Blog Blogger Bloggest

Way back in the dim, dark history of websites I started to make them. I wasn't very good at it at first, but nobody is and few people ever got to be exceptional. There just weren't many good ways to make websites look good at first, especially with the number of differences between browsers and at first there was no such thing as a WYSIWYG editor. I think, actually, Mozilla had a simpe editor but it wasn't particularly good for much more than very simple things.

Along came Dreamweaver. It was - supposedly - powerful and excellent. I got a copy for work. I hated it.

Here's how it changed my workflow: I used to code pages by hand in a simple text editor. But Dreamweaver allowed me to use a visual editor to almost make the web pages I wanted. After I made each one I needed to make changes by hand so I would wade through oceans of pointless, confusing and distracting gibberish and often simply give up and go back to the text editor.

So really it added time (and frustration) to my workflow. I stopped using it and haven't gone back to anything like it since. That was in about 1998. I still use a text editor. In fact, I'm writing in one now!

Disregard (As Usual)

This is just a test to make sure the new links page provides accurate links!

Un-vive la différence

Something has been bothering me for a while. Resized photos on the napaJapan website look a little fuzzy and a little dirty. Take a look at the two photos above (Winter Strawberry Kit Kat, in case anyone is interested). The one on the left was resized (from 498x498 to 210x210) using AspJpeg from Persits. The settings are bicubic interpolation and 90% quality. The one on the right uses almost the exact same settings (80% quality bicubic) in Photoshop, but it looks beautiful; crystal clear.

What's Photoshop doing to make it look so good? More to the point, what's AspJpeg not doing and how can I get it to do that? Admittedly, the uglier image is about half the size (13k versus 33k) of the nicer one, but neither is huge. I'd be willing to sacrifice a little speed for beauty. The site in question is trying to sell the product. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing people are a little less excited to buy products that look like they've been run through an uglifying filter.

I could be wrong, though. I was wrong about people using IE6 to buy something from the site. I thought IE6's own special brand of website uglifying filters would chase them all away. These days, to test IE6, I need to install and run a virtual computer. For less than 10% of just the IE users, it's not worth it. I'm sorry, but if you're using IE6 your browser is broken.

Web Design - The User Experience - Part 1

Emphasis on user rather than experience. A number of years back, one of the clients of the company I worked for hired a consultant. He had two recommendations. One is that we add more orange. The other was that we try to get away from your usual website navigation and give the user what he liked to call an experience. To him, this meant "something exciting and new, not something you see at every site". To me - and I like to think most other website users - this meant "a website that frustrates me so much I will never return to it."

We added more orange.

Various napaJapan Link Image Sizes...

The time has come to make link images. I had made one, but wasn't very happy with it. Also, considering the variety of blog designs out there, I figured it's best to be flexible. One size does not fit all. So, I scanned a few blogs to see what sizes their columns were. Most are around 220 or so. Some are smaller - about 150.

The Site is Live and That's How it Looks

The site is live and that's how it looks. I'm pretty happy about having done so much of it by myself. I got some advice from Sorrel at the start and the logo and mascot were done by Dennis (who also provided some colours and the background tile) but the rest was done just by me. I'm not usually a designer, so it was a stretch. I think it's about 80% of what I was hoping for, and in some areas I did better than I thought I would.

However, I do think that if the site gets popular Jason should get a real designer to come up with a real design for it. Or at least tighten it up a bit.

Photo Sizes

If I make little promo images for clients, what sizes are good sizes? You don't want it to size up or down, really. That never looks as good, so it would help to know what blogs do to images when they get uploaded. So far everything I've uploaded has been resized. One is 400 wide and the other is 320. The originals were 800 and 480. Hmm... time for some more uploads...

That worked okay. The original is 400 and Blogger's large size is also 400. Perfect! How does it look in the two other (smaller) sizes? ...

I gotta say I hate the way this uploading thing works. Who wants an image up at the top? I have to drag the image down here and then I'm left with extra space at the top. When I delete that, the first paragraph switches to centered. Nutty. Not impressed.

Oh well. One more size...

Yeah... not impressed with editing posts in this thing. How do people get anything done? I have to keep switching back to HTML editing mode to get stuff done. Ugh.

Never Ready For My Closeup

I'm more of a background kind of person. Except not making them; I suck at that. But backgrounds are important! They need to be there to give the foreground some support. They need to look good without drawing attention. That's a tough task, especially without talent or knowledge. That's why I created about 30 potential background for napaJapan.com and ended up scrapping all of them in favour of one that Dennis had. It's just not my forte. Hell, I don't even have a forte and that one sticks out as being particularly NOT.

So now I've figured out a few things about the Blogger template and I've uploaded several backgrounds to the napaJapan server to be used here. I did another jumble of products, but I made them tiling, then I faded them to almost black and put some blue over top. It's like a nice dark blue background, but with Kit Kat!

Oh, and completely unrelated, but I made an poster-style image of a Majesty Ukulele for Yusuke. It's one I took of Virginia's custom "hummingbird" model a few years ago. I masked it out and laid it on a bed of hydrangea ("ajisai" in Japanese, which also happens to be a great sushi restaurant). I think it looks pretty good. He may disagree, but I'm guessing he's too busy and too tired to care enough to complain at the moment.

That ukulele, by the way, is one of the nicest sounding ukes I've ever heard. Loud, rich, clear tone and a very sweet sound. It blew me away when I heard it last month. I thought my ukulele was in a league of its own and I thought it was mostly because it's a tenor, but apparently I was wrong.

UPDATE: I was right. Yusuke didn't like it.

UPDATE 2: After sending a version without the logo or background, he changed his mind!

UPDATE 3: The photo is on the MusicFair website.

It's Not As If I Have Anything To Say

But that's irrelevant, really. Even if I did, who'd want to read it? No, I'm just making this blog so I can know how they work. I want to make a template for Jason's napaJapan candy blog. If I can get that looking all fancypants, it would make me happy. Also, it would mean I know how to make blogger blogs look good.

Well, different.

Anyways, let's load up a few images...

Hmm... that didn't end up where I thought it would. I thought it would be down here, where I has started the process. Oh well. It's more interesting than this writing, so why not leave it up there at the top?

That's it. My first post is done.