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.