Rule 34

Today I’ve decided that transitions are overrated. Lo! A list.

1. I arrived at a great conclusion the other day, due in part to a helpful reminder from xkcd. Anything you could possibly dream up, no matter how random, is already on the internet. For example, behold the randomness of Lasagna Cat. If random reenactments of Jim Davis’ Garfield exist on the internet, there is no limit to what’s out there. Therfore, every single wonderful feature that I ‘dream up’ for my websites but don’t know how to implement, is out there. Waiting to be discovered. What I’m getting at is that there’s no limit to what you can do in this wacky world of online media.

2. I’ve been working on Wordpress blogs lately. A lot. The silver lining out of this one is I’m intimately getting to know how to manage blogs installed on independent sites as well as optimize them for search engines. It’s a bit tedious, but pretty straightforward once you find a method.

3. I’d really like to be able to volunteer to teach basic web design to high school kids. Or basic Dreamweaver. Whichever. I was kind of surprised to do a quick google search on the subject and only come up with results on how to teach seniors to use computers (another noble cause, but not exactly what I had in mind) or outdated listings that only remotely relate to what I’m looking for. Hopefully I’ll find something sometime in the near future. Just something I’d like to pursue as I’ve always felt that because my own teachers made such a big impact on me, I’d like to try to make a difference as well.

Psyop

Since a friend pointed the site out to me, I’ve become really enthralled with Psyop. They have some of the most interesting ads; they’re gorgeous illustrations with some extremely inspiring ideas.

What I like best about the site is that they flesh out and illustrate concepts. Change, influence, persuasion- you can’t just draw a simple picture and everyone will go ‘Oh! That’s supposed to be change.’

I’d like to explore that in the future with my own work. How do you explain an idea that everyone takes for granted? It seems like it would be a lot of fun reaching into the abstract and returning with something concrete and visual.

Lightbox

I figured out how to implement Lightbox today, which is quite a neat little tool if used properly. As the saying goes, just because you can use it doesn’t mean you should. I think it’s perfect for videos or for showing off a couple of pictures, but it’s no way to showcase a gallery unless you have all the pictures interconnected through a link within the Lightbox. There’s nothing worse than having to click to see something, close the dialog box, and click again. That’s one of the first things that’s going to be gutted out of my portfolio for convenience’s sake.

One thing that didn’t occur to me on this video project was, oh hey, accessibility. I use alt text for the benefit of the impaired as well as search engines for images, but there’s so much more I need to learn in this particular area. I’ll let you know when we have some subtitle system figured out. One of my goals is to read Maximum Accessibility by John Slatin.

I’m trying to think up some clever new uses for it (because I’d love to use something nifty like this on my portfolio). It’s pretty simple to use as the developer lays out the code pretty plainly. A modification that goes beyond images can be found here.

Very cool. Just goes to show you that by fiddling with a some code, you can make some amazing things.