I’ve revised the site – again.

Posted on May 12, 2012 by WindyBore

Well, once again I’ve revised the site, although most of the changes are not very dramatic or even noticeable to the casual visitor. (Q: Are there any visitors? A: Don’t be a smart-ass.) The biggest change is that I’ve decided to dump the Flash photo galleries, the Lightroom generated HTML galleries and the Hype slideshow on the home screen and move to Showcase generated galleries. Showcase is a companion program to the Freeway, Softpress web authoring program that I use to create this site (other than this WordPress blog). It took a bit of time and effort to figure out how to use Showcase and to convince myself that the limitations of the program were offset by the relative ease of use.

Showcase’s advantages are:

  • Easy selection of photos for the website
  • Acceptable, although not great, thumbnail pages
  • Reasonable slideshow displays
  • Straight forward web page generation – less than five minutes from start to finish to create and have a working page online
  • Easy to modify and reasonably flexible

I have been meaning to do this for a while but finally got motivated after I spent some time auditioning a Squarespace website. Squarespace is a cool web publishing site and I might have gone with them if I hadn’t already built the current site. I was also concerned with the higher cost (twice as much as my current hosting), lack of portability (you can’t export and move your Squarespace site) and the dependency on a single provider. So as a result I decided to burn a few hours tuning up the current site rather than spending many more building a new Squarespace site.

So, here we are.

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New Gallery Postings on Aeolist.net

Posted on January 12, 2012 by WindyBore

For anyone who cares, I posted some new photos under Gallery>Favorite Photos on aeolist.net for the years 2000 to 2011. I also updated my homepage slideshow to include some new pictures found on my favorites pages. I must admit, though, that the slideshow is rather long at over five minutes and I’m not sure who will have the patience to sit through it. Probably best to go directly to the galleries.

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Hype

Posted on June 11, 2011 by WindyBore

Big doings here at aeolist.net – A total revamp of the homepage slideshow developed using the Macintosh app Hype. Hype is an HTML 5 creation tool that builds simple animations to compete, in a limited way, with Flash. For those of us who want to have sites that work the same for iOS and PC browsers avoiding Flash is very important.

I’ve been experimenting with a number of alternatives that allow creation of visually interesting slideshows for the site that go beyond a simple static presentation. I tried iMovie to create Ken Burns type effects with static images but found that the movies created were of too low quality to be acceptable. I purchased and tried Photo To Movie that offered more flexibility than iMovie but found that while the slideshow-movies were of high quality file, sizes were very large and slow to load in the browser and there were issues of file compatibility between browsers and platforms. Photo To Movie is likely to have a role in some of my presentations but not for this particular purpose.

Hype is a new, version 1.0, application that is very easy to use but seems to me (a non-expert) to be lacking some features. It is very easy to use but somewhat repetitive and tedious. There are few automated ways to do things in the program without resorting to Javascript. Since I’m not Javascript savvy, I had to build my project using the GUI which took some time and resulted in some frustration. I am, however, hopeful that new versions of the program will address these issues. Since there’s a lot of buzz around the program and the developers seem to be responsive to users I think that this program will evolve into a more powerful tool as time goes on.

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