Holy good lord. Tarnation. Yikes. Gosh golly. Good night that took a long time. I remember saying July 4th this would be done, a deadline I shamefully blew through and which Nils could have yelled at me for. At last, I don’t believe it (you most certainly do not, either), but it is done. The great tumbledry redesign of 2005 is ACTUALLY DONE. I’ve been spending so much time on this that its hard to know where to start. I can say: look forward to one image per day in the imageLog, actual updates, and more.

You may ask yourself why so much time has been spent rebuilding my online home. Well. As you read the text below, keep in mind that this is now my life’s journal: it is where I record what I see, what interests me, what I am doing, how I feel, and what I have done (with the added challenge of attempting to make it interesting enough to garner a few minutes of your valuable time). This will serve as a sort of “life cabinet” where I can go and look back on what has happened to me. Think of it as a digital scrapbook, but cross-indexed, searchable, continuously updated, and publicly accepting feedback. With that in mind, I think my reasons for putting forth so much energy are more clear.

That said, I can’t believe we made it.

Why do I say “we”? Well. Consider the two people who got me through this. Mykala. Justin.

Mykala was the impetus for this design, giving me invaluable feedback on the original CSS markup, put together in early June. She stuck to a great mantra: “simplify, simplify, simplify.” I had gotten so caught up in form that function lost out in my designs. Here, in these new surroundings, form follows and is an integral part of function. I remember one particular day Mykala and I spent discussing the background: how to blend a centered chunk of website into a background of unknown size, opacity and color balance? The solution was the slightly faddish, but mind-bogglingly simple solution you see before you: the mighty vertical gradient. Scales beautifully, tiles seamlessly, blends impeccably, all while serving to give the page depth, direction, and attractiveness. It was something I would not have had the energy to find if she hadn’t been there to say “you could do better.” The piano header itself, seen by everyone who visits the front page, was actually burned green that way at Mykala’s suggestion. It’s a scan of a photo from the best roll of film I ever shot (B&W 400 - swear by it). The piano was matched to a logo and rough design, from which this entire designscape grew and evolved. Beyond the design, I had some literally dark moments sitting here, pounding things out to make them work - and Mykala was a bracing force, giving perspective, encouragement, and never once calling me a geek. For her thoughtfulness, I am extremely grateful, things would not be nearly as polished, buffed, and shiny as they are without her help and welcome dose of sanity.

Justin can code like no one I know. I said “Justin, I want the JavaScript to do this for the archives” and in 15 minutes, he had an answer. I said “Justin, can we recompile PHP with the EXIF library so I can show a bunch of information about each photo I take?” In a couple of days, it was up and running. I asked Justin to restart Apache … at least 20 times, and each time he did it, no complaining, just a friendly ‘no problem.’ You see, Justin owns the server that tumbledry lives on: he’s the one up late nights making sure everything is working, and he’s the one who keeps things updated, running, functioning, working, happy, and stable. He’s also the guru that has helped me iron out and improve my coding for years. I am still a bit ashamed of my coding here: it didn’t achieve the separation of markup and code that it could have, which Justin pointed out, but it’s good because of his guidance, and robust because he knows how to push the system. For example, remember when he hacked my comments to automatically show his page instead of mine? Yeah, I’m trying to forget that, too - but the point is, it makes me attempt to make this website safe for all: where discourse can take place without trouble from evil spammers and the shady folk of the web.

Point-by-point breakdown of what’s going on:

The Groovy Font
You may have seen this font before: it’s the one on the Polaroids in the movie Memento and is Hagrid’s handwriting in the Harry Potter books. And I bought it. For tumbledry. From Mark Simonson, an awesome local letterer and font-maker. Now, I’ve worked with my share of fonts, and a lot of them have been utter crap: this font was worth every cent. It gives the site character and flair that I simply love. For the technical amongst you, the headings were accomplished with the best hack the web should never have needed: sIFR.

CSS
Preface: those drop downs menus were a pain to work with. Just say ‘no’ to drop down menus. Goodness. Ok … CSS is the ‘language’ that makes this place pretty. I plugged and plugged and plugged on the CSS/design, and made it to the green stuff we see before us. Now, it is not as bold or as varied in colors as I would like, but that is not too much of a problem. In fact, it doesn’t concern me too much at all: it’s workable, and I will tweak it as the years go by to be a bit bolder and more colorful. Files are divided up into fonts, structure, color, and images, meaning tumbledry can morph into a black and white version anytime it wants to: versatility that I will need when I have no time but want to make a simple change (that no time to work on the website will be the next, say, 6 years or so).

mySQL
This is the container for my information. It’s like a different version of Microsoft Excel … except it does not stink. And you can use it online. And … ok it’s nothing like Excel. But it is the warehouse for everything. Overhauling this was not hard: data was copied, and column and table names were changed. With Justin’s sage (and let me tell you, he really saved my rear on this one) guidance, I switched from using numbers like this: 110524867 for my dates to numbers like this: 2005-08-18 14:45:23. The latter is, obviously, more simple to work with.

PHP
The gargantuan amount of time sucked up writing PHP code is difficult to describe to you. It all totalled to about 4800 lines of code. I don’t know if I could write that many lines of things creatively, so good thing I was stuck writing logically. Lines like:

$updatesPerDayTracker[$data['day']] = 
$updatesPerDayTracker[$data['day']]+1;

will haunt my dreams for a while. Yeesh. My recommendation to those considering writing their own website: either (1) don’t (2) don’t or (3) seriously, don’t. Use WordPress or Blogger.

Google
As the fTrain post noted, Google tries to store everything you write on your website.

“I put the robot exclusion protocol on my door. Didn’t you see it?”

“You understand Google, person? I index many things and if I am very good I get to go to Bot Park and have more processors. And an oiljob! Thank you Google! Must come inside apartment and index. Must!” His video eye winked up at me.

There are, in fact, times you do not want this to happen. I wrote a piece on my chem stockroom manager recently, which was stored by Google. A quick Google of her name brought this up. Scary. I had to wait anxiously after I changed the article for Google to look at things again. Just say not to it’s intrusiveness - let it look, but not copy. Like it listens, anyhow.

That’s all I can write about this. If you feel like you have some question I have no answered about this site, ask away, I’m an open … comment answerer.

I would like to formally thank:

• Mykala
• Justin
• Ryan Brill
• Mark Simonson
• Mike Davidson
• Jon Hicks

And with that, I will stop talking about the designing, and start doing: writing stuff about my life. I love anybody who was able to make it through all this, sorry for the longness.

• Coding
• Goal achieved
• Mykala
• Justin
• CSS
• PHP
• RSS
• Graphic design
• Typography
• mySQL
• Tumbledry

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