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Web site 101... Or how this readhead put
this site together...
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Welcome to our
"making-of..." section :)
This part of the web site will tell of swearing
at PHOTOSHOP at 2am, of pulling my hair out at
noon when the coffee runs out and the pictures
don't align and of bargaining with God for my
soul if he will just allow my computer to stop
crashing...
As I mentionned before, this site was originally
a project for an html course I took last year.
While most of the people in our group made small
2-page web sites with pictures of everything from
their knitted toilet paper roll covers
(Quebecers, sheeesh !!!!) to their drooling
infants, I decided to do something about my
favorite singer...
The course didn't really go much beyond the basic
functions of FRONT PAGE. Looking back, I am
amazed that I have stayed with this project for
as long as I did after the course ended and I
decided to "update" it. I guess my love
for Miss Sarah has helped to keep me working on
it for the last year or so. And the pengies
too... They can be quite persuasive at 3:00am
when they hide the beer.
But I am getting ahead of myself here. When I was
done with the course and properly
"ohhhhhhhhh and ahhhhhhhhhhh" over the
PHENTEX and slobbering infants, my own web site
was only a 15-page thing with a list of albums
and me and the penguins's comments on them. That
was fun to write and not too complicated to do.
Then I thought it would be fun to try something a
little more challenging. I had had some ideas on
things I wanted to do, like desktop wallpapers
and the calendars so I rolled my programming
sleeves and went to work.
That's when things started to get complicated...
I honestly thought this was going to be fun and
easy !?!?!?!?!? Boy, I sure ain't a redhead for
nothing !!!
The first problem was the pictures. I discovered
after a while that my monitor did not really
render color and brightness very well. I was
horrified when I went to a friend's place to
check my site and discovered to my horror how
washed out and horrible my scanned pictures had
turned out. I never checked but I am sure the
video card in that old computer was made by
FISHER PRICE.
And the pictures were not the only problem. The
texts too !!! Nothing aligned the way I had
intended, so between the crappy scans and the
shifting texts, the whole thing looked more
amateurish than a sock puppet version of EVITA.
That's when I discovered it helps to have lotsa
long hair when you do this type of work. Pulling
on it is easier.
Well, being a stubborn redhead, I thought I would
try again. The teacher had explained to us that
not all browsers rendered things the same way,
and that often, things that looked fine on one
machine end up looking like CAMPBELL's ALPHABET
SOUP on another. Shaken, not stirred...
Armed with a very thick "FRONT PAGE FOR
IDIOTS AND SOON TO-BE-HURLED-OUT-THE-WINDOW
COMPUTER", I started to make the site you
are looking at now.
After several tries with different designs and
color schemes, I had settled on this very nice
and classic look. It had a black background with
white letters and I quite liked it, but in the
end, I decided it looked too dark. I wanted this
to be lively, not a visit to a funeral parlor in
the middle of the night.
The image I had as a main theme was from the
ENCORE cd and it had taken me forever to work on
it to the point that it blended in well with the
surrounding black background. I debated keeping
it and trying to work around it, but again, the
quest for color won out.
Cut to the fall of 2002...
After 2 horrendous moves in a few months, the
kind that compares well with having root-canal
surgery done by Hannibal Lecter, I decided to
retire my old computer with the toyish video card
and the MATTEL processor. I had sold the
offending monitor by then and had gone back to my
old trusted IBM VGA one but with a maximum
resolution of only 640x480 pixels, working on
graphics was a major pain. Sorta like looking at
the MONA LISA through a needle thread hole.
Rather than frustate myself even more, I decided
to put off doing any work on the site for a
couple of months.
Don't ask, but I had to move again that November
and this time to a much smaller place. I thought
a laptop would be a good idea since space would
be at a premium. Well, I won't get into any of
the specifics here, but my 2 attempts at trying
to buy one on EBAY ended up with me being taken
twice, and getting ripped off for over $250...
I finally found a nice one for sale here in
Ottawa (a THINKPAD 385XD) and decided to go for
it. I will be eternally grateful to my family and
roomie for having paid for parts of it when I
wavered on account of the price. And the penguins
were soooooooo happy !!! They like the little
rubber pencil eraser thing...
Well, I was in for shock number 2 as soon as I
took LINUX off the laptop and installed Windows.
The screen is so awesome that all the images that
I had redone still looked awful !!! Everything
had to be redone AGAIN !!! I just cried and
yelled and cursed and ranted and raved then had
more coffee and tried again.
Not only that but I had not been able to find a
picture to replace the ENCORE cd image from the
SIX FEET UNDER funeral parlor look. Nothing
seemed to work until one day when I put my EDEN
cd in my DISCMAN. This being my favorite cd, I
took one look at the leaf motif on the actual cd
and you could have gotten a tan from that
lightbulb that went up over my head. THAT'S IT, I
thought, THAT'S MY LOOK !!! The leaf !!! And
beside, what is more Canadian that a maple leaf
??? I just wonder what's holding up my Nobel
price now... I mean it is a pretty fabulous
idea...
Well, I managed to find a very nice leaf and
after playing with the color and sizing on the
scanner, it ended up being exactly the look I
wanted. I think it looks good, don't you ? After
all, one must try to make any web site about Miss
Sarah as awesome as possible.
Well, with the look decided upon and the better
computer to work with, I started redoing the site
from scratch. A lot of pages took forever to do
and some had to be redone maybe 10 or 15 times
before I was happy but in the end, I got the web
site I wanted. And if I can say so, it came off
even better than I thought it would have.
As it stands now, I am almost over my limit of
free disk space on the server at 50megs.com. I
will probably try and get one of their monthly
packages so that I have more room for graphics
and stuff. I never thought when I started this
that it would be that big in the end. Well, about
700 web pages and some 800 images later, I stand
corrected. And amazed.
I am very proud of the site you are looking at
right now. I have stayed with it and kept working
on it at times when things were not going so well
for me. I left a job last year that was pure hell
and had been for a number of years. One of my
very good friends was also murdered shortly
before Christmas of 2002. And earlier this year,
my friend David took his own life. Keeping busy
was important for my peace of mind during all
these difficult times. Making this web site gave
me a reason to get up in the morning when I just
wanted to pull the blankets over my head and hide
from the world.
I cannot begin to thank Miss Sarah for the way
her music has helped me deal with so many sad
moments in my life in the last 10 years or so.
This web site is all I can do I guess to show my
appreciation. I just hope she will look at it one
day, or parts of it, and see or read how much her
music is important to me.
They say music is the window to the soul, well,
Miss Sarah, thank you for providing me with the
best window seat around.
Mario and the penguins xoxo:)
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