A rare event occurs: I update my blog.

Today, this is in aid of a significant milestone. I’ve got a fairly robust visualiser in place. It doesn’t actually visualise anything specific yet - none of the values are hooked up to incoming data. However, those values are all running off normalised inputs with an expected value of 1. Anything could be hooked up there, so long as it’s normalised.

View the SWF here, but be warned: it’s full-window and rather processor-intensive. If you load it in a full-screen browser it might slow your machine to an unusable state. Resize your window to ‘tiny’ or even ‘wee’ before opening, maybe.

This is all code, by the way. I’m writing this at home, using FlashDevelop on top of the free Adobe Flex SDK. It’s pretty fun, but it’s spoiling me for other development environments: it starts noticing my own functions and variables and suggesting them for me as I type. It won’t replace Notepad in my heart, but it is excellent for ActionScript authoring.

Create an imaginary city.

Well, that sounds easy, I said to myself. Then I started to wonder: How? How, amongst all the tools of Google, might I show the viewer the streets of a city that has never existed?

After some (considerable) experimentation, I implemented a solution. It doesn’t currently contain anything meaningful, but it is sufficiently robust that all I need to do is create some pictures, write down their filenames, and write some titles and descriptions.

You can see the current prototype at: http://www.benjamindrichards.com/project2test/

All it contains is my face tiled across an unfeasibly large part of the world and two markers. The first marker will always be centered when the map loads, no matter where it is positioned. Click on the markers to view riveting regional information, dynamically generated and fully (if not finally) CSS formatted.

This is my engine of the unreal. Now to fuel it with imagination.

Much research and jiggery-pokery later (it’s a technical term), I have implemented a pleasing CSS layout. But not without incident; confronting Internet Explorer incompatibilities forced me to reconsider my layout, and eventually settle upon a more compact, centralised navigation scheme. This is actually a good thing, because my original design had navigation on the right and headers on the left, separating page navigation over an RSI-inducing span. Reconsidering matters helped the page become more efficient.

The final design is rectilinear and clean, exploring a style with which I’ve been experimenting for months. It’s intended to divide text into comprehensible topics and subtopics, as can be seen on the Writing page.

The CSS takes advantage of the HTML, but the HTML does not require CSS to be readable. You can see this by setting your browser to view with no style. It’s just raw data in there, perfectly accessible.

Similarly, I implemented Lightbox scripts in my art gallery, but having checked the page with NoScript enabled (thank you, FireFox!), it behaves in the default fashion, opening images on their own page.

Lightbox posed a brief challenge, however. During testing, when I used the scripts, they would appear awkwardly scattered across the page. I eventually realised that I had done this myself, despite not altering the LightBox files. The culprit was CSS styling on IMG tags. I had implemented this to give images borders and bring them into the text flow, but the LightBox script was remembering my settings and scattering its components accordingly. I fixed this by redefining the styling from ‘img’ to ‘#content img’, affecting only images referenced within the content div of my page.

So then I shifted everything over to my domain name. Well, I say ‘shifted’. I mean ‘typed an alias into a box’. This is easier than it looks. I uploaded the altered files using FileZilla, which seems pretty efficient.

The page, for which feedback would be great incidentally, is at:

www.benjamindrichards.com

Following the HTML -> CSS -> JavaScript model of development, I have completed the HTML content layer. The site is now fully functional, and contains all the information I intend to present at this time. However, it has no decoration or style. This will follow shortly.

Temporary filesite: http://benjamindrichards.nfshost.com/test/

Website: operational.

Content: minimal.

Address: http://benjamindrichards.nfshost.com/

Personal Domain: purchased but content-free.

Prognosis: address and content subject to considerable revision.

After considering my options, I went to www.nearlyfreespeech.net for hosting. They seem pretty bare-bones, but the more I have to learn to make the site… the more I learn. In keeping with the bare-bones philosophy, my site currently consists of a basic greeting message and some empty CSS and images placeholders, essentially the basic Flux setup.

Uploading these files into the /public directory using Fetch, I see that my site is immediately accessible. I realise that the content and the address aren’t particularly awe-inspiring right now, so I’d better work on getting alternate locations. Fortunately, NFSN charge by traffic and has few limitations on sites per user account, so I don’t think this will cost me anything.

I hope to have home internet by the next class. This will eliminate my current dichotomy: eat dinner, or do web design? Both of these options are thoroughly tempting, but I’ve thus far decided to stay alive by eating. No doubt the ghostly lemures of admins long passed are mocking me even now, but that’s just how I roll.

This is coming together at last.

A smidgen of content for the demonstration of blog functionality. More to follow.