Life Less Literary

Wow! Even better. I have a favourite new word. Callipygian. Go look it up.

Gill has gone away this weekend - for a Hen weekend. So for Friday night, all day Saturday (today) and until tomorrow lunchtime, I’m in charge of Rowan & Lola.

It’s a strange feeling. I spent so much time with Rowan when she was young - from the ages of 3 to 6 months I was unemployed, so I was with her as much as Gill was, and had no problem helping out. But with Lola, I have spent 4-5 days a week in London ever since she was 5 days old, and now that she’s almost hit 6 months I only just feel that I’m getting to know her, understanding her routine. A couple of weeks ago I babysat for most of the day (about 10am-5pm anyway) and that was bloody hard work. So I was terrified of doing the weekend thing. I’m also a lot less patient myself than I used to be - the pace of life in London, then rushing back and trying to cram so many experiences into two days makes it hard to be mellow and chill out and think on kid-level.

In actual fact, we have been having a great time. Today we went to the Elsecar Heritage Centre. I wasn’t expecting much from it, restored Victorian industrial bumph with a few labels that would keep the kids happy for 5 minutes, perhaps. Then I looked it up on the web, and discovered that it had a steam railway, so another 10 minutes before Rowan started moaning, perhaps. However, it was not what I had expected.

The central attraction was the PowerHouse, a bunch of interactive displays about Energy in a kind of Science-Museum/Exploratory/Eureka/Magna etc. type of way. Rowan really did enjoy it. We Spent about 3 hours there, popping out of the Powerhouse for lunch, toilet visits etc., and always back in to play with a few more exhibits. Loads of fun stuff, like a human sized hamster wheel, a rollercoaster-type track for little rubber trucks (and another one for big plastic balls), a huge catapult firing out ping-pong balls, a chair on which you could winch yourself to the ceiling.

I guess most of this was pretty much over Lola’s head, but she seemed quite happy to sit behind me in the back-pack and watch all the pretty moving things as Rowan set them in motion. As long as we kept her fed, clean-bummed, and moving about fairly frequently, she was happy.

We got home knackered at around 3pm to play volleyball in the garden. Lola was a star, hardly moaned all day - now that I have her meal & milk times fairly sussed out (and now that she has them fairly regularised) she is no problem to look after.

Must do this again soon.

I have been meaning to build myself a new home page for a long time. I tore down my original one out of embarrassment some 2 years ago, and stuck a placeholder there while I tried to find the time to build a new one. Unfortunately, that time must have been very well hidden, coz I never found it.

For ages I have harboured ideas, dreams. Originally I was going to make a Flash version of my house where you could wander from location to location. Photograph bits and pieces of all the rooms, make some kind of semi-abstract montage, have software representations of myself, Gill and the kids (plus the odd guest) wander around randomly like some early-80s adventure program, doing… something. Scatter any existing content in relevant hidey-holes. Add lots of little easter eggs. You get the idea - something totally unachievable. Something I’d still like to achieve one day.

As I began to realise that I’d never pull off this Herculean challenge, I scaled down my ideas a little. Some time ago Jim took photos of us all at work which were destined to appear on our hard reality business cards. Before, that is, hard reality ceased to exist, and the business card project became just another pipe dream. One of my photos had me kicking my leg out, wonderful action pose, and I wanted to base my home page around it, make it into a Flash movie, navigate through the site using different parts of my body - fingers for music (with these fingers I thee bled) that sort of thing.

Although this idea was far less ambitious than its predecessor, there were essentially still two problems with it. One, the sum total of my knowledge of Flash can be measured in the time it takes to download a single-pixel gif (take a look at my one Flash project if you don’t believe me), so I would have to spend years on the project to make any headway. Second, my knowledge of Photoshop isn’t all that much better, and my knowledge of Illustrator much worse, so the end result would have been some shoddy photo shoddy stitched together doing shoddy sub-Terry-Gilliam-type animation stuff.

Anyway, last night for some bizarre reason I started getting literary-type inspiration, i.e. I had some idea what I would want to write on an updated home page. At the time it seemed like a stroke of genius, although this is most likely because I was drunk at the time. Anyway, when I got up this morning at 5am, I couldn’t remember the actual words that had made it genius, but I could at least remember the gist of what I’d wanted to say.

I sat down on the 6.05am train to Sheffield, finished off the “proper work” that I’d been doing yesterday in the first 15 minutes or so, and started pondering on this home-page idea again. If I was going to put new words on it, I should at least make it look slightly less of a dog’s dinner. But… I’m not a designer. I don’t do pictures. I wouldn’t know where to start.

Then I realised where to start. A few days ago on Blogger, I’d noticed the winners of their Template Design Competition. Most of them struck me as fairly naff, but there was one in particular which I loved - beautiful big blocky colours, in a Mondriaan-esque sort of an arrangement. And it had no graphics - the whole thing was done using blocks of colour, table cells and bgcolor tags. Which is something I know a little about - after all, this blog template is a very simple take on something similar, and my 1998-designed guest book-template is a slightly more complex (if not very inspired) version.

OK, so… tables, colours, blocks. But what, and how. Orange sprang immediately to mind. For starters, everyone I know teases me over my love for the colour orange. I don’t actually feel that special about it, but it is strange how I seem to keep ending up with orange clothing, orange furniture, orange decor, etc. Secondly, I had just been surfing around not.so.soft, and had been impressed by the simplicity and orangeness of it. Thirdly, I hadn’t designed a proper orange site since my very first (and best) website (OK so there was Cannes Lions, but that doesn’t count as Michael & Auriea designed it, I just coded shit).

Orange it is then. Don’t worry too much about which orange, none of yer fancy colour-wheel stuff here, just fire up Homesite, open the colour swatch, and pick the first two oranges that gravitate towards the mouse cursor. Now how do I lay out these blocky things then? Again, the answer is simple… trial & error. Or in my case, trial & that’ll do I guess, needn’t bother trying any more. Obviously I needed a space for the text, lets make it white otherwise things could get messy. OK, so how about alternating some oranges on either side of that… say 4 per text block? And then let’s top and tail the text box with some more boxes, red this time (well, red’s a kinda orangey colour, isn’t it - by this time I couldn’t be bothered with picking any more oranges, getting 2 that went together was pushing my luck, 3 would no doubt have upset the orange cart).

Hey, I’m starting to get some kind of a look here. But it’s a bit… weak. What would make it stand out more? BORDERS! God, last time I did proper HTML, building a table with borders was a mortal sin, but I have an inkling that nowadays you can do borders and make them look kinda nice. Let’s try black ones… WHOAH! That’s it. Wonderful. Kinda stained-glass window-y Charles Rennie Mackintosh-y (hey, isn’t it great to find a website called crmsociety.com that has FUCK ALL to do with customer relationship management!) stylish effect. Hey, with those colours it even reminds me a little of the stained-glass in our new house.

OK, I guess I oughta start trying with the text. Those white boxes are all very well, but they still look pretty messy with text in them. I need more white space - oodles of it, all around my text. Now, I know I can do this kinda stuff with Cascading Style Sheets. Problem is, last time I designed with HTML, you didn’t go near CSS with a bargepole beacuse otherwise Netscape users would see a butt-ugly website. So, quick crash course in CSS entities… half an hour later I come up with the margin settings I need to let the text breathe. Oh yeah, and while I’m at it… those red boxes aren’t doing much, why not stick some header text in them? I can steal the style off my Blog.

But it still doesn’t look right, it’s…. AAARGH!!! It’s the PARAGRAPH SPACING. My most touchy subject. In the early days, I used to spend weeks getting the paragraph spacing right, choosing the right combination of BR tags and stretched dot_clear.gif’s. Aaah, I remember it well, 1995, reading David Siegel’s Web Wonk, a true road to Damascus experience. No looking back after that, I couldn’t look at whitespace the same way again.

Some things may be easier these days, and at least I didn’t have to scatter my code with ugly transparent GIF spacers, but I still spent more time getting those damn lines far enough apart and yet… not quite too far. And I’m still not happy with the result. After trying infinite combinations of BRs, Ps, spaces before and spaces after, I settled on something not too jarring. One can only push these things so far, after all.

And then I stuck the rest of the text in. Added bits as I went along. Fluffed out and reined in the copy. Fiddled. A nice page. Oh, better stick that funny little GIF of my even funnier little signature on there. After all, it’s been on every home page I’ve ever had, and I don’t want it to feel like I’ve abandoned it. But the page still looks a bit… bare. It needs pictures of some sort. Not many. Not big. Just… a little blob of something. Me. Yeah, that’s it, it needs me. Sod modesty, this is my home page.

OK, so what can I stick on there. A nice little head shot would be good. Hey, that picture from the party… if I could just cut the head out and float it on the white… ahh, but I have no image editing software on this machine, and even if I did I’m not particularly good at image editing… and even if I was, the photo is a bit out of focus. Sod it. How depressing. Oh yeah, let’s see whether I have anything else suitable. I doubt it but… might as well give it a try, while I have time to kill.

Well waddya know? It’s that bloody business card picture of me kicking again. And, of course, Jim had already traced it ready to go on the card. It’s a bit dark & undefined, a bit crunchy around the edges, but what the hell, it’s still a great shot. I’ll go with that anyday. Oh yeah, there’s the other photo too, the one that was supposed to go on the back of the business card, with me in my Jesus pose (well, Mark’s Jesus pose actually, it reminds me far more of him). I could stick that on there as well. Hmmm… would look a bit much with them both together. Of course! I can use them to top and tail the page. Daniel, you are a genius.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how my home page came to be.

Rowan got her first ever school report last week. Clever girl!