Sunday, August 3, 2014

The Secretly Secret Project Secrecy Continues Gaining Security - Updated

You can get a lot of money talking like that in Bluffdale ... or by giving lap dances in cocktail lounges to the NSA guys.  Either way will work.  There is one trouble with both of those ideas in that I am not in Bluffdale.

There is relative silence lately which some may take as a blessing.  The silence is not medically-induced but rather it's programmer trance.  I have kicked any drug, except nicotine, as I liked but this programmer stuff .... arrggghhh!

Announcements slow as this part is trickier to develop but this is when it gets interesting and it's the same deal as with chess:  it's not enough to win the game, you have to annihilate your opponent and destroy his heart, his soul, and any hope he ever had for becoming more than a sniveling mass of corruption in a gutter somewhere.  Welcome to computer programming.  It's you or the computer.  May the best whatever it is win.


The number one thing I have heard from people about Valerie's paintings is what are the names.  Well, I'll tell you.  I have no idea what the names are ... but ... the structure I'm building now will cover that just fine ... plus media types, show in which it has appeared, etc.

Geek alert:  the information is stored in a flat file with sequential records and all data delimited by percent markers.  This makes it very fast loading plus, and this is a big one, that file can be easily edited by a novice on any word processor.  Upload the image file, type, type, type on the inventory file.  Presto, your new work is online.  It's not that easy right this minute but ultimately it will be.

Since I like you all and you're so much cooler than those nong nongs on social networks, you can take a look at the work-up file if you like.  Valerie Fraser Inventory is already strong enough to give you a pretty good idea where this can go but do NOTE all of the information in it is fake just to use for the work-up.  I may also include a thumbnail with each image name but that would slow down the page load quite a bit.  In any case, the object is to list all the names with info and give a hot link to view each image.  The number of the images that could be handled in this way is only limited by available memory (i.e. a very lot).

Think huge.  There is no limit to disk space or bandwidth for this site.


Updated:  The Valerie Fraser Inventory page is looking tidy.  The information on it is, as yet, thin but the titles are fairly accurate and they hot link to the full image.

There is more stuff coming but I haven't received it yet.

Part of me thinks the site needs to be snazzed-up a bit to prevent it from too webbish but the main principle driving this is to keep it low key so it does not compete with the art.  Putting popups, ticker tapes or any sort of annoying blinking rubbish like that is out of the question.

I write this stuff as commentary is welcome.  I'm not interested in critiquing the work as my focus is entirely showing it the best way possible so any positive thought on improvement to the site is welcome.  The background is pure white whereas normally I would use snow white or some other to soften it and warm it.  Pure white means the paintings jump as much as a digital environment can throw them at you.

The Harley Move icon on the left of the screen is sitting there to see if that's cool or it sucks.  It might be cool to make it so no matter which page you are reading when you click it, the click will take you somewhere else ... but ... what would make that interesting could be if it were a random pick.  When you start thinking up tricky stuff like this, there's always only one good answer:  hit the sack.

I'm fairly pleased with how it develops.  More to come.

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