laramie

It's been a rainy morning, and the sky is still looming gray, but I didn't really need my umbrella in walking from the skyway to the Amex building. There was only a scattering of droplets, hardly felt, in the air. Before I left the house I left an envelope on the front porch, containing the hard copy and a disk of files for the Minicon ad I put together on short notice over the past couple days. I had to work with artwork I already had on hand, and chose the drawing of romantically intertwined trees and the theme: 'Springtime in Mpls Means Minicon.' (And the tune of 'Springtime for Hitler' goes through my mind when I think of it.)

This morning I was singing 'How are Things in Gloccamora?' and was thinking it would make a good tune for a filk song. Maybe the song of a hobbit, wondering how things are going in the far-off Shire while he is on the road. ('How are Things Back in the Shire?') Or a space-farer, ('How are things Back Home on Terra?') Or an elven princess wondering how things are with her true love, who is off on a dangerous mission while she's stuck at Rivendell. ('How are Things in the Path of Danger?') I don't like the idea of the female characters being left to wait on the events in which the guys are taking active part, but it's often been a reality in history, and waiting can be a hard thing to do.

I looked at Ray's website yesterday. I can see why he thinks it needs something more for the graphical interface. It's a simple layout, heavy on text, with text links – this works, but it's not very interesting for visitors, and the color scheme doesn't quite work – the black font looks too stark with the green side-bar. Also, the way the frames are set up, the title frame can be squashed down so that the title itself is no longer visible. A simple style sheet could help a lot, with a nicer color-scheme and some text style. The menu frame is probably easier to update if it's all text, but some kind of icons would make it more appealing to the users. I'll propose the combination I usually use: with three different versions, and users redirected to the appropriate one according to their browser capabilities. (The simplest, text version, as the default, for those without JavaScript enabled, Flash for those with Flash support, JavaScript for those without Flash.)