Sleep deprived ramblings

Hmmmm, we are to be more personable in our blogs... so errr, welcome to me! It's hard to share a lot about yourself on the web when you have a paranoid fear of stalkers, and some of us have it with good cause. I am a lady, who used to work in the games industry, in a public role, and I still receive requests and comments from fans who I really have no interest in keeping up with. Thankfully I no longer get actual gifts sent to my work place, or at least work have stopped forwarding them onto me. So quite frankly any info that makes me obviously Googl-lable is a no no. So, what can I say, it's alright being me, yes that is a wig in the photo, and so far I am holding down the pretense that I'm not struggling with web design although my face apparently says otherwise.

This week was Photoshop week, I made a duck site, which was rockin' duck rock. No picture available as the file I e-mailed is not compatible with my home computer so won't open. It was really interesting to see some of the functionality of Photoshop and how it relates to Dreamweaver. Basically you can just make a nicely layered image that looks like a website, slice up the sections that you want to be links and Bob's your uncle (well he's definitely not my Uncle, mine's called Bill. He has a rare form of Parkinson's disease which is really quite cool / interesting depending on how empathetic you are). Ctrl T for free transform of objects was the learning tip of the day.

So yesterday I cycled 22 miles (it should have only been 20 but I got lost) and ran a further 4. This reinforced my previous suspicion that exercise is bad for you as I rapidly developed a head full of mucus in the night and couldn't sleep. Plus side was the quiet of the wee hours gave ample website ponder-ance time. So I'm settled on my 'science experiments in the kitchen' idea (despite noting that Morag mentioned it on her blog and wrote it off as boring). Here is a Paint mock up of my home page, yes that's right, we learnt how to use Photoshop and the best I can muster at home is the use of Paint... pathetic.

The idea is that the objects in the drawn kitchen are links to experiment 'recipe' pages. I only have four experiment ideas at the moment, the cat is not an experiment, it could be an easter egg. The tabs at the top take you to information pages on safety of the experiments, the science background of the site, and one with references and stuff.

I really wanted the page to have an old skool point and click feel, where the action objects stick out like a sore thumb. This adds a nice feeling of nostalgia for oldies like me while making the site look pleasantly child friendly. Well thats the sales spiel anyway.

A worrying slice of my mind

Whilst contemplating the joys of brown paper, and sticking a load of it to my walls, I decided that this special material* needs to be incorporated into my web design project. A quick search revealed a super free resource of brown paper backgrounds, so that's my design base sorted. However the little issue of content is still looming, fortunately I have two ideas.

1. Dissections and dead people: I think dissections are beautiful, and the soulless nature of corpses is an eerie and fascinating reason to explore the boundaries between science and spirituality. I have often pondered how to bring the intrigue of dead people into my art and it's possible that a website is a good medium. The home page could depict a corpse in a morgue with animations of cutting into the body. The items in the morgue would function as links to pages such as the role of the pathologist, dissection equipment through history, and a body parts gallery.

http://www.scienzepostmoderne.org/Immagini/Opere/DamienHirst8AutopsyWithSlicedHumanBrain.jpg
This picture is sadly blood free, so not as nice as it could be, but still quite good.
Check out the patterns on  'second from the right, bottom row', and 'third from the right, middle row'.
Pretty.

Sadly I don't think I can take this idea forward due to a lack of resources. My idea is to show the exceptionally colourful and fluid nature of the internal body when you first open it up, but this luster does not remain for long and I don't think I can get easy access to images that really capture it. Also I am a bit worried about Googling dead people... My alternative is to break into a morgue and take photos myself, this is appealing but probably a touch too illegal to satisfy a Sci comm course component.

2. Science in your kitchen: Food is not science, I say this for my own benefit as I love food and really just want to write about it all the time, but I can't, because food is not science and this website design course is supposed to be about science (communication). Luckily scientific experiments are science and there are a multitude of them that can be done in your kitchen.

This idea lends itself to lots of fun media such as experiment descriptions, photos, and demo videos / explanatory podcasts. It could have functionality for users to post their own pictures and experiences making it more interactive and community based. I'm not sure if it should be aimed at children or adults who would then use the content with children, but either way the crafty nature of home experiments lends itself nicely to the crafty association of brown paper design. Now thats an epic win for a crazy lady like me.

Anyway, enough of my insanity, here's what you've all been waiting for... Stuff I learnt this week:

• Adding links to a webpage. I put links into my test page and also practiced this by adding the links in this blog as embedded links.
• How to put a background image on my test website. This worked nicely although I had some issues with the placement of the div wrapper against the background, adding a higher margin at the top of the background image fixed this.
• Different browsers have different displays. The div wrapper is centre aligned in Firefox but not in Explorer, I'm not sure why but one day I will find out how to fix this.
• CSS gets hard to read once there is a lot of it. My new mentor swears by the use of indentation, she may have method to her madness and next week I will try and find a nice way to format my CSS so it remains legible.

*For those not in the know brown paper is amazing for several reasons: It invokes feelings of nostalgia, sometimes it is ribbed (not just for ladies), great stuff comes wrapped in it (like Victorian parcels, mushrooms, and tramp whiskey), and it compliments twine. It also makes nice patchwork quilts.

Self centered

Week one day one: I'm not there
Week one day two: Trying to read handouts about HTML and CSS on your own is dull, apparently I am distracted today.
Week one day three: OK focus, read notes, ahhh they do make sense. Right I'm on this.
Week one day three continued: Access to Dreamweaver achieved... crack knuckles and get in there.

So basically I have done the same thing as everyone else, ran through the work sheet (although I haven't done the bit about links yet, that excitement is yet to behold my keyboard fingers), made this blog, and made a bit of web coding for a few lines of text.

I've used the same links as everyone else:
http://www.csszengarden.com/
http://www.w3schools.com/css/

My learning / reflection points:

1. Why does CSS Zen garden open with the hovering links box over half the text on my work computer? This made me hate the site, if you are going to be an example of good design then get it right. All the other pages open beautifully, so basically the makers of Zen garden are rubbish. I have taken them off my Christmas card list. 
2. Trying to write this blog using HTML instead of the editing functions is pointless since there is not really any editing I want to do, but putting in line breaks and making stuff bold was momentarily fun. 
3. I don't know how to make my div id=wrapper align properly. Why is it in the middle of the page? It's not supposed to be there, I'm not telling it to be there, why does it have a life of it's own?*
4. Colour doesn't have a 'u' in it. This is probably my biggest learning point. I shall go through all my childhood books immediately and tip-ex it out. 

*Clearly the only answer is that our worst fears have been realised and technology is self forming into a conscious entity. Note to self: ask about this in class and reign that self centered bad boy back in.