📅 July 2006

I hate the way that photo sharing sites are laid out. I have a big screen, I want to see a big motherfuckin' picture - not acres of whitespace. 500x375 is not high-resolution, Yahoo*. If I had a small screen, I'd still want to see a big motherfuckin' picture and the caption and not have to scroll all over the screen to see it, Photobucket. You should also enable random-access navigation from the photo display page, not just from the thumbnails page, Apple.

But now it seems that Editorial now wants to run a picture page with a significant online component. So I talk a lot of trash but now it's my turn to step up and show y'all how it's done.

This is how it's done:

Notice how the thumbnails page scales with the size of your screen. Big screen, lots of thumbnails; small screen, fewer thumbnails. I do not try to jam five thumbnails across in a table because that would not work for many people. Notice how the photo takes up as much of the screen as you will give it. You cannot assume that people will have large screens, nor should you assume that people will have small screens. This design does not seriously break down until below 800x600. All the thumbnails are displayed on the left side of the screen, so you do not have to return to the thumbnails page to explore our photos. The title, photographer, and caption are clearly visible onscreen at all times. Most of the graphical elements are grayscale against a black background so that the photograph really pops. We do not have any dancing bears labeled with every state of the union offering you great mortgage rates. Every photograph has a unique and descriptive URL. It offers a photofeed/photocast compatible RSS feed [which will be better promoted]. The buttons at the bottom of the screen do not do anything, giving our users the opportunity to wonder what the Hell is going on [because it isn't done yet].

<geeky>
I put together this design in Firefox in one day. It took me another full day to get it to look the same in IE as it does in Firefox and Safari. Now I understand why photo sites are not laid out this way.

For starters, no browser will scale images to 'the largest size possible while still maintaining aspect ratio.' This seems like an oversight to me. As a consequence, the large photo is wrapped in a very small Flash stub that loads the image and scales it appropriately.

But more importantly, if you want a box to go from the top of the screen to the bottom, IE will not let you do

[box]#thumbs {
    bottom: 128px;
    overflow: auto;
    position: absolute;
    right: 0;
    top: 0;
    width: 256px;
}[/box]

because it is wack-ass and does not understand that top:/bottom: is a valid substitute for top:/height: and thus totally ignores the bottom: [and also, coincidentally, throws away the overflow: as well]. Thankfully, its wack-ass CSS engine will let you specify a Javascript expression for the value of a CSS attribute:

[box]#thumbs {
    bottom: 128px;
    height: expression('' + (document.body.clientHeight - 128) + 'px');
    overflow: auto;
    position: absolute;
    right: 0;
    top: 0;
    width: 256px;
}[/box]

What the fuck is that?! Now- I have to admit that there is some perverse part of my id that expression() appeals to, but that doesn't mean that I should have had to use it.
</geeky>

At any rate- my humble contribution to online photo sharing.

- Z

_______________

• Yes, @ajay - Flickr has some very cool features. I like the one where you can draw a box around the dude's johnson and totally make juvenile comments about it. If I ever took photos I would put them on Flickr just so I could do that. No I am not joking.

If i'd known eminent design had custom ramin i'd have gone there more often.

So you're hanging out at the mall with your friends, and you see a tornado coming. Quick! What do you do?

No! You do not get your phone out and point it at the tornado! What is wrong with you?!



- Z

who checks out other peoples' groceries in the checkout line and thinks completely baseless snarky and judgmental thoughts about their diet?

- Z

So I saw An Inconvenient Truth yesterday and it freaked my shit right out. I am not in the proper mental state to have to deal with tornadoes in Cheektowaga. You can't just spring that shit on somebody. By the time I got home I was convinced these are the End Times and it'll be two months before we're living on rooftops and killing each other over rat meat. Bad juju.

This week I got meeting'd to death. I'm not sure whether I am glad that everyone has taken a sudden interest in the website, or chagrined. Either way, we're going to have a new home page starting next issue and some interesting ideas coming down the pipe shortly.

One very cool thing we want to do is take our regular interview-with-local-bands piece and turn it into an Epic Cyber Battle of the Bands. We run two bands in the paper every week, side by side, and there is an Ultimate Popularity Contest of Ultimate Destiny every week on the website, where you can listen and vote. After eight weeks [sixteen bands, eight winners] we match up the winners for the next four weeks. The last four bands standing play a show, and the winner gets ... I dunno, but it's something big.

Another idea that's a little further down the road is we want to put together some sort of participatory video website. [I think I may have mentioned this before; @mike you should pay attention.] On the one side of the balance, we have traditional commercial television, where the station produces and controls all the content and all the shows suck. On the other side of the balance, we have YouTube and Public Access where the content comes directly from the public and all the shows suck. We want to split the difference - solicit pilot episodes from the public, try to separate the interesting and novel from the ho-hum, and contract a short, renewable series from the better producers. We want to find interesting people on the fringe and give them a forum for their work. I think this could be very cool.

- Z