glerg, with a side of good stuff ~

[lookingland]

this morning i woke up thinking about how i had (oops) missed posting the Monday Millennium recap. then i realized it was thursday and boy did i ever miss it! i guess i got bogged down in other truck and deals and annoying life junk of no interest to any of you. suffice it to say, all is well in the world and despite the inhospitably cold temps recently and about of week of missing time, the month of march is rolling through with thus far record productivity.

i launched the Reconstruction site over at EpiGuide last sunday and got some excellent feedback on some of my lack of intuitive web-building. i made some changes to help the site be more user-friendly and i think it's looking pretty great. now i just need to get on the stick about creating content. i've fallen behind and am nowhere near where i wanted to be in terms of catching up to where it was the story left off three (or four?) years ago. beh.

anyway, this is completely random, but here's two recent cool articles on interesting bits of ephemera related to the man in the funny hat:

Collector: Lincoln photo uncovered in Grant album; and ~

In Lincoln's watch, mystery revealed

fun stuff ~ !

: D

Comments

[ironichles.livejournal.com]

Now that's a pretty damn cool site!! Love it! And you had to post some watch porn dammit.

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

oooo baby, check out these gears. (i know what you mean ~ watches are just too amazing).

: D

thanks for the compliment! as i mentioned before, you deserve kudos for inspiration ~ so thank you twice!

[ironichles.livejournal.com]

So loads of questions of course. Where did you get the font for the title and how much did you fiddle with it? Did you make the decorations for the right side menu banner yourself? Pretty cool stuff.

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

the font is Ruritania (http://www.dafont.com/ruritania.font) combined and tweaked with something more banal (i think it might be Goudy, but i don't recall off the top of my head). i did very little fiddling (i'm just not any good with vectors and i think you need to be to make nice titles). i did some kerning, but otherwise, i just feel lucky to find nice fonts.

the decorative banner on the right side menu is a mutt created from parts of old scanned 19th century graphics (one was an advertisement for Hamilton's photo gallery in Ontario, the other for a Photo Artist in Chicago). i sort of built the various pieces out of the tops and bottoms using a lot of PhotoShop (and its many wonderful features!).

thank you for the questions and the interest ~ it's fun to share all the little details!

: D

[ironichles.livejournal.com]

Do you have any page tracking enabled on your site like Google Urchin? I'm kind of curious to know in the long run how much your readers spend on text vs graphics (comic) I'm slowly getting the impression that there's a limit on how much text a blog post/article can be before users switch off (regardless of the quality of the text)

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

arghh, i composed a lovely response to this and el-jay ate it. so annoying.

the sort of it was: yes, i do have a stats tracker thingie, but i don't pay that much attention to it in all honesty. if people want to come and read, that's great. if they just browse through the pictures, that's great too.

i'm the same way in how i read online. i don't have the stamina for long blocks of text, but sometimes if a picture catches my attention, i'll stick with it to read the writing.

for those reasons, i'm trying to keep Reconstruction visually pleasant and the text to relatively short, easily digestible scenes with lots of things to click on for those of click-happy temperaments ~ ha!

: D

[bachsoprano.livejournal.com]

Does this mean I can finally blurb you? *so excited!*

I spend a little time the other night cruising around Reconstruction (so much there! It's like Myst, all these pieces that connect in such subtle ways!) and didn't have trouble finding my way around, just so you know! :)

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

thanks cat!

i originally wanted it to just "be" what it was and peeps could explore and figure it out (or not), but i also don't want to create an intentionally hostile environment and a lot of feedback seemed to indicate that my non-welcoming choice might be perceived as snooty, so i tried to make compromises that i can live with ~ and i did and i can and it's all good. hahahahahaha ~

there's still some dead ends and things that need cleaning and rearranging, but yeah, the site's pretty much good to go. like i said, i need to really work on the content now. lots and lots and lots of writing ahead.

: D

[minstrel-ivare.livejournal.com]

If it is indeed Lincoln, it would be the only known photo of the 16th president in front of the executive mansion and a rare find, as only about 130 photos of him are known to exist.

I'm still so shocked when people say "only 130 photos"! That is so many pictures! But picture #131 is still a sweet find, and the watch story is pretty fantastic.

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

i agree ~ i don't get the whole 130 thing either. he was the most photographed president since the invention of the camera and very few people in that era were more photographed!

i wish the article showed a closer picture so we could actually see him!

: D

[countessariadne.livejournal.com]

The Reconstruction site is looking great! ♥

Did you see this (http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Photography-collector-Keya-Morgan-holds-he-believes-rare-unpublished-photograph/photo//090310/480/982bb8527d5a427d9b8896f41c69c344//s:/ap/20090310/ap_on_re_us/lincoln_photograph_uncovered#photoViewer=/090310/480/f094b864f52847ffaf34d1eb9a483d6d) close up? It's still not clear at all, but it's better than the guy just holding it in his hand...

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

oh, that's a much better picture, thank you!

looks fairly possible, though i am surprised that he would be standing out of doors with no hat on (perhaps?). i don't think, if i looked at the image (even through a loupe) that i could immediately conclude it was Lincoln (the scrawl on the back of the picture is really the only "evidence"). the picture at Gettysburg was far more convincing.

either way, it's super cool!

: D

[redcoatcat.livejournal.com]

WOW what a layout!! :)
Very nice!

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

thank you! i'm so bad at this, so the fact that it looks good surprises and delights even me!

: D

[sparowe]

Good luck on the site-building. I'm bogged down on a similar project, minus the HTML. Just don't want to deal with some of the things that I have to work on. :(

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

sometimes it seems overwhelming, doesn't it? i hate starting new stuff; the mountain always looks impossible to climb. the nice thing is remembering that one foot in front of the other sill get you up to the top eventually!

: D

[geckobird.livejournal.com]

The website looks fantastic! I'm a bit excited for it!

That's really interesting information concerning the watch. I like how that tall tale turned out to be true.

130 photos... Lincoln certainly did a lot of posing!

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

Lincoln the fashionista! whooooo!

thanks for looking at the site. i'm excited too! looking forward to getting it rolling along!

: D