (both a guaranteed delight) and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The latter is an MMO which is a little risky, them being so addictiveness and whatnot, but I figure I’ll just play it like it’s a single player game. At the other end of the scale Civilization V has been really nice to casually dip into; it holds your attention while you play it but doesn’t demand it while you’re doing something else. Maybe that’s an RTS thing? Empire: Total War did that to an extent but it was way too easy to dominate once you began to pull ahead and the premise of global conquest in a pseudo-historical game strikes me as really silly, so though it chafes not to get my money’s worth I’ve had to ditch it entirely. I’d love to replace it with Shogun 2: Total War though as it’s supposed to be tighter and less buggy and the idea of merely conquering all of Japan is much easier to swallow, but y’know… Time.

To think there used to be a years-long dearth of good RPGs for the PC! It’s an embarrassment of riches now, and relatively unrestricted by budget or computer specs as I am the only thing I’m missing now to play them all is time.

Glad to see that PC Gaming seems to be having a revival, just a shame I’m too BIZ-AY. …Time.

| Recaps

Edinburgh Stress Fest

I’m just back at work after a couple of weeks off, ten days of which was spent in Edinburgh during the awesome Fringe Festival. And awesome it was, in the oldschool “overwhelmingly huge” meaning of the word. Hundreds of venues and thousands of shows; I don’t know how I thought “play it by ear” would work at all! Juggling seeing the shows and doing touristy things in the city and drinking with friends and catching up with the family was just too much, it would have been so much easier if I’d planned out more what I was going to do beforehand, or at least read around the subject some more. By the time I’d worked out that I wanted to see some revue comedy it was almost time to go home!

Still, we pretty much managed. My highlights for the holiday went a bit like this:

  • Show-wise: easily the stunning Le Gateau Chocolat and the adorable Mae Martin
  • Drinking highlight was accidentally meeting the owners of an actual good gay bar in Edinburgh (IKR!?) called The Street, followed by more shots and dancing and the hall of mirrors that is CC Bloom’s.
  • Family-wise was chilling out, dog-walking and the unexpectedly delicious vegetarian cooking. Also they loved Dom which is nice.
  • Tourist-wise we didn’t get a lot done, so the highlight was probably napping in the short-lived sun in Princes Street Gardens.

I’m not sure how to categorise the extremely surreal dinner with a Harry C-W and a bunch of comedians including Scott Capurro and Margaret Cho, so I’ll just file it under “lolwhat”.

| Recaps

Bizzy Wizzy: 1994 to 2011

Dear dead Bizzy Wizzy. You were seriously unhinged, hated and tried to attack strangers and had a really stupid name, but I’m going to miss you scaring the dog four times your size and getting hair on all my things. You’d totally mellowed out in your old age, which was nice, though it’s sad that you passed just as you were finally about to get your own garden.

Hope you had a nice life of sitting on plastic bags and purring. Rest in peace, old cat.

| Photography

I’ve taken 45,000 digital photos.

I still don’t know how to use my new camera. While I understand the basics, they way they all interact is tricky, the layers of jargon impenetrable and the automatic functions of the camera add more complexity. I’ll get there eventually… Meanwhile I’m mainly using automatic mode and continuing to progress with nifty post-processing. My free copy of Lightroom arrived yesterday so I should be able to advance to taking pictures in RAW which is exciting

I got to thinking about the EXIF meta data embedded in my photos last week, and wondering if there’s anything interesting I could extract from it: with a bit of work and number juggling I put together a graph of how many photos I’ve taken and how many I’ve kept with my various digital cameras, since the start of 2004. It’s pretty nifty, and far too much effort for a single blog post so I’ve also used it the new photography info page I’ve written. (That’s a demo of deeplinking which is also new. Woop!)

Pics taken per month

Oh and the graph’s written with a javascript plug in using html5 so if you’re using IE8 or below, NO GRAPH FOR YOU. Also: you suck.

Realising I’ve taken fourty thousand pictures in the last two and a half years is a bit scary. It also doesn’t count the hundreds I took at uni with my uber-retro film camera, but that’s a story for another time.

In other news, I’m off work for the next 17 days, including 10 days in Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, which is AMAZING. Longest non-Christmas holiday since uni. Yes.