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Monday, December 21, 2009

The Rambler Just Got Roomier

Believe it or not, after two straight years of posting seasonal threats that Copper Man - the site which hosts the Subway Rambler - was finally going to be getting a complete overhaul... well, Copper Man has gotten a (mostly) complete overhaul. In what I'm tiresomely calling the 'beta' version, if you go HERE, you'll see a complete layout, admittedly with some holes when it comes to actual content, like an Entenmann's box with only one plain donut left.

The Rambler itself will be folded into the larger site, although the address won't change. What will change is the look, however - it's probably going to get a lot more stripped-down looking, which may be kind of a drag to look at. On the other hand, I've had this billiard room look going for almost two years (after I changed from the original hunter orange), so it's time for a graphic clean-up no matter what. I'll try to strike a balance between what will look nice on the main site (where the Rambler will appear in an iframe in the site layout) and what won't be distressingly bland when viewed away from the site, the way I expect most regular readers will continue to do.

Actually, I'm fairly certain that a batch of you follow me on RSS feeds, which are the most dispiritingly dry-looking way of viewing content on the web imaginable, like reducing everything under the sun to the status of a stock ticker. So there won't be much of a change for you, either way.

As far as the revamp to the main site, rather than run the risk of repeating what I've written over there about its current state and future implementation, I direct you there and, as always, invite you to make feedback.

And Christine: that graphic on the home page is an animated gif, about as old-school as such things get. Let me take this moment to say that although I still kind of miss ImageReady, the animation menu in Photoshop is nicely done - straightforward and intuitive, which is something that Adobe has been having a harder and harder time with as their applications grow more massive and unwieldy.

D.

4 comments:

Ansley said...

Yeah this blog looks like a room in Clue.

Ansley said...

Sister.. damn brilliant for how old you were when you did that..

Dave Kopperman said...

Blogger does turn out to be really versatile - I just did an experiment with it over at Noah's site where I dropped it into the main navigation in an iframe and it works like a dream. You can customize it a lot, even down to column widths and stuff, the type of practice I expect to come in handy when I finally get down with Wordpress and Joomla for various sites.

Sister was too much of a narrative mess - to pull off what I wanted to as a writer needed an artist with a much sparer and more confident hand than me to make the vibe work. I realized much (much!) later on that the flashiness of the visuals worked directly against the mood and story I was trying to establish (with the exception of the dream page, which still works for me). As much as manga bores me, I think the PERFECT artist would have been someone like Yoshihisa Tagami.

D.

Ansley said...

Hahaha.. you always have to contradict me.. even when I'm complimenting you.. Whatever, it's some damn fine drawing.. and your other stuff really represents well on the computer screen..