Brian Crick

I Have Some Catching Up To Do.

Just made a tweak to my layout here that should make my web site a little more readable (read: a little less unreadable) on phones: the right-hand blog navigation doohickey should drop out on small screens.

Since migrating to a CMS, I have, admittedly, been rather lazy about making sure this site scales well, is accessible, etc. For what it’s worth, I apologize for that. I can do better.

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I used to complain rather frequently — and inarticulately — about how I didn’t like the approach HTML had to accessibility. It all felt very static, like a printed out web page with some explanatory notes written on it. And, I thought to myself, we can do better than this. Blind or sighted, you’re probably viewing web pages on a computer. Adding more explanatory data to your forms and images and site headers is good and all, but computers can do more. They can adapt to things. A browser could make intelligent decisions about what to present to the user based on screen size, ability to see images, whatever. HTML authoring tools could make cleaner markup and enforce basic accessibility guidelines, for those authors who can’t be prevailed upon to care. (Many will disagree, but I firmly believe that victory can only be had here if the people who just don’t care about accessibility are unknowingly making accessible markup anyway, because we’re encouraging the adoption of visual layout tools that do this for them. I think trying to make those people care is a waste of energy.)

Thankfully, this sort of adaptive presentation of web pages seems to be pretty common now. It would seem I checked out of web design right as this sort of logic was getting standardized — right as smart phones became popular.

I have a lot of learning to do.

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Today’s update isn’t much, but it’s a start. This web site doesn’t use what you’d call an adaptive design, and it will take a long, long time — or, perhaps, a clean start, a nuke-the-site-from-orbit type overhaul — for me to get it where it needs to be.

But, for what it’s worth, I’d very much like to put in the effort towards getting this where it needs to be. It’s a bit overdue.

Lost and Found

I have, at long last, rearranged my web site a bit so that this blog is no longer on the front page. Sure, writing here helps me sort out my thoughts, and people seem to like this sometimes, but I really want the first thing you see here to be my stuff, not my random babbling. The blog was never supposed to be on the homepage… that was just the WordPress default.

The new menu could certainly use some cleanup, if not an overhaul, but I’m glad to have taken this step.

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While I was at it, I made a proper project page for the Jennifer Ann project, complete with screenshots and music samples. While I generally regard the project as an embarrassingly incomplete failure as a game and as a story, I forgot how much I liked the overall look. And while it could use a whole lot of smoothing out, the music isn’t half bad, considering that those were some of the first things I composed, ever.

I’m lucky I still had the original project files that I could dig through to make that page. I have a really bad habit of immediately deleting things as soon as I’m done with them. I ran into an issue making the thumbnails on the new home page, where I didn’t have the original files for my favorite web site design; I lost them years ago.

I like having this stuff around, because I frequently forget what I’ve done in the past. And I forget what I’m capable of, and what I still need to work on.

Just Another WordPress Site

Welcome to my new journal!

Okay, if you’re seeing this on LiveJournal or Facebook, this won’t seem terribly new. But this is being posted to my in-the-process-of-being-overhauled-web-site at www.oogby.com, and cross-posted everywhere else.

And wow, does this site need an overhaul. The old site just wasn’t very easy to edit, and was therefore terribly outdated. So I’m replacing my homegrown, not-quite-functional editing system with WordPress, adding a blog, and I’m going to try to keep up-to-date pages around for all my pet projects.

It’s going to be a bit messy while I’m rearranging everything.

And hopefully, I’ll feel more accountable for everything this way, and if random people I’ve met Google me and find my site, as they seem wont to do, they’ll get something a bit more meaningful than has been here in the past.

At least, that’s the hope. Let’s see how it goes.

Copyright © 2017 Brian Crick.