in progress: reflection

Timothy Mills
http://www.inajar.net/351/reflection/identity.html

Well the front end of in progress, http://www.inajar.org/development (moving to http://www.inajar.org/ on 1 may 2003), is complete. I'm rather pleased with how the site turned out. I am especially pleased with the visual look of the site. I came into the project knowing exactly how I wanted the site to look and almost didn't use this project for class because I knew that I would not be very open to criticism of the visual design. I'm not always that way; in fact I usually solicit feedback from friends and family before completing a project.

The inspiration for the visual design came from a couple places. I knew that I wanted to do something with background images since I haven't made use of them in most of my recent sites. And I'd been reading Train of Thoughts: Designing the Effective Web Experience by John Lenker, which makes use of full-bleed, full-color background images throughout the book. This book also provided the inspiration for using shaded boxes to house my text and other content. However, I wasn't happy with just using shades of color, I wanted to give the boxes the appearance of being translucent. At first I was hoping to use some of the more advanced transparency features in PNG, hoping that I could set an alpha channel that would show up in the browser. But PNG support isn't widespread enough to rely on, so I had to find another solution. Luckily CSS and CSS support have advanced to a point that makes this trick possible. I won't go into details here, but I will thank Eric Meyer and his css/edge, http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/, website for the solution to this problem.

I'm also pleased with the content of this new version of in progress. The old version of the site (currently housed at http://www.inajar.org/old/) was supposed to provide a home to my works in progress, be it writing, design, photography, etc. The site content was rarely updated mostly because I don't always like to share my works in early forms, but also because I was finding less and less time to work on these creative projects. The content of the new site is not tied to such a theme. Rather I've chosen a few categories that I'll be able to update without creating a lot of work for myself. The content of the new site also seems to provide a better representation of who I am. So rather than simply showcasing some of my own work the site can also show some of my influences.

There are a few things that I'm not happy about with this site. The biggest is how the site renders in IE 6 on Windows. Of all the browsers I have tested, IE 6 is the only modern (post 5.0 release) browser that does not render my boxes appropriately. Instead of aligning the background images to create an illusion of translucency, IE 6 reinitiates the background position for each element. It doesn't look terrible, it is just a different effect than what I want and expect. At this point I'm not going to try to fix it. In my mind this is the fault of the browser not the fault of my code. Perhaps I'll add some sort of message just for IE 6 users letting them know that all is not well with their browser, but since I normally find those messages annoying and silly I'll probably just leave it and hope for a fix in IE 7.

I'm also upset that I was not able to complete any of the management utilities for the site. The plan is to implement a set of web forms that can be used to update the site easily since right now I have to manually edit the database and upload any images or files. While this isn't a problem, it also isn't the easiest way to add content to a site that is totally database driven. Also once I have the web management functions complete I would like to experiment with updating the homepage blog through email. That would allow me to update the main page from anywhere at any time using my mobile phone. I know, it's totally superfluous and probably not of much use, but I'd like to see if I can do it.

In the end I'm very happy that I had a chance to polish my CSS skills some more on this project. At the beginning of the project I had no idea of some of the things that CSS can do (e.g. creating buttons that look like graphics but are really just text and background images/colors). And even though CSS adoption and support is still weak, I do think that some of what I've learned in this project can be applied to real-world projects with more diverse audiences.