I moved the entire site to a new server during the last few days. Quite a process.

I add examples of Flash to the animation section. I'm taking a Flash class this term and needed a place to put my experiments and assignments. The trick was figuring out how to display both the Flash example and provide a description of what I did. Sometimes I have a link to the Flash movie from the explanation page (when the movie needs to take up the entire window) and sometimes I put the movie at the top of the explanation page and add text, screenshots, jpgs, and gifs for clarification.

Posted:

• Flash class experiments and assignments to the Animation section
• changes to Animation main page
• comparisons of sound formats including Shockwave, RealAudio, QuickTime, and Windows Media to the Sounds section.

Today I added my photo album. It took me about a week to design and build the 40 page document. I wanted it to have the look and feel of a photo album from the fifties with a lush red leather cover with gold lettering, black photo corners, white print borders, black pages, and white handwritten captions. This is also my first use of rollover buttons.

Posted:

• My Photo Album (over 40 pages and images)
• changes to Pictures main page and Site Index
• changes to About Jim

I added this year's Christmas card today with eight midi Christmas songs.

Posted:

• changes to the Pictures and Sounds main pages
• 8 Christmas midi songs and pages
• updated Jim's Studio page
• updated the site index

I completed the website (no more blank pages) last Friday with the addition of the Links page and the Site Index page. From now on I'll be adding additional features, examples, demonstration projects, explanations, tech notes, journals, etc.

Posted:

• Links page
• Site Index
• Minor changes to :
  • Text page - added link to Keebook example
  • Jim's Studio page - deleted postcards from list of research items

This week I installed two new features - the birdbath webcam in Pictures and virtual postcards in the Giftshop. The birdbath webcam was the easiest of the two. I used a camcorder to record about 10 minutes of digital video of our birdbath. I grabbed about 20 frames (640 x 480 pixels) and saved them as PICT files. I then used Photoshop Elements to resize, sharpen and save each image as a jpeg file. I used Dreamweaver to create a page which chooses a random image file from the folder of birdbath images. I used the random image extention which I found on MacroMedia's website.

Adding the postcards to the Giftshop was more challenging. It took me two full days to choose the 8 images and create frames and matts for them in Photoshop. I then created the new Giftshop page and the new Cards page in Dreamweaver. I made the thumbnails as two images with 4 thumbnails in each because they load faster that way. I spent another day modifying a free postcard cgi script I found at bignosebird.com. I uploaded everything at the end of the day on Sunday, 11/04/01. It didn't work. All I got was an internal server error message. I spent the next day troubleshooting. I uploaded the original unmodified script and it worked. I slowly added my modifications one at a time until I discovered the piece which caused the problem. It was something in the standard footer I put on every page. So, for now I have left the footer off the card pages which are generated by the script. It all works, but there is a small problem in Netscape. The pages which are generated do not have an opening html tag or title tag. When Netscape tries to open such a page it displays a "You need this special plug-in" window on top of the page. This takes time to display and looks like an ad. Very annoying. : ( Internet Explorer does not do this. I have spent a lot of time researching why these pages don't have an opening html tag, but I can't find an answer. I have tried to alter the cgi script to add an html tag, but so far I haven't had any luck getting it to work. Since Tuesday I have made some modifications to the way the email notification looks, the preview page, and the card page.

Posted:

• New Picture page
• Birdbath random images page
• Postcard cgi script
• New Giftshop page
• Postcard selection and creation page
• Sound page - minor modifications
• About Jim page - added a link to a picture of me in a kayak
• Jim's Studio page - added links to Birdbath Webcam and Postcards
• About this Website page - added a link to this site diary

I created the Movies page today and added links to two QuickTime movie examples - cheetah and horse.

Posted:

• Movie page
• cheetah and horse movies
• updates to copyright and privacy pages

I added a philosophy statement to the "About this Website" page and I edited my bio on the "About Jim" page. In doing so I tried to add a link to a RealAudio music file. I finally got it to work, but I had to convert the original aif file again using G2 RealProducer. Apparently, the old file was too old a version to play with today's players. I was glad to see that RealAudio files play off this http server and that I did not have to set the MIME types. I also updated the Sounds page to include links to 5 RealAudio sample files.

Pages posted:

• About Jim
• About this Website
• Sounds
• and the following RealAudio files
• Autumn Leaves
• Bumble Bee Boogie
• Cockatiel Whistle
• Mac Tv Theme
• Textbook Toolbox

Today I worked on the Text page. I wrote the introduction and added links to examples. I also added links to several articles. These were articles I had written over the last two years. I converted them from existing web pages and from Word. I also deleted some picture files which I no longer needed.

Pages posted:

• Text
• Observations from Online article
• Notes on Composition article
• Notes on Lighting article
• Tai Ji article
• minor changes to About Jim and Sabbatical pages

Yesterday, Friday, and today I worked on the "About Jim" page. I worked on the composite photograph at the top of the page all day yesterday. I picked 10 photos of myself at various ages. They came from prints and slides from my collection and digital files which my brother Bob had scanned from our Dad's collection about a year ago. I pasted each image into a separate layer in Photoshop Elements, resized it, colorized it if it were black and white, erased each background, and positioned it relative to the other images. I also created a gradient gray background. I then flattened it, resized the whole image to 570 x 62 pixels (to fit in the header table) and saved it as a jpeg image at medium quality (30).

I converted my sabbatical request and sabbatical addendum Word documents into a single web page. I did it by copying and pasting text between Word 5.1 and Dreamweaver. This loses all the formatting and puts break tags (<BR>) instead of paragraph tags at the end of paragraphs. I had to delete bullets and designate bulleted lists as Unordered Lists. Also, I had to build the table (rows and columns) and paste each cell's text in one at a time. What a pain.

Pages posted:

• about Jim
• sabbatical

Well, it's up. Thursday 10/25/01 around 4 o'clock PST I FTPed all the pages and images I've been working on for the last three weeks. I took me longer than I anticipated to create the base site. I spent a week just working on the design of the home page. A lot of foundational work goes into creating a new website. I spent a lot of time researching various possible features such as different bulletin board systems, ways to display random images, photo albums, guestbooks, ways to upload and download files, search engines, ways to create password protected folders, etc. It took a long time to research web hosting services and registration services. It took several days just to check the name "Zip Boing Wow" for usage, register it, and configure a web space on a server and learn how to keep web logs, set up email addressed, and administer a web server.

I still have several main pages which aren't done (Giftshop, Links, Site Index, Text, Sounds, Movies, and About Jim), but I was eager to share my experiments and discoveries. So, I put up the site even though it was incomplete. If nothing else, at least I have a backup now. :) I hope to have the rest of the pages completed this week.

Prior to this posting I had installed the following:

• Ikonboard - a free Perl scripted bulletin board system
• Site Diary - a modified guestbook Perl script and html doc
• Keebook - two samples of multimedia booklets created with the free authoring system

Pages Posted on 10/25/01:

• about
• animation
  • carousel
  • magic bunny
• copyright
• giftshop
• history
• home
• images
  • ad.gif
  • comproom1.jpg
  • comproom1m.jpg
  • comproom1s.jpg
  • comproom2.jpg
  • comproom2m.jpg
  • founder.jpg
  • header01.jpg
  • header02.jpg
  • nav_2.jpg
  • nav_index.jpg
• jim
• links
• movies
• pictures
  • airmuseum
  • coast
  • fireweed
  • mtangel
  • panoramas
  • parade
  • silverfalls
  • walport
• privacy
• site index
• sounds
• studio
• text
  • articles
  • journals
  • log input
  • technotes
  • weblog
• workshop