Made of Plastic

I added my first vid to the site. (Technically, it’s the second one I started, but the first one I finished. More on that later when I post the other vid.) Most, if not all, of the videos on this site will be in Flash Video format, so all you need is the latest version of Macromedia Flash installed. Who knows, maybe you don’t even need the latest.

As for the video: For a while now, Porcupine Tree’s “Collapse the Light into Earth” has sounded, to me, like it would sound good over the credits for Donnie Darko. Not that there’s anything wrong with the current credits theme, but nonetheless the song somehow fit the mood of the film. I especially liked the idea of juxtaposing the chorus with the image of the jet engine falling through Donnie’s room. (My thinking was not meant in a morbid way, I assure you.) At any rate, I kept this in mind over a period of months, but couldn’t quite determine how to go about piecing together a vid. [Continued]

Finally getting some work done on this site. I’m going to stick with Wordpress and simply add plugins, hacks, and theme alterations until it’s what I want. I found a very simple looking but very effective theme. I’ll make some changes and probably add a little bit of artwork to it.

I also finally found just the kind of gallery plugin I’ve been looking for. Online gallery software comes in basically two flavors — barebones and bloated. I don’t need slideshows, I don’t need online postcards, I don’t need rating systems and I don’t need 200 configuration options. What I do need is something that lets me easily add new images and (this is real important) something that can simply be integrated with the rest of my site. I believe I’ve found what I need in d13gallery. So, thank you also to its developer. Again, I’ll tweak it a bit, but it’s also very simple and very effective.

So. Yeah. Look for the actual site to be up sometime soon.

I’ve been trying to decide whether to use a script-based gallery to host and organize images or to just hand-code pages to display them. I want this site to be hands-on, have a consistent style from section to section, and especially be clean (meaning: very little overhead). On the other hand, I like the features of script-based solutions, though, like automatic thumbnails, categorization, and the ability for visitors to rate images and post comments. [Continued]

If anyone visits here regularly already, get a life.

Just kidding. If anyone visits here regularly, sorry about the lack of updates. I haven’t really started announcing this site to anyone yet, so you’re trespassers anyhow. ;-) I’ve been going back and forth trying to decide how much of this site is automated by PHP packages off the net, write the HTML by hand, or some combination thereof. Recently I’ve started considering the idea of making it a PHP site that I write by hand. So here I am teaching myself PHP now. I’m really liking this idea, so there probably won’t be any new design changes to this site while I’m working on that, and it will probably get a total facelift. Isn’t that exciting?

In the meantime, I have worked on a few small pieces lately, so perhaps I’ll upload those.

So, I learned today that Corel has acquired Jasc, the maker of Paint Shop Pro. Or maybe I already knew, but blocked it out. Kind of hard to do now that Jasc’s site redirects to Corel.

Lordy. This site isn’t even “open for business” yet, and already the spammers are attacking. I stopped by to make some changes and discovered about a dozen comments to the couple entries I’ve posted so far — all spam for online casinos!

Thus, until I find a better way, all comments will have to approved before they appear. Gr.

If you’re reading this, and it’s the only entry in this log, I’d be curious to know how you found this place. See, I don’t like websites with Under Construction signs…very tacky and rather annoying. So I’d never do that to you. Okay, I don’t know you, so I guess I just wouldn’t do that…period. I promise this site will be complete (not final, obviously…what’s the point of a website that doesn’t change?…but complete) when I start handing out its address.

I finally had some time to get started on piecing this site together this past week. One thing that didn’t completely suck about having sprained my ankle, I spent a week off of work so I could keep my leg elevated. Actually, I guess a rant about that whole week could’ve been a post here, but do you really want to hear about that? No, of course you don’t. [Continued]