The legacy website saga aka Why I'm so tired

[chrisvenus]

Deadlines passed: 1, deadlines pending: 1. average sleep per night this week: 4 hours

I'm shattered. I'm totally and truly exhausted. As I mentioned perviously I've had deadlines. One is a work one that is for next friday in theory (though before that in practice really). The other was an RPG one and was to get the website for Legacy up and ready to be viewed.

Sunday saw our last meeting on this subject where we had established a few things that needed to be done. I had a few more pages to write and then the whole site to put into HTML. It was going to be a fairly tight deadline with a lot of work anyway. Creating a 40 page website isn't a quick task but its by no means insurmountable. The pages done on sunday evening, the site started on Monday with the confirmed pages and finished on the Wednesday evening. Its a plan. Until people decided they weren't that keen on the design that I showed to them a few months ago. Can we make it dark on light instead of light on dark?

So sunday night was spent playing with site redesigns and stylesheets and all this sort of exciting stuff. I came up with some options but I wasn't hugely happy with any of them. I sent them out for others to see though. In bed about 1:30am.

Monday I was naughty and although I wrote my pages I spent a long time playing computer games. Longer than I intended because things went wrong in Eve when I forgot to turn my shields on and so lost a very expensive ship (for me). So that turned monday into a late night. In bed about 3:30am.

Tuesday evening was the horizon debrief. I was already feeling tired so wasn't going to stay for the pub. Ended up finishing relatively early (about 9:30) so I went home and started playing more with styles since I wasn't happy with them. At this point evath (or would you prefer to be Andy) helped me out on IRC and made lots of suggestions including the reasonably accurate "They're all pretty crap aren't they?". Luckily he was then a superstar and offered me a variation on his site design. I always say that I'm not a designer, that I'm a developer, and I stick to this. If you give me a design to work from I'll make you a killer site. Ask me to make you a site that looks good and it will be a pile of poo.

So Andy leant me his design and I tweaked it, put some content in, tweaked it some more and did all this stuff. It looekd pretty good at the end of things so Andy deserves much kudos and respect. I am being tempted to base an NPC on him. :) By the time I got that all sorted it was relatively late. Time to bed: about 2:30

Then late night was the big push. I watched some tele to relax from work (I've been workign relatively late at work for that deadline as well I should add) and then started converting pages to the now approved Mk4 web page. It took longer than I thought it would. I'm glad mark was online some of the times so when stuff needed doing editorially I could just ask him to do it rather than having to break my HTMLing run. I've worked out it probably averaged at about 12 minutes per page - that's based on just under 40 pages and about 8 hours of work. That includes testing time (wget and looking for 404s) and the inevitable "omg I need a break" because you really can't do that kind of think solidly for that long. You can probably work out what time I got to bed. Yeah, 4:30. YOu're beginning to see why I feel quite so nackered.

I'm really happy with the way it looks now. A few minor corrections were made this morning when it was noticed I'd missed a few bits off, I'd typoed stuff and so on but the site is now live and hopefully has happy punters looking at it.

I'm sure you're wondering what all the fuss is about so lets go and look at : http://www.legacy-empire.org.uk/

Any feedback welcome.

SO I've been getting to bed stupidly late lots and still getting up at normal time. That is about 8AM. In theory that is. I've not been sleeping that well though so my four or five hours are rearely uninterrupted. Right now I think I am getting to my limit. Luckily tonihgt I might even be in bed before midnihgt which is seeming like a rare luxury. I'm also off to games night where I honestly think that I am going to just fall fast asleep. :) I do feel totally zoned right now though.

And as a word of explanation to those who think I have gone mad. No, I didn't have to do all these late nights. I could have said "Sorry, the website isn't going to be ready after all". I could have said "Sorry, not going to change the style at this stage." I could have said "screw it, I'm off to bed." The reason I didn't was simple. Firstly I think that if a job is worth doing its worth doing well. I didn't want to force out a half assed website that looked a bit poo. Until the game starts this is going to be the one tangible thing about the game for people to look at. I don't want it to look like a website "I made when I was 16". That and if my fellow GMs didn't like it it was kind of my job to find something they were happier with and not something I just dictated to them.

The other thing is that I said I'd have the website out this week and it was always a deadline driven by what I wanted as much as what anybody else wanted. I said I'd do it and I didn't want to let people down. Not a good example to give to your players on how effective you are.

Lastly I thought it was for the best of the game. Its the end of term this week and so if we wanted a chance to face to face talk to people about it then it had to be games night and letting people read the website seems to be the only way to make it a useful conversation about characters ratehr than us reiterating the general blurb again.

So, the upshot is that this is all self-inflicted really but that doesn't mean I am going to forego the right to moan about how tired I am.

I'm having to resist the urge to go home this afternoon due to tiredness. I think I'm beyond the help of coke at this point though. And to be fair I do feel a little sick too. Probably just that really tired one though.

*yawn*

Comments

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

1) It's gorgeous! Looks like a very fine game, too.

2) From what you were saying, I was assuming all along that it was a site that you were being paid to produce. Burning the midnight oil for a site with no financial reward? Chapeau!

[chrisvenus]

Cheers.

And care to explain what chapeau means in this context? "hat" seems to be the closest I can come and that doesn't make sense... I'm assuming its simmilar to "respect!" though that may just be wishful thinking and me avoiding thinking it might be "idiot!". :)

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Indeed hat, as in tipping thereof.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

There's no ticky-boxes!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Any feedback welcome.

First thought was: looks nice. Slick, professional, tastefully minimalist.

Second thought was: OMFG this site is freaking huge. You nutters.

Negative points:

* Don't like the placement of the "Legacy" graphic on the front page. Doesn't line up nicely with anything and just looks like it's floating.

* The home/news/characters buttons at the top either need to look more like buttons or have their button-ness completely removed and look like clean text. At the moment they look flimsy and out of place.

* I know Mark Jenkins already mentioned the lack of pictures over email, but I'm going to mention them again. Makes the site kinda dry and unatmospheric.(I also don't like the cheesy cheap-ass renders he attached to his email. But then presumably the GM team had similar reservations about the visuals I sent you !)

[chrisvenus]

Yeah. We hadn't realised how huge it was. When it was on the wiki we designed stuff on it didn't look like much. I was at one point worried we didn't have enough content. then mark printed it out and we had half an inch of stuff and that's before we'd finished writing. :)

Legacy graphic - have had that comment from somebody else who suggested centering it. Since I've had it again I'll probably have another look at it at some point and tweak.

Home/News/Characters - I think I vaguely understand what you are saying but I don't really get it. Are you talking more like buttons as in just give them a proper border and stuff like that? I'm not sure how to remove their button-ness completely because I am not sure what aspect of buttons they have. Oh, except I think I do having just looked. You presumably mean the fact you can click not on the text and it acts as a link? Hadn't actually noticed that (as I say, design largely borrowed) so I shall look at it more.

Yeah, I wasn't a fan of the renders since they do look a bit cheap and also with only two graphics on the whole site I was worried it might be weird. And apologies if I didn't let you know about your graphics before. I thought I'd mailed you. I think the consensus was that they were good pictures but didn't have quite the space opera feel (they put me in mind of a sandman-esque feel - I'd say more but my knowldege of artistic terms is minimal so I can't say too this or to that because I don't know what it all means).

I think its just one of those things that none of the GM team are particularly graphical and so we've ended up with no graphics.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Are you talking more like buttons as in just give them a proper border and stuff like that?

Yes. Just visual tweaking. Background colour different from the page background for example.

I'm not sure how to remove their button-ness completely because I am not sure what aspect of buttons they have.

On this screen I can see a faint grey line between them and when I mouse over them the background lights up slightly.

[chrisvenus]

OK. I see it now. They're basically kind of weird but the buttonness comes from them being anchors that have been made into blocks and given a solid width. Should be possibly to add a margin a more noticeably different background colour, maybe some margins and borders.

Cheers for the suggestions. I'm still not sure what to do with the title image since its currently aligned with its left edge in line with the left of the nav and the title bar which lives the actual "legacy" text a bit hanging. However, I'm not sure what I can easily (or indeed not easily) align it to that makes sense. :)

Oh, alright.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Are you aware that the w3 have a CSS validator on their site?
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.legacy-empire.org.uk&usermedium=all

It's got 4 genuine CSS errors for you, which are easy to fix, but you'll kick youself it you don't notice them.

I'm less convinced about the complaints it makes about defining only one of foreground or background colour at a time, as that's frequently context sensitive...

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I'd go for centering it.

If it doesn't center trivially, stick it inside an invisible DIV of fixed width then shift it sideways within the DIV until the centre of the text matches the centre of the DIV. Then center the DIV.

(I apologise to all right-thinking individuals for the foul mix of spelling in the above paragraph, but "center" here is a technical term, not an English verb !)

[hardwired.livejournal.com]

Are you being paid for this.

If so, I would have belted them with a replanning fee after they started saying "Oh, the thing we agreed on months ago, we want it changed"

Nothing like a replanning fee to make you feel that you don't need that change.

Focusses the mind wonderfully.

[kissifa.livejournal.com]

The site looks great, Chris. I'm already pondering concepts.

[chrisvenus]

hello stranger. Long time no see. :)

No, this isn't a paid thing. Its for the game for Oxford University RPGSoc (I'm sure I must have raved about the wonderful annual Society Games which I always reckoned blew cam out of the water). I'm GMing the game and volunteered to be webmeister.

I might try hitting my colleagues with a replanning fee anyway though, likely in alcoholic beverages.

Luckily my actual work one has some fairly fixed (if hard to hit) goalposts. :)

[evath.livejournal.com]

I was thinking centre originally, it ended up there when the page was made wider. However what about moving the text right and keeping the planet where it is? moving the weight back to the middle.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Yep, that might work. It's one of those "I'd have to see it" things.

Re: Oh, alright.

[evath.livejournal.com]

It was all pretty much valid HTML/CSS before I hacked around with it to passed it over to chris (I was just going how about this etc). I say pretty much since I think the google video on the front page currently breaks the validation of the original site. And errors slip in now and again as I play without validating after.

All the backgrounds errors should end up as being defined transparent. I think.

Re: Oh, alright.

[chrisvenus]

Yeah, completely forgot about validators last night. I do know of their existance (can even do it from the webdev toolbar I think) so will play further later. I'd spotted two of the errors and agree with you about the foreground/background thing. I guess you should explicitly set it because you never know when a user style sheet might overrule something... IN practice though I can't be bothered with all that. :)

Re: Oh, alright.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think I really don't agree that they should be set in pairs, in the same selector.

Say you've got a choice of background styles, 4 of them, for the sake of argument. And four foreground styles. All of which can, in theory be combined independantly. If you right 4 background rules, and 4 foreground rules, that's (gasp!) 8 rules. On the other hand, if you want to actually spell out the explicit combinations of styles, you multiply, instead of adding and have 16 rules.

And when you're Brookes, and have styles called "orange-large" (rather than two styles, which can be combined...) We have a style sheet which has 77 combinational rules in it, rather than the 18 it actually needs.

Re: Oh, alright.

[chrisvenus]

all very true. I didn't look at the definitions but maybe the warnings are just meant to be "these things commonly cause people problems" rather than "ooooh,, not strictly banned but really, you should know better".

[zandev.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping to do some more graphics over the easter period. I need to talk through some of them with the other gms though.

[zandev.livejournal.com]

Anyway, great work on the site Chris. Thanks a lot.

I'm just feeling somewhat guilty that I've not managed to do as much as I'd hoped due to being tied up with stuff and ill. :(

Re: Oh, alright.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I really don't agree that they should be set in pairs, in the same selector.

You're right - a weaker but sufficient requirement from the POV of a web page would be that they're set in pairs on the elements, since the selectors by which this is achieved aren't terribly important. But the validator can't check this, since it depends on the HTML. So the kind of scheme you suggest is fine, but it imposes rules on the person using the CSS which may or may not be documented in a style guide somewhere.

styles called "orange-large" (rather than two styles, which can be combined...)

Yeah, the great thing about CSS is that it gets you away from that nasty physical markup. Oh, hang on a minute.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Looks good, but why are the vlinks the same colour as the alinks?

[tyasante.livejournal.com]

Website looks cool to me, and reading up makes me wish I was a member. Anyway, I hope that you get a chance to sleep at some point!

[chrisvenus]

Ah yes. Something I meant to do but see 4:30. :) I'll sort that over the weekend. Or maybe tomorrow when I need a brake from work work.

My plan is to make the Vlinks blend in more with the main text. Maybe the same colour (but keeping the underlines) or maybe closer but not quite the same colour.

[chrisvenus]

well if you're ever likely to be in oxford on tuesday nights let us know in advance and you can play (or NPC or whatever). :)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Sounds reasonable. I like it when vlinks merge more into the text, since they're less important/interesting than unvisited links. The underline should be enough to pick them out.

[narenek.livejournal.com]

Wanna ponder some with me? (Though my squick factor is probably orders of magnitude lower than unclegriff's) which may cramp your style ;-)

[narenek.livejournal.com]

A very fine website sir.

Looking forward to playing in your game.