June 13, 2005
Long ignored, this is the first update to this page in nearly three years, since I recently made the first changes to the site design in that long. My interests swing more towards the content than the design, obviously.

The change, extensively-documented in the blog posts themselves, is that this site has become an actual blog, rather than a strange mixture of a live journal and an online diary and a blog. Or something. The change began in late May, when I had a trip to Chicago, a day home, and then a week long trip to San Diego awaiting me.  I wanted to blog some from San Diego, but I didn't want to go to the trouble of doing the HTML and finding a program to upload it with, while I was going to be using my girlfriend's iMac, rather than my usual desktop PC.

Happily, said girlfriend has been fooling around with various online blog software for months and months, and with her aid I was quickly able to set up a cheap little blogger blog, and got it working well enough to update while in San Diego. It didn't look very good; just white text on a black background (I used this template.) but I liked the ability to update it anytime, and when I got back home after ten days in San Diego, Malaya again helped me to modify that blog, and get it working while looking just like Black Champagne.  I've yet to post about just what we did, but since this is the site design page I suppose I should explain.

Briefly, we picked a blog template with everything set to the default. No fonts, no colors, no sizes, etc. I then inserted the code to that blog into my main page, and after making a few modifications on my end, it looked fine.  The problem, was that while it looked fine there, the archive pages and links to individual blog posts were no good. They were just the blog default look, with no colors, fonts, and nothing of black champagne visible, including no navbar, title, copyright, or anything else.

That clearly wouldn't do, so we then took the opposite tact, and pasted the BC look into blogger. That worked, since the BC HTML was now part of my blogger template. The problem was that I couldn't make anything insert into it remotely, so my usual way of putting in the navbar and copyright text didn't work. I had to cheat those and paste the code for them directly into the blogger template, which worked, but which requires me to update them in the code any time anything changes. That's not a big deal with the copyright info, since that's something I change just once a year, but the nav bar is a bit of a pain, since it changes every time I add a movie or book review.  Que sera sera.

The only other real design change was a graphical one, since I had to redo the main page title image. The old one was 118x480, just like the ones on the other site pages, and that worked fine when it was just floating overhead. With the site layout change I didn't want the blog to start right on top of the main page, and I was moving the quote of the day and other things into the posts themselves, so I decided to move the title image down a bit. The problem then was that it tied to the table it was in, and stretched to fit wider resolution widths, causing it to tile (the image repeated). That looked lame, so I made a new image, put the Black Champagne.com text on the left, and left it much wider, a full 800 pixels. This way very wide resolutions will still see the logo graphic in acceptable form. Extremely wide ones will still get it repeating a bit, and very short pages might see it tile beneath itself, but since I'd already reached the limit of my interest in tweaking the graphic, I decided it was good enough. 

No further changes are planned since I'm pretty happy with things as they are now. I'd like to totally redo the site someday, with a database to sort things different looks for different sections of the page, and so on, but that's far too much work to contemplate now.

July 8, 2002
A couple of weeks ago, June 28th to be precise, I was briefly hypnotized by the artwork of Hieronymus Bosch.  The site linked to there has most of his work on display, and as I was looking at it, especially the amazing stuff like Garden of Earthly Delights.  There is so much detail in the images, so many dozens of small scenes, that I can look at them for hours and still find new stuff to ogle.  Plus I love the medieval style of the artwork the demons and angels and such.

My thought, while looking it over, was that his work would make for some awesome page banners, if I ever wanted to do all new ones to replace the Van Gogh ones I have now.  I finally got around to making one up just to see how it would work.

I rather like that one, actually.  I picked a different font, a more medieval one, and it works okay.  I would change the text effect also.  I did slightly in this one, adding bevel/emboss to make it more 3d looking, but I don't think that works with the artwork.  I would probably do something more subtle, making the letters transparent, and visible through their texture or 3d look or something of that nature.  Making them look branded into the image, somewhat.  Also, most of his paintings I like have dark backgrounds, and this text wouldn't show up well enough on that.

I'm not sold on that font either; it's sort of cool, but I don't like the "S" much, in the old "f" looking style they chose.  But I spent literally 30 seconds comparing fonts to pick this one, so it's obvious not my final answer.

My other reasons for rejecting it, at least for now:

• Size and composition.  The thin rectangles work well for Van Gogh's work, since I'm mostly picking a pretty piece of it for the texture and eye candy aspect.  There are seldom things in the painting that I want fully visible and recognizable in the page banner.  Bosch's work is different, the interesting things are the people, or demons, or angels, usually in how they are interacting or tormenting each other. So the image would need to be large enough to show the damned soul, as well as the demon on his back, and to fit it all into these 480x118 banners would be hard.  I'd have to shrink the images so much they'd look like shit, so likely I'd have to do some page layout modifications to make space for the taller graphics.

Another problem with the images are their composition.  Namely that there are so many things in the images, all crowded in together. It's physically hard to fit in the text without covering something up, or having the text lost in a swirl of "things" in the image.  The sample one above I don't really like the woman's head right on top of the text, for example.  I tried it two lines high, but covering her up just drew attention to what was below the text, and made it more distracting. 

• Quantity.  There simply aren't that many Bosch images surviving.  They are over 400 years old, after all.  However since the good ones are so large, with so much detail, I could probably get a dozen individual page banners from one of his bigger works.

• Image quality.  This is a pain, since the artwork is so old, and often ill-preserved, they are covered in cracks, the colors are faded, etc. That actually works to help in some ways, since it gives the archaic images even more gravity and creepiness, but in lots of cases it just makes them hard to see.

Anyway, I've not abandoned the concept entirely, but it's not exactly a project I'm dying to get into. I can do acceptable graphical work when forced to, but it's not really my calling, and it takes me a long time to settle on a design or style that I can live with.

I'd still like to learn some clever web programming that would enable me to do more artistic design.  Like extend the art down over the nav bar, and have just the main section names listed as buttons, which when hovered on would expand and display the various pages in that section.

I'd really like the page headers to extend down over the page as a background.  That would be tough though.  I don't mean just use the actual page header as a repeating background, since that would be impossible to read over.  I mean some light and textured portion of the header would stretch off and down the page, ideally seamlessly from the header image.

For example the orange at the bottom of this one would extend down from it, and the rest of the page, inside this light-background'ed table, would be that color.  I'd have to alter text colors from page to page to match up with the background for that section, but each page/section would really have a unique feel to them then.  In this one the dark rocks to the left might extend down over the nav bar, and the buttons would be that color on that page.

That would require a ton of image manipulation though, endless cutting and pasting to get the background part to merge smoothly, as well as doing all of the buttons, etc.  It's unlikely to ever happen, but I'm always much better at thinking up cool features than actually executing them.

I'm hoping to take some college extension classes to become more expert with Photoshop, as well as learning some more website programming, so perhaps if I gain the skills I might apply them here.  I could do them as my class project, after all.

June 19, 2002
The "Curse of the Day" on the nav bar begins on this day.  Somewhat of a replacement for the discontinued "What's for Lunch" item, it's going to be various annoying things, though will probably devolve into random sarcastic and oddball remarks quickly enough.

May 9, 2002
This is the last day of the What's for Lunch thing on the nav bar. As explained in the update, I just got sick of thinking up something new, when often there was nothing new.  And it wasn't especially funny to know what I might have eaten.  If I had something interesting to say about food then I could put it into the blog, right?  So May 10th and on, no more What's for Lunch.

March 29, 2002
I've been doing the "Disks in Rotation" thing below the SSI nav bar on the archive pages as I go the last week or two.  Initially they were just on the main page.  The problem is that I change a CD about every 2 weeks, usually changing most or all of them at once then, so it's not a real dynamic feature.  I don't buy many new CDs both because I can't afford it and there are so few released I want anyway.

I added the "What's for Lunch" below that a week or so ago, also on the main page and the archive page, and added the "Soul-Eating Worry" below that just a few days ago.  And it's also on the main page and the archive page.

My inspiration, somewhat, for these daily cutesy ideas is Dooce, a blog site that has even cuter and more eclectic nav bar thingies like "How to Annoy Me", "How to Charm Me", and "Currently Feeling Guilty".  The woman who runs that site seems to update about 2-3x a week, so less pressure to think up something clever each time with that relaxed schedule.

I wouldn't use the same exact headings she uses, I'm not that much of a thief. I was considering putting a listing of the topics in a given blog on top of the page, but just as I was about to do that Lileks started doing it, and now if I do it'll look like I'm copying his semi-organization addition.  I've been doing the quick summaries of a day's blog on the Blogs Index page since the site opened, so adding those to the top of the actual blog per day isn't exactly a huge stretch.  So maybe I'll do it, and Lileks be damned!  Damned I say!  He deserves it for his increasingly Republican-loving, anyone-with-a-different-PoV-bashing Screeds anyway. 

Anyway, on the nav bar, Dooce has some cool topics, but none of them are exactly my style, and I wouldn't steal her same exact topics in any event.  I had the Disks in Rotation thing on my page since it opened, long before I ever saw Dooce, and in any event it's not like Dooce was the first site to ever do that, anymore than I was the first to put a short synopsis of a page on the link to it, or Lileks was the first to put a short synopsis of a day's blog on top of it.

Anyway #2, I like the concept of more offball personal thoughts on the nav bar, ALA Dooce.  None of her topics are ones I want to use; I'm never "Charmed" under any circumstances, and though I'm sure I could work in an "Annoyed" a day if I worked at it, I pretty much marinate the entire blog in annoyance already.

I semi-poached Dooce's "Currently Feeling Guilty" one, but it wasn't quite extreme enough for my taste, and I needed a daily Angst, hence the "Soul-Eating Worry".  I want it to be "Soul-Devouring Anxiety", but I think that would be too long and wouldn't fit on one line in the nav bar section, and nav bar wrap around is tacky as a slip poking below a skirt.  I'd say "tacky as underwear poking out of pants" but as that's currently the style...  Not that that makes it any less tacky.  I'll never understand why guys want to walk around with their pants falling down and boxers poking out; it's such a prison-bitch look, and I don't think they mean to look like they're being used as a weight room cushion on a regular basis.  Plus it's sexy when you can see the top of some girl's g-string.  But only if it's a g-string; you must be able to see skin below the narrow strap. Seeing just the top of some big granny panties is about as sexy as melted condoms.

Anyway #3, on the nav bar.

It's set to be 20% of the 80% wide main table, so I could always change the main table to 85 or 90% width.  Then the 20% of that would be larger, or I could bump the nav bar up to 25%. I don't like the look of big empty side nav box space though, especially when it's on the left, since you read from left to right, and notice unused space there, especially with my color scheme.  Pages that are entirely one color background can do whatever the hell they want with open space, within reason.

I have considered moving the nav bar to the right, and considered putting it there to begin with on this site, but went with the standard left nav.  Big empty space to the far right looks tacky as well, but it's not such eye-line interruptus as when it's on the left.  IMHO anyway.

I limited the width of the text for a reason; since it's hard to read huge full width text.  I often end up dragging a browser window to a narrower setting when I see an amateurishly-designed site that's got full width text. Columns don't work well on the Internet; quoted or indented space looks funny, too narrow, and it's really annoying reading it since you have to scroll down twice.

So I left the page room to expand, like if I want to add another nav bar thing on the right for some reason.  Some day.

Feb 3, 2002
I think I'm happy with the new look, been tweaking for several days, trying to settle on something before I do 50 pages and then have to redo them all into the new design.  I decided that the flat color background for the page and cells was too boring, so fiddled around with some textured backgrounds and made the light grey/blue one you see behind this text, and the dark purple one for the main page background.

Also redid all of the text colors, had a dark blue for the highlight color, with green/dark green links, and some olive also.  Too many colors, and I'm happier with the gold/dark gold links now, and made the blue highlight color a darker purple, much like the background, though a bit lighter, since it was too hard to tell from the black text.

I've wanted to put in some more interesting fonts, like for the headers of pages, ("Design Notes" on this page) but those are worthless unless people actually have them on their machines, and I never DL fonts when I see custom ones required for a page, so I figure other people don't either.  I generally have them already, I collect odd fonts, got probably 400 or 500 on my machine now, but it always sort of screams, "my first webpage" when there are weird fonts to DL, and usually they are vastly over-used, with some odd semi-unreadable thing used for the main site text.

It would be nice if there were some sort of temporary browser font cache, and you could just have those load like java script or other things on a page.  A font is usually 40k or less, especially the specialty artsy ones that don't have the full ASCII character sets, numbers, punctuation, etc.  That's not much, any decent sized image will run larger than that.

Verdana, the main font on this site, has 4 versions required, with normal, bold, bold italics, normal italics, and Arial has even more, with thin, black, and other versions.  But most everyone has both of those already.  Verdana is a Microsoft font, but I like it anyway, it's highly legible and not ornate, but not too boring.  Plus everyone with any sort of Microsoft program (Office, Excel, Front Page, etc) has Verdana bundled with it.

I just scrolled through a bunch of fonts for ideas, and I think I'll just stick with the boring verdana bold for page headers and dates.  Scripty fonts look great in images, like the van Gogh images on top of every page on this site, but that's because they do well with drop shadow, bevel/emboss, outer highlight, etc.  They aren't as impressive as just plain letters.

Feb 2, 2002
The page headers are mostly set.  They are all going to be paintings by Van Gogh, or at least details of his paintings.  He did hundreds of great pieces of art, most of which I could probably cut two or three background slices from, if I were to push it.  Some are better enlarged to show the brush stroke detail, others are better reduced in size to get a bigger piece of the painting into the size-limited frame.  I don't anticipate having any problem finding enough of them for the 20 or 30 or 40 I'll need for sections on this site.

Jan 31, 2002
Why are there design notes for such a crappy webpage?  Well, compared to some of the geocities disasters out there, this one is art, damnit.  And not just because I like van Gogh for my title images.  More fundamentally, it's because I'm doing a page for everything I've ever thought would be good to see on a webpage, and doing them all early on, when I've still got the energy.  It's much easier to update an existing page later on, than to do it from scratch.

The look of this site (as is the case for nearly every website) will evolve over time.  It'll will always be relatively simple, I hope, I'm much more motivated and interested in doing content than design, so hopefully I spend as little time as possible on design, while still having something that's at least tolerable for the surfer.  I like to think I have a good eye for color schemes, but I tend to experiment endlessly with fonts and graphics and color matches, when I do experiment, so I try not to do so very often.

As of right now, I'm relatively happy with the site design.  The colors will probably go, and I'll probably do more fancy stuff for the table borders, but the basic navigation on the left, title graphic, content box on the right is probably permanent.  I'm fully aware that this is about as original as a car with 4 doors, and that half the sites on the internet use this as a design, but what did I say above about design vs. content?  Exactly.

I'm not real happy with the colors now, it's a light grey/purple behind the text, with a darker plum for the page borders.  I generally prefer backgrounds with some texture, but the ones I tested for this were too obvious, distracting to the eye.  I hate all white/black websites, mostly since I can't take pure white, it's painful on my eyes, as is white text on a pure black background.  The site colors now are actually almost identical to my windows appearance, the plum is my inactive window color, the light plum/gray is my active window appearance, and these are the colors I see most sites that have no actual background color setting (like Yahoo, for example).

Ideally I'll learn more about scripts and get hosted somewhere with support, so I can just input the various pieces of text with tags that correspond to the overall theme setting, and with that I can just change the colors in the theme and every page will update at once.  I'll definitely have to get SSI support for the navigation, since I can't imagine doing this without SHTML.  And perhaps I'll take some classes in computer science and learn PHP or ASP or other useful languages, and use those instead.

I know all the concepts of such design tools, I just don't have any actual programming knowledge, and since I lack the patience for endless worrying over code and scripts, I doubt I ever will.  At best I'll adapt some existing script to do what I want it to do here, which is what 99% of websites do now; the site designer who can actually write his/her own scripts is a very rare beast.  And the ones who can are usually interested only in technical matters, and have a very ugly site with worthless content, for all the brilliance and automation of design.

Also sites that get way too script-happy are heavy loaders, crash older browsers, and just generally seem like some form of compensation on the part of the designer.  A website shouldn't be a programming demonstration, it should be an easily-navigable resource (unless of course you are a programmer using your site to demonstrate your l33t skillz).

Jan 27, 2002
The original concept of this website was as a forum to post my writing (fiction mostly) and hopefully come to the attention of some agent and/or publisher.  I'm good at writing, terrible at the business aspects of it, such as reading Writer's Market, picking appropriate agents out, sending off query letters and story samples, etc.  That's unpleasant work, to me, while the writing and such is fun.

And yes, I know that life is mostly about doing the unpleasant work in order to have free time or reap the rewards later on.

That was the concept for the site, years before I ever got to any sort of actual detailed planning, which I did a burst of in 1998 and then again in 1999.  Neither time did I do much more than think of features I'd like to see on the site, and fiddled around with layouts and graphics some. I wanted a site, wanted to do more writing and post it, wanted to get published and earn some money from my work; I just didn't want it enough to do the work required to get the format set up.

Finally in early 2002 I gained more determination (mostly financially motivated, as in about to be broke) and forced myself to work on the design again.  I had old site design concepts that I almost totally discarded (it was much too ornate, with various wallpapers and borders made from van Gogh art, ugly graphics, etc), choosing a much more basic site look, which will no doubt be changed around several times in the immediate future.  I like thinking about site designs a lot more than I enjoy actually working on them, so we'll see.

I have no realistic hope that some agent or publisher will swoop down from the sky and throw some Harry Potter-sized book contract at me, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, right? (Ideally that step being towards a waiting airplane, but you get the point.)

As of right now, there are about 5 pages done on the site, I'm relatively happy with the navigation concept, and the overall design structure, and I've got dozens of more page ideas, and tons of old stories to convert and post, as well as many ideas for new stories.  Will I have time to do as much regularly-updated content as I envision?  We'll, I'll have the time, whether I'll chose to spend it working productively on this site, on writing, or piss it away playing games or surfing or chatting or working on other doomed website enterprises remains to be seen.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.