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