I’m simply at a loss to explain this design. Clearly many most all web designs from that early need to be cut a little slack, and I doubt any of them have truly aged well. But even through that lens, this site is inexplicably hideous.

I’m certainly not the first person to look back in time and mock this design, of course. But “usability guru” Jakob Nielsen used it in an article he wrote back at the time, and it’s still lingering on his site with a new introduction written in 1997. (Frighteningly enough, if the conclusion I draw from my brief perusal of the long and boring highly usable article is correct, he’s actually praising this design.) Personally I think Nielsen’s views are overrated, and that if he really knew as much about usability as he is supposed to, his website would look a lot different (and he’d also realize he no longer needs to cater to the bandwidth limitations of those running 28.8 kbps modems — but I digress; besides, these guys rip into him much better than I care to). But it’s still an interesting look back in time.

Well, that’s not really the reason I did it. I wanted to take a new approach that allows for more customization of the presentation in different sections of the site. But I made it IE6-friendly while I was at it. The new design is based on another color scheme called “Salamander” that I found at Kuler. (Sorry, I’d link right to the specific color palette but, guess what, it’s Flash. Boo.)

It’s not finished yet, but I wanted to put the necessary pressure on myself to keep working on it until it’s completely done. So now that it’s far enough along to be presentable to the public, I’m rolling it out.

Most of the cool site-specific graphical headers are still missing, so it’s falling back to a generic presentation with a nice garish green band at the top. Certain other fine details are also still missing in the CSS, but I’m getting there.

Eventually there will be more dramatic changes to the page structure: the home page will be more of a “portal” than just a dump of the most recent blog posts; different sections of the site will have different content in the sidebar, etc. But this is a start.

His icy stare is compelling me to CLICK THAT LINK but no, I will not! I will muster all the will within my soul to do anything other than click that link. Begone, John Anthony! You are almost as terrifying as the Hypnotoad.

OK, I clicked it.

Wow, he really does sound like Dennis DeYoung. And… um… that’s about all I have to say about that. My only other comment (before I must leave the site in haste, lest I become hypnotized) is that I think he must have stolen away Paul Todd’s webmaster. In fact, the Paul Todd similarities seem to go deeper than the bitchin’ website. He really needs an animation that morphs between a photo and cartoon of himself, though.

I’m presently working on a major redesign of this site to make it more portal-like and less generic-WordPress-blog-like, and once that’s in place I’ll integrate ReverbNation and SoundClick content more seamlessly into the site (plus I’m planning to set up some PayPal-Kunaki integration to handle sales of my CDs directly from this site), but in the meantime, here are the links:

http://www.reverbnation.com/room34

http://www.soundclick.com/room34

Today I had the chance for the first time to see just how horrible the new design looks in IE6, and as much as I don’t want to support that browser, I also couldn’t handle thrusting visitors into the hideous mess of this site in IE6 without at least giving them a taste of what it’s supposed to look like first. To that end, I’ve created a more friendly “welcome” page for IE6 users, giving them one last chance to upgrade before proceeding, and in the process showing them a hint of the site’s actual design as it’s intended to appear.

But of course, since you’re not using IE6 (are you?), you have no idea what that page looks like. So, I thought I’d show it off a bit. Here it is. Enjoy. Or not. Actually, it’s not really intended to be enjoyed, so don’t. (I’m really only posting this link so I can test the HTTP_REFERER link functionality I embedded in it. [And yes, I know the correct spelling is "referrer." Tell that to whoever created the names of the HTTP host headers. I mean whomever. So there.])

Does this site look a little wonky to you? In that case, then you are probably a better graphic designer than I and/or you’ve discovered that the new design isn’t 100% implemented yet. If I’m lucky, it’s the latter. At any rate, I’ve already spent far more time in the past 24 hours working on this than I’d have expected to, given the limited extent of the results, but I’m a little burned out, so I’ll be finishing a few things (like the background on the footer and a few other little graphical touches) over the next few days. Oh, and I’ve only done the bare minimum trying to update the “Offspring” pages to work with the new look. (It took me about an hour of hunting before I realized/remembered that some of the style settings for the gallery pages are actually in the plug-in settings in WordPress and not in the Gallery2 files at all.) But I am hoping to make the move from Gallery2 to the Dutch Monkey’s DM Albums plug-in soon anyway.

The only design element that’s noticeably different is the little greenish weirdness at the right end of the photos in the header bar. This was something I spent a great deal of time developing for an old, shortlived design that was part of my quickly-abandoned experiment with running the site on Drupal. I may end up getting rid of it again; I just thought it deserved a second chance.

Now then, if you’ve actually visited this site sometime before, you may find the pages are looking somewhat garbled; sadly that’s the side effect of keeping a lot of the filenames the same; your browser likely has old versions of these files cached. Hit the Refresh button a few times or perhaps clear your cache. I did the Refresh thing, but I had to hit it about 4 times before all of the files actually updated. Sheesh, you’d think I was using a Microsoft product or something, not Firefox!

Fortunately for you, we’ve taken almost no new pictures since Christmas, because a) the camera’s batteries are crapping out and b) the camera has been misplaced for several weeks. So, you haven’t missed anything, really.

One of the key points in getting this set up was finding a mechanism in WordPress to restrict access: in short, I want to know who’s looking at pictures of my kids. Now I’ve found a plug-in to manage access to individual blog posts, so that’s one more hurdle jumped.

Future posts in this category will require you to be logged in. Fortunately, it’s easy to register and once you’ve done it, you should never have to do it again. (At least, not until I decide to change my site entirely again. But I don’t anticipate doing that in the near future, if only because I’m not going to have the time to mess with it!)

For now I’ve rolled back to the old site (with the 3 or 4 blog entries I posted in Drupal floating out there in the ether). I’m in the process of moving everything over to a new server anyway, so for now the site will remain in this old look until I get everything on the new server ready to roll out.

Color Palette Generator

Just give it the URL of any image anywhere on the web (such as, for example on your own site) and it generates color palettes for you to use in your design, based on the colors in the image.

Look for yet another new Room 34 site redesign in the near (or not-so-near) future using this tool!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The effect is that every time I open my browser, a new, random article on Wikipedia loads, which can often be severely distracting (so I make sure not to use this configuration at work!), but it’s almost always very interesting.

For instance, today the random link led me to this site: www.politicalcompass.org

Despite my skeptical view of questionnaires designed to pigeonhole your identity (think Myers-Briggs), I was immediately fascinated with the idea of the political compass, because it addresses a dimension (literally) of political viewpoints that the typical left/right dichotomy completely misses. It acknowledges that the traditional left/right spectrum is primarily (but not entirely) an economic scale, and it adds a second scale for social issues, with extremes it labels “authoritarian” and “libertarian.” I think the terminology is a bit muddled, since left/right would be better described as liberal/conservative or perhaps socialist/free market, but all of those terms have baggage. (Of course, in the United States, at least, so does “libertarian,” and the characteristics of “libertarianism” as described on the site are not entirely consistent with the Libertarian Party in the U.S.) Nonetheless, the terms are familiar enough to give a clear picture.

I was not too surprised to see where I ended up on the chart, although I did find it interesting that I was even farther down in the lower-left corner than the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai-Lama!

(On a side note, writing this led me to another topic: the confusion of similar words. In my particular case, it was the old thorn in my side, farther vs. further. Luckily it seems I got it right. And writing the first sentence in this paragraph reminded me of yet another similar word problem: lead vs. led. I’ve noticed more and more lately, often coming even from respected sources, careless use of the word “lead” when in fact the intention was to use “led” — the past-tense of “lead” as pronounced “LEED.” But I digress [yet again].)

Anyway… so as I said, I’m trying out Google AdSense on the site, hence those ugly ad panels in the left columns of all of the pages.

We’re off to a rocky start, though, and I have previously unexpected doubts over the accuracy of Google’s algorithms, having discovered that they put ads for nudist/naturist sites on a page of family photos! (And there was nothing of an illicit nature in those photos, I assure you…)

So, Google, consider yourself on double-secret probation. Don’t make me sic Marmalard on you!

There’s nothing really wrong with WordPress; in fact, for what it does it’s pretty elegant and flexible. But since, let’s be honest, I’m a geek, and I’m more about building my site than actually creating any meaningful content for it, running it on someone else’s engine is unsatisfying, and almost feels like cheating.

Besides, WordPress (and probably any other third-party tool) will never do everything I want it to, or at least it won’t do it precisely in the way I want it to. And it’s more fun for me to write my own code than to tweak someone else’s. So here we go.

If you care to look back at the old stuff (and why wouldn’t you?), you may notice some oddities… that’s mainly due to inconsistencies between my idiosyncratic HTML and the fancy formatting/clean-up WordPress does. I’ll gradually fix that stuff… maybe. (Right after I get around to organizing the basement.)

I’m also tinkering more with the themes. I’ve downloaded several interesting themes that I plan to try out for a while, to get a feel for both their visual appeal as well as the ways they handle certain technical features of WordPress. Once I find one I like, I’ll use it as a basis to build my own, one that incorporates my photography as well. (Will the excitement never end?!)

Oh, I almost forgot to mention… some of the old stuff didn’t have dates, so I hastily and more-than-somewhat arbitrarily assigned them all to January 1, 2004.