GMU

Testing

2005-05-16T15:24:00.000-04:00

Hello

A big sigh of relief!

2005-05-10T22:51:00.000-04:00

Ahhh, I'm finally done with the semester and can enjoy the rest of the summer!

After some frustrations with blogger not working, and running into ftp problems today, my site it finally posted at:
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/preservation

all my other assignments are posted here:
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/hist697/type
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/hist697
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/hist697/image

It is quite amusing to go back and look at my earlier attempts at design and see how much I have progressed over just a semester. If web work wasn't so frustrating, I'd do more of it. Hopefully over the summer I will complete a homepage for myself that will have a vitae on it so when I get my degree I can imediately start job hunting!

Website continued

2005-05-03T19:17:00.000-04:00

I'm experimenting with three different fonts, and I'm having trouble deciding which to use. I've definitely settled on the penmanship font for the navigation bar. I'm indecisive about the font for the headings. There's two, one called technical, which is what is now posted on the homepage, and there's one called antique type that's posted at:
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/preservation/indexant

I'm also still working on my restoration "gallery." It's much improved, but not where I want it yet. It's getting there.

Preliminary final website

2005-05-03T14:13:00.000-04:00

Is the title an oxymoron or what?
I've posted a draft of the site at:
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/preservation/
It is still a work in progress. I envisioned the "restoration" page to be a gallery of projects, but I am having lots of problems placing the photos exactly where I want them and making everything look nice on the page. So far, this is my best attempt.
I'm still searching for the perfect font for the large headings. The blueprint type font I chose looks great for small things such as the footer, but I think it does lose something when it gets bigger.
Still working...

myst

2005-04-26T19:18:00.000-04:00

I really liked the first Myst, but the versions since then have become impossible to solve. I don't understand how anyone could ever solve this without cheating. It's strong points remain, however. And that's experiential quality and beautiful graphics. It's very engrossing. Probably the closest history site I've seen come close to this is The Lost Museum, which has the same great graphics and the feeling of exploring a world. But how to use this for anything I'd be capable of designing, I don't know

Urrggh!

2005-04-19T13:46:00.000-04:00

The last couple of weeks have been extremely crazy, and with work and personal life, it has been very difficult to keep up with school. I have managed to put something together, which hopefully is not too bad!

To save money, I have switched from Verizon to Cox, and after going through some hair pulling to get the Cox ftp service up and running, my assignment now resides at:
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/preservation/

My content is not done, so I'll have everything greeked in. I did however find what I think is a pretty cool font that looks like the archtectural blueprint font at:
http://www.pbs.org/flw/index.html
But this font was free, unlike any of the fonts that I have found that were even remotely like anything I was looking for. And for someone on a students budget who depends on student loans to pay my mortgage, free is great! The site, Fonts for Kids, where I got this font has some great knock offs of some of the expensive fonts that we have looked at in class: http://www.momscorner4kids.com/fonts/

Don't Make Me Think

2005-04-05T10:42:00.000-04:00

This is a great book w/ lots of useful info. Things he pointed out were common sense stuff, but of course, this common sense stuff is sometimes the hardest thing to design, like using "jobs" instead of "employment opportunities." The examples of actual websites were useful. I wonder how many of those sites underwent redesign after his criticisms.

One great point he makes is not ot overload pages with text. As historians, who are wedded to text, I think this would be the hardest part of his suggestions to implement. We are naturally verbose creatures. I myself tend to be a very succinct writer, so I hopefully will not break this rule too badly. Which leads me to my next topic...

Since we are historians and are so into the written word, if we do feel the need to create something very wordy for our sites, what is the best way to do it? Some of the projects in class, such as an online archive, could probably get away with not being too verbal, but what about those of us who are have to create some kind of argument? If my website on preservation in Richmond is going to be more than an online exhibition, and I am creating an argument (although what I am arguing other than preservation is a great tool for grassroots-oriented community revitalization that preserves history, I don't know at this point), how do I argue something without being verbal? If I feel the need to be verbal, would it be better to creat a pdf document that could be printed rather than a webpage?

Cool websites

2005-03-29T17:11:00.000-05:00

It took me a while to find a great website. Second Story had some well-designed sites that I really liked, but none of them really had anything to do with architecture. I loved the Lewis and Clark site, but it had nothing to do with architecture. But I liked the way it was organized into three parts, which I see my site in three parts; history, preservation efforts, and photo gallery. It had sounds, interactive maps, exhibit gallery, video clips of Native Americans, and it presented the story from multiple view points. All of these were great features.

There was one site on css Zen Garden called Urban that came closer to something I could envision. I like how it used architectural features for the border on the left that served as the navigation bar, and it had a picture of buildings as the footer to the page. I could do something similar to this and get a real look and feel for an architectural district.

Another site I came across which I also could emmulate, PBS's site for a Ken Burns film about Frank Lloyd Wright. This website used Frank Lloyd Wright architectural features as the overall background for the pages (the wrapper) and then each subsection had a different background color and some kind of Wright-styled architecutral feature on the left. Although each sebsection was a different color, all the colors worked with FLW styling, and the architectural images on the left kept all the sections together. It has a nice introduction page with an image that draws you in. There's a well-designed menu on the bottom of the page that keeps with the theme in design, although it's a wierd place for a menu to be. Of all the websites I visited, this is probably the best example that I've seen so far of something I would want to emulate that would be within the realm of possibilities for me to create. It's not so far advanced in design like most of the Second Story or Terra Incognita sites that I wouldn't feel overwhelmed trying to do something like this.

Image Assingment pt2

2005-03-22T15:33:00.000-05:00

I fed this thing through the validator and finally got it validated. I didn't realize that in order to get validated, I had to change my br/ codes. And I forgot my alt tags. Very important for acccessibility! My page is not the most beautiful, but it's functional. As I get more comfortable w/ html & css, things are becoming easier and slowly looking better.

The next assignment will prove to be more difficult. How can I represent historic preservation in Richmond through a website? I would like for my navigation and header to have architectural elements in them, but how I go about writing this into my design is beyond me at this point. Much trial and error will begin...

Image Assignment

2005-03-20T19:48:00.000-05:00

The unexpectedly hard part of this assignment was to find suitable photos. I wanted the find some architectural photos that could be used in my final project, but nothing was suitable. So I settled for a cool photo of some railworkers. Photoshop is an amazing program, if a bit overwhelming at times. I've been using this program for 3 years in my work, but I still don't know 1/10th of it capabilities. My assignment is posted at:
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeohrc6/hist697/image.htm

Photoshop

2005-03-08T17:28:00.000-05:00

This book is great, if a little overwhleming. As I said in a previous blog, I've done a lot of work with photoshop, but never anything like this. 3/4 of the tools I've never used and while some of the things I understand what they are, like layers, some of the other things went over my head.

I do have to wonder however, when is an image edited to the point that it becomes bad history? Are we ethical in manipulating these images and presenting them as history? As suppose as long as one states that the image was enhanced/manipulated in photoshop, then it probably would be ethical. Of course, one could argue that some of the manipulations, such as repairing the man & cat photo like we did in class last week, actually enhances the photo historically. The photo was damaged by the ravages of time, and it was simply repaired to an appearance that was probably more like how it appeared when it was first shot. I guess the bottom line is, if I alter an historical photo in anyway through photoshop or whatever, I need to make that clear on my website or I would be doing bad history.

Tufte

2005-03-08T17:18:00.000-05:00

This book was beautifully illustrated, so I can see why is cost over $40. But his analysis of chart usage, particularly his case w/ regards to the Challenger explosion is flawless. I might be at a slight advantage to some of the humanists in our class in that I double majored in Sociology which required me to take a statistics class where we used SPSS and learned about presenting and interpreting information visually. I totally agree with Tufte in that charts and graphs have to be carefully constructed to get the proper information across to a user.
Also, graphic data and statistics are very powerful tools. Many laypeople take these things very seriously and believe that statistical data and charts are a more "truthful" way to present research. I think the average person does not really understand statistics and charts, and is willing to assume the chart maker knows more than they do. Prime example are the brilliant history grad students at GMU, many of whom will readily admit they do not understand how to visually present data.
Anyway, very useful book.

wicked worn look

2005-03-08T16:48:00.000-05:00

I'm still on the search for that perfect font that says "Jackson Ward Historic District." The wicked worn look had some great links to free fonts; and free being the optimal word here, as I am poor. What says late 19th-century Romanesque and post-bellum architecture? Or what says African American neighborhood? So far, I have yet to find anything I like.

Also on the wicked worn look, the link to Sleeping Giants. This website is very cool! They've captured the feel of a delapidated airfield with the music and graphics of the site. The movies are well done, I'm sure Mary & the rest of the class that was in the documentary class can appreciate the clips. I appreciated the how-tos on the other postings from wicked worn look site as well, these may come in handy.

I've found some great Habs/Haer photos from Jackson Ward that I'll be using in my final project (ah, the beauty of public domain). It'll be fun to experiment with these in photoshop. I've used photoshop at work to process the National Register of Historic Places scanned images of nominations on the register, but no retouching was involved as we wanted to get as faithful a fascimile of the original as we could. But I'm very familiar w/ cropping, adjusting levels, and all the different file formats. I'm looking forward to having fun w/ Photoshop.

Typography

2005-02-08T17:41:00.000-05:00

After all this talk about different fonts, one thing I'm wondering, are there good places/websites to get free typefaces? I'm too cheap to pay. But one also has to think about using any funky typefaces carefully, as many of the odd ones will not display in a browser properly. Also, it a typeface is hard to read, then don't use it for main text, only use it for effect in graphics or logos.

The secret to typography is, basically, make it aesthetically pleasing, yet practical (meaning easy to read). Most of it is following the rules of style and grammar and using common sense. Many of the things Williams talked about in her book I've already done on word processing, and it's a matter of figuring out how it's done on Dreamweaver or in html.

CSS assignment

2005-02-08T13:23:00.000-05:00

My home page for this course can be found at:
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeohrc6/hist697/
There is a link to the CSS assignment there:
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeohrc6/hist697/css.html
Getting the validator to work required some doing, and my home page is still not totally compliant, hence the lack of a validation badge there. As you can see from looking at the two pages, the navigation down either side of the page is different. The format of the sidebars on my homepage, which looks much slicker, is not compliant. But it looks so much better on my home page!

CSS tutorials & Brickner Book

2005-02-01T13:22:00.000-05:00

Web Design on a Shoestring can be summed up in one sentence. When budgets are tight, be realistic about what you can do (think small) and be very organized! I know from working in a government office where everything is done in committees, too many people bog down a project needlessly and eat up time and money. Of course there was an extensive discussion of using CSS and webstandards. Plus Brickner gives a link to the W3C website that can check whether your xhtml is valid or not (http://validator.w3.org), which I'm sure everyone in this class will find very useful.

I found the CSS tutorials difficult, especially McFly. With McFly, I felt like I was missing part of the instructions. With each step I found myself saying "eh?" and getting frustrated. I ended up skipping McFly and doing the one from Macromedia which I found infinitely easier to follow, even if a little cookbook-y. I screwed up just a couple of times in the code, but got it in the end.

VEGAS

2005-01-30T14:15:00.000-05:00

blog
Originally uploaded by annemason.

Vegas the dog