As promised: an addendum to my realignment notes—the revised comment ranking system. Nils mentioned that the challenge of earning new comment ranks was good and necessary. So, I have (very nearly) maintained the difficulty in getting ranks. There are still iron crosses at 1000 and colored iron crosses at 5000 comments. However, Dan argued (and I originally noted) that 125 commenting thresholds were rather widespread markers of achievement. So, I have changed things a bit. Now, vertical bars next to a commenter’s name represent the number of comments they have left, and therefore their rank. Each vertical bar represents 100 comments and every time the tumbledryer leaves 10 comments, their vertical bar increases in height. After 100 comments, a new vertical bar grows up next to the previous one.
Note: To view the changes made to tumbledry, you may need to do a hard refresh. To summarize that link, it’s Ctrl+Shift+R in Firefox, Ctrl+F5 in Internet Explorer, and Command+Shift+R on Macs.
As I cryptically mentioned a couple of posts back, there was a realignment going on at tumbledry. Not a redesign, oh no. Those are rather a bit more costly. Anyhow, the seeds for this evolution in design were planted back in April. You see, I sometimes diddle in photoshop as a way of getting my creative side out (and as a homework break). So, I put together a horizontal grid with a vertical grid and started plunking tumbledry elements in. Thus, this is a realignment in both the vertical and the horizontal sense. Vertically, I have finally found my rhythm, with an 18px baseline. Notice how the horizontal pieces of text (it works best on the front page, I’ve been lazier elsewhere) line up nicely, even with the gaps between images, etc. (This trick is slightly broken on Internet Explorer. Curse you, Internet Explorer.) Oh, and you’ll find the line lengths are quite short. So, you only have to read about 10 words per line. This has been shown (by a few studies) to maximize comprehension. Here’s the idea: the human eye has an arc through which it moves (comfortably). This allows you, at a set distance, to comfortably scan a certain horizontal distance without moving your head. Having to move your head back and forth requires considerably more brain work, and slows down reading comprehension. Restricting the width of the line keeps your eye within its comfortable arc, minimizing head movement and maximizing comprehension. So I think/hope this evolution will serve us well.
You know how here at tumbledry you earn a comment bullet after 125 comments? Is that starting to seem like an excessive number to everyone? Yes, me, too. I think I have found a better way to do this. I’ll code it up in the next week (or so) as I have time. Finding a job is rather a bit lot much higher on the list. I’d revise that sentence, but I thought it was funny. Your mileage may vary.
Whoa. As I write, graduation with a B.S. in biochemistry and life-changing changes all crash down at once. I should brainstorm for some sort of longer form writing about these events. I could call my writing a “post” … and then, as they accumulate, arrange these “posts” in reverse chronological order on a sort of faux-forum online. I’ll call that a world wide web log of my life. Perhaps I could shorten that to “web log.” Or even “blog.”
There are many things that I would be proud of
If I’d only invented them such as the wheel
The washing machine and the tumble dryer
On these inventions
Surely I could retire
As we all know, I am a Biochemistry senior. I mention this because this fact necessitates me being an amateur graphic designer. By amateur, I mean that I have no formal training. Therefore, the what I know has been gleaned from what I could find out about topics like vertical rhythm, grid systems, CSS, and improving my Photoshop skills. But I digress. “Design” is a side hobby, meant to present in the best possible light my extensive project in writing my own website from scratch using Apache, PHP, and mySQL.
The previous logo on tumbledry meant absolutely nothing (just like the ones before it). I still liked the way it looked but … as a recognizable widget, it really accomplished nothing. Additionally, I had been using the first take on my color scheme since about July of last year. As a side note: indeed, taking a design from the drawing board to live takes about 6 months. Well, it takes me sixth months because I have all these other hairbrained ideas on the journey. That said, I noticed some serious problems with the color scheme. The ratios of green to red to blue were completely wrong. Half the time things looked like a bad version of Christmas with some blue tossed in. So, a concerted (minor) graphic refresh was undertaken.
For those of you stopping by from the Facebook invite … feel free to congregate, mill around, or whatever it is that crowds do. Alternatively, you can click around at whatever strikes your fancy. The latter option might be a better bet.
To clarify on the turning 8 thing … tumbledry has been around in one form or another since 1999. As for the actual name “tumbledry” … that’s been around since June 22, 2003. I guess we’re coming up on 4 years if you count that way. So, a bit of number inflation going on there. Sorry about that.
In the past eight years, this website has evolved from an extremely simple, unchanging outline of an adolescent kid to a dynamic web of text, links, sights, and (at times) sounds chronicling a young adult’s life. All of this extra content has necessitated extra layers of complexity. As sections have been added, I’ve tried to keep it simple, but it has certainly been a challenge — and I haven’t always succeeded. So, for anyone new to tumbledry or curious how it all works, let’s run down the basics.
Not too long ago, Katy sent me a couple of pictures she had taken, and suggested that I could post them. In an effort to kill two birds with one stone, I realized that I could not only post those pictures, but also roll out a new feature of tumbledry … besides the redesign you see. And yes, I’ll review the new features available to you in the coming days. And Nils will see some of his ideas posted, too. And there will be much rejoicing. And there will probably be some bug fixing.
In the interest of explaining why in the Sam Hill there haven’t been any images for almost two weeks, I’d like to apologize and ask for your patience just a little bit longer. They (the photographs) are on their way - there is simply a bit more to do on ye’ olde version 15.x of tumbledry. I’m digging up time for it in between homeworking sessions, hence the delay. The entire redesign, though, is 90% functional, with only a few key components remaining. I’ll walk you all through the new features when they are released - the most visible changes will be in the community aspect. As tumbledryer’s, you’ll feel more engaged with the site and with one another. Unless you don’t. In that case, I will have failed. But I will have had fun doing it!
I returned a few days ago from my trip with my family to Kau’i, Hawai’i. Tumbledry has slept peacefully over the holidays, but there are some big things going on in the background. I’m way way backlogged on adding some great photos and great links. There are stories to be told, and oh yeah, that redesign is still going great guns in the background. Come the end of the January, things will be looking quite a bit different around here.
Computers are most useful when they get out of our way. I recently realized that when I say I work with computers, people automatically peg me as that computer geek who loves hardware, spec sheets, and processors. Thing is, I only know about them in order to get these blasted machines to do what I want to do. I spend an inordinate amount of time shoehorning machines into working the way I think, so (pardoxically) I can stop worrying about shoehorning the machines into working the way I think. I’ve always seen Windows as a respectable software tool to deal with, but I must liken the experience to taming a wild stallion (without any of the glamorous trappings inherent in the animal analogy). Windows has to be poked, prodded, altered, trimmed, augmented, and examined from the top to the bottom and up again, to get it to do what you want it to do … when you want it to do it.
The calmodulin protein has two sites where it binds calcium ions in the cell; after it has bound them, it serves as a signal to other proteins of calcium levels within said cell. As an introduction to some of the basic conformational changes proteins undergo, we covered this figure in our cell biology slides yesterday.
Hang on, you loyal tumbledry readers - I know it’s been an absurdly long time since my last update … but rest assured that I have something in the pipeline that will make your wait worthwhile. Feel free to speculate what it is exactly that you are waiting for.
What in bloody heck is this - I ended up on this page when I used google images to search for “voting icon.” You see, I’m looking for ideas for the icon you’ll be able to click to vote a user’s comments up.
We’ve completed another step on the journey to a better commenting system at tumbledry. There are now ranking icons that allow one to see, at a glance, the seniority of a tumbledry commenter. I decided to name these “irons.” It fits in with the theme of tumbledrying … see? However, it is rather difficult to make an 11 pixel high iron look like a nice stylized iron, so I have gone with some different icons to indicate status. The tumbledry commenter, after submitting 20 comments under the same name and email address, will find themselves awarded a gray bullet. This gray bullet indicates that the user has left between 20 and 124 comments. Upon leaving 125 comments using the same name and email address, the tumbledry commenter receives their first colored bullet. This is generally an occasion to celebrate. Rankings continue along these lines … another 125 comments earns another gray bullet and 125 more comments changes that second bullet to a colored one. Users are notified of the number of comments remaining until their next promotion when they visit the front page of tumbledry. When a user leaves one thousand comments, their bullets are condensed into a higher honor: the gray maltese cross. Feel free to throw a party for this occasion. 5000 comments and the tumbledryer (we’ve discussed the spelling of this term previously, I think) earns the highly prestegious red and blue maltese cross. These crosses are accompanied by the usual bullets that track the commenter’s progress towards another cross.
For the more prolific tumbledryers amongst you (I think it would be cool if that nickname for us caught on), opening many posts on which to comment on has been a nightmare. Even when you copied the letters in the security image very precisely, the code still said “nah nah nah try it again.” So, I have a gift for you (especially Dan, who was having commenting problems) - I have fixed some very pesky bugs in the commenting system that popped up when you tried to open a bunch of tumbledry pages and comment on each one. These were strange bugs - usually I work through them by coding on-the-fly, but I actually had to leave the computer and just concentrate hard on the problem to map it out on my head and figure out a fix. Hopefully, things are working better now. An outline of the patches/bug-fixes/thank-Gods follows.
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.
