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I’ve got a problem

I’ve had it for several years. My Wellington Road Pictures site uses a table for formatting.

I know, I know its wrong, wrong, wrong but hey, it validates!

I’ve tried a couple of times to clean it up but I’m not so much on Web design.

Every six months or so, I’ll find inspiration. Today, while trying to figure out how I’m going to use CSS Animations (I am starting to think its the millennium’s version of Blink), I ran across more inspiration.

A List Apart is always inspiring. As is the Opera Developer’s site. So this weekend, while my wife is at a Gaited Horse Workshop, I’m going to:

1) Clean the garage or atleast make a dent in it.

2) Finish my Mom’s blog for Mother’s Day (I try to be a good son.)

3) Convert my www.wellys.org site from a table-based design to CSS and columns. Maybe even a grid-based, flexible, liquid layout with rounder corners and a AJAX menu.

One can dream, right?

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Veerle

I like Veerle. Never met her, but I like her.

She has consistently taught me new stuff in an engaging way for several years. Her latest post, Placing a CSS background… is a fine example.

1) Its something I didn’t know

2) She has great detail on how to do it

3) Its something I want to know

Thank you, Veerle for making the Web a better place.

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Video Redesign on WRP

Recently, I spent a fair amount of time re-organizing my films on WRP. I had a few goals:

1) Bring my site into the 21st Century, so quit using a js script to open a new window to display the movie.

So, how are all the cool kids doing it? YouTube and Vimeo. No thanks, color me old school and not into “insert your video site of choice that displays your video in horrendous quality along with bizillion ads.”

2) Have a common well-thought out format for all films AND forget about trying to create a reference movie that will check for access speed, QT version etc.

3) Add the ability for iPhones/Touch’s to be able to view the films.

First came DVcreators’ DVKitchen. Fantastic! It provided EVERYTHING I could possibly want… for about a day. It is a nice program and it provided a great starting point for what I wanted to do. I highly recommend looking at it. I’ll repeat… it is a GREAT starting point for a video site!

Now I had a nice way of showing my films; cross off #1.

DVKitchen showed me the value of spending a bit of time understanding your bit rate and film quality. One word, SampleLab. Thanks! (again). Using SampleLab as a starting point, I created multiple compression formats in Compressor. This allowed me to determine the ideal combination of film size and viewing quality. I was amazed at the difference between each film. (I’ll create a note regarding H.264 to help explain this one.) Cross off #2.

After much experimentation, with MakeRefMovie from Apple and Quicktime’s Export for the Web command, I decided that a reference movie wasn’t all that. Due to the my inherent difficulty with reference movies and the fact that iPhone-type devices love a vertical format, I decided to create a vertical-oriented iPhone-only website.

Cross off #3.