Along the same lines, I think bunnyhero should put his Snakes On A… design on a t-shirt as well.

Taking advantage of the weeklong summer vacation that just passed, I decided to don my pimp suit and get to work on decry.org. This post outlines the steps I went through, exporting from MovableType to WordPress, sketching concept ideas, building mock-ups in Photoshop, and finally creating a WordPress theme in XHTML 1.0 strict. Which is to say, this post is more for me than for you. Kind of like my tattoos…

In the beginning…

This is the first project that I really sat down and planned beforehand, complete with sketches of the main content, sub-pages, navigation, and icons. I was interested in going through all the steps to see how my ideas progressed at each stage, compared to my normal, more haphazard way of designing sites. And in the end, I have to say I really enjoyed the more thorough, planned approach; I found that when I finally got to the stage of writing the stylesheets and scripting the templates, things went much faster because of the prior planning. It was like following a map… I knew where I was going and I just had to type up the details.

Another reason for going through the full design process was because I had been reading a lot about designing on a grid. The always inspirational Khoi Vinh posted about the grid design behind subtraction.com, which really opened my eyes to what a grid can do for a design. markboulten.co.uk has a useful 5 part tutorial on grids that also came in handy. Which isn’t to say decry.org was strictly grid, but in the early stages that’s how it went, and I tried to stick pretty close to my early grid-based mockups.

The other driving force in the redesign was my nascent Illustrator skills… I finally know enough to make basic icons and decry provided the focus I needed to push myself into icon creation. It took me an evening of fiddling and futzing, but in the end I came up with seven icons I’m pretty happy with, though some of the categories were hard to abstract into an iconable image (greenlight/redcard?).

The icons, from left to right: Features, Interviews, Neal’s Fun Fact of the Day, Dispatches From, Bats Are Not Bugs, Ask Nica, Greenligh/Redcard.

Sketches sketched out, mock-ups mocked-up, and icons iconified, it was time to start pushing bits.

The problem with MovableType, and forays into MySQL

I don’t know if MovableType has changed in the years since I used it (circa 2002/2003), but the export options are atrocious. Mostly because there aren’t any options, simply a flat textfile export of the posts and comments combined. Which isn’t so bad until you consider the atrocious spam-filtering that MT “features”, and you can begin to see the problem. decry.org on MT was split into seven different blogs, covering each of the sections we had originally deemed necessary for our killer zine. The ‘Features’ section had the most posts, which also meant the most comments. For an estimiated one-hundred-and-something posts, there were 28,000+ spam comments, all of which had to be imported into WordPress. Importing the text files was a breeze thanks to WordPress’s built-in import function, though it did take quite a while thanks to the aforementioned and copious spam comments.

One complaint I have with WordPress is that their ‘mass edit’ mode for the comment section allows you to edit 20 comments at a time. This is hardly sufficient when dealing with 35,000+ comments, all of which you don’t want. Rather than click though the mass-edit page 1,750 times, I went straight to the MySQL command line and did some table manipulation there (I won’t get into the details here, but if you find yourself in the same position and need some guidance, feel free to contact me). Minutes later I was spam-free, and hopefully will stay that way if Akismet does for decry what it does for this site.

The decision to go with XHTML 1.0 strict wasn’t based on anything substantial, I just wanted to try it out. I validated along the way, so it wasn’t too painful to adhere to standards and I didn’t have much trouble, probably because decry.org doesn’t do anything fancy. Originally I had wanted to use this project to explore AJAX, but after numerous frustrating experiences with needless AJAX hindering my use of a site, I decided against it. Simple and clean was my goal for decry.org, and in that respect I think it does pretty well. The theme was built from the ground-up and rather uncomment worthy, though I did use the comment template from the default WordPress theme. I did depart from my usual flexible, bendy, em-based everything for an absolute layout and some pixel measurements, and surprisingly I’m okay with that. Also, the stylesheet is the cleanest, most organized stylesheet I’ve made in my life. I used the same structure as Veerle and really came off with something clean and navigable. Of course, it could be cleaner, but overall it’s pretty damn good (compare it to, say, the stylesheet for protocol7.net).

And in conclusion…

In the end I have a much better grasp on WordPress hooks and the anatomy of a template, refreshed my SQL skills, learned some new CSS tricks, and got some hands-on grid-based experience. There are still things about decry that I’m not happy with, and I’ll be working on those in the upcoming weeks (including copy to replace all the lorem-ipsum still running rampant). I don’t know if decry.org will see live content in the future, or remain in it’s current state as an archive for the writings of a group of twenty-something friends. I’m still going through the individual posts cleaning up the formatting, but if you have some time on your hands, feel free to browse the remnants of decry.org.

Tonight I fired up Illustrator for the second time in my life, determined to master the intricacies of vector art (really, I just want to make icons and cute little animals). Andy sat nearby with a slight smirk on his face, so I decided to use him as a model for my first project. While I’m a little more comfortable working in Illustrator than I was two hours ago, it sure is a bitch to learn. The results of my efforts:

Andy in all his vectorized glory.

The real Andy drinking a margarita.

The river is clear, cool, and calm, with a small current for comfortable floating travel.

Hanging out at the BBQ pit.

My husband, towelhead, and the beautiful hills.

Nothing beats grilled food, beer, friends, and river swimming.

Except maybe drinking beer in the river.

An abandoned dolphin sits on the river bank, forlorn and lonely.

My toes, my toes, my toes…

Emerging from yet another dip in the river.

A road sign above the river.

kzi thought the curl was cute, I’m not so sure…

The difficult rope-swing.

Tomo and the ultimate poking stick.

kzi’s approach seconds prior to being tossed in the river.

A BBQ wouldn’t be complete without watermelon.

Sunset on the river.

We’ll be returning to the river this Saturday, weather permitting, this time with fireworks and ’smores. Expect ongoing visual narratives, as my brain is melting out of my ears (a condition that makes typing coherent sentences quite impossible).

To justify my need to spend countless hours immersed in the WoW landscape, I did a quick google search on “World of Warcraft ethnographic study” and came up with some interesting results. The first hit is a website for a college level course, Games for the Web, offered by Trinity University. This class requires you to spend a “significant amount of time” playing World of Warcraft. From the course description:

Throughout the semester, we will spend a significant amount of time in World of Warcraft. This virtual world is an ideal location for studying on-line gamers, cyberculture, and videogame aesthetics. A significant amount of class time will be spent in the game-world, but you are also expected to devote at least five hours a week to ethnographic research within World of Warcraft.

The Students section contains links to blogs students kept throughout the semester, in addition to their final papers. While perusing the blogs I saw several mentions of a gnome protest, so I did some further searching…

… and came across screenshots of the Gnome Tea Party, an in-game protest held a couple months after World of Warcraft went public. The protest, regarding changes to the Warrior class between the beta-version and final public release, crashed the server and resulted in a good number of banned accounts (I don’t think the ban was permanent).

EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and Ultima Online have also played host to virtual protests. TerraNova made a post about the nature of virtual protests and possible emergent politics and governance in online spaces. The post, Synthetic Statehood and the Right to Assemble and the ensuing comments bring up some interesting points from both sides of the fence.

And let me not forget the in-game 4th of July fireworks.

Enough with the justification, it’s time for me to go questing…