The air conditioner for the back office is busted and it ain't getting fixed.

I feel kind of bad about it, partially because I'm in the back office but mostly because I'm on the outs with management w.r.t. the air conditioning situation (e:zobar,68) [woops].

So today I went out and got a 6-pack of icy-cold Sam Adams for the back office. [It is important to know that the back office and the front office are separate enough that we may as well be in separate buildings.] Later on, the assistant music editor came back to chat about our upcoming citywide battle-of-the-bands thing (e:zobar,79) . Of course I offered him a bottle, and of course he accepted. I did not expect that, after the meeting, he would come back with two 6-packs of icy cold beer of his own for the office. Now Video and Editorial are in on it, and nothing is getting done.

Now we've got AirTunes set up in the back office and one of the front office people is djing for us. I got a link to Bar Stool Racing and we got videos of dudes taking on four other dudes and winning and the whole place has just gone to hell. This is kind of a crappy company to work for, but where else could you get away with this much fucking around?

Wally is my hero. Perhaps that's a bad thing.

- Z

On the one hand, what a weirdo.
On the other hand, can you blame him?



- Z

First things first: (e:libertad,79) got me thinking about the environment, sort of - so my new user sound is '(Nothing But) Flowers' by the Talking Heads gather:0052634001152745342

I'm a little cheesed off about work- I got the last three articles dumped on my desk at 5:30 this evening, a half hour after I was supposed to have already been at my mom's house to tend to her dog. One of them was supposed to be a web exclusive that we were going to promote on the cover, but it's in the paper this week. Is it just me, or does something cease to be a web exclusive once you run it through the press? Ohhh.... just the video is exclusive to the web, because that's a special thing. Wouldn't it be more impressive if we did run the video in the paper? Pick the most important 54 frames and print them in the corner of every page so you can flip through them real fast?

The moral of the story is: the dog pooped all over the floor.

- Z

_______________
ps. The video is kind of blah, but it's worth it just to see Antoine Thompson try to say that he supports gay marriage without actually saying that he supports gay marriage. Also, props to Sam Hoyt for showing up and going on-record, though his argument that gay marriage would be good for Buffalo's economy is, like, really weird.

Dear sir or madam:

My name is [Eric]. I'm the features editor at City Newspaper in Rochester. We're currently preparing to completely overhaul our website, giving it both a redesign and massive content upgrade. I was looking at [your] website and was impressed by some of the features. I was wondering, does your paper create the site in-house, or do you contract with a web provider/designer?

If you could back to me on this at your earliest convenience I would greatly appreciate it.

Sincerely,
[Eric]

- Z

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, (e: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.