Sunday 9/9/01 9:06 PM ET

I had an idea for the main page with listings sort of like they are now. Straight down the side with seasons and pop up pictures to help navigate the site. Originally it was going to be the popup pictures and a caption to go with the pictures but after playing with Fireworks a little, I figured I couldn't get a constant space to add the text for the captions. Some of our captions are huge. Plus, I was concerned that I'd be giving too much away if I did that. It was bad enough that I was already giving away some of the plots with the pictures. Didn't want to spoil the stories by giving away more.

So Thursday night I designed the site. Had it all laid out with layers and frames to control the popup pictures. I really did work my butt off. I wanted to get the site redesign up Friday morning ...

THE FRIDAY FROM HELL.

Friday started with trying to nuke the old graphics on the site. Thursday night I had made some changes to our directory structure so a lot of the pages had to be reuploaded anyway. With this in mind I decided to nuke the old graphics on the site and reupload them when I reuploaded the site. I honestly thought this wasn't going to take any time. Last time I did it (season 3), it only took about an hour to nuke all the graphics and upload the new ones. Oh how we've grown since then. The process JUST TO DELETE EVERYTHING took 2 hours.

Reuploading and uploading everything after that ... well, let's just go with Friday was a pretty bad day anyway. My dad had another panic attack that landed him in the emergency room. He's fine and the doctor told him the best thing they've ever told him -- calm down, there's nothing wrong with your heart -- go home and try calm down. He didn't like it a bit, but it was true. If you look at his records we've been up here for four years now and he's been in the emergency room with panic attacks maybe 30 times.

Anyway, I used the stress of what was going on that afternoon to fire me up to do the re-redesign.

Did I mention re-redesign?

Oh yes ...

After the horror of uploading everything taking up most of the day on Friday I realized that with layers and frames the download times for anyone on 56k would be absolutely horrible. All of the pictures I used I had recycled from the strips and it didn't make any sense to me to have you all have to redownload them as parts of the indexes for the seasons. So back to Fireworks I go.

I'll says this, if photoshop is too complex for you and you're focusing on web pages, Fireworks from Macromedia is one hell of a product. Paired with Dreamweaver and you have a web addict's dream. The package is a delight to use and I'm highly addicted to both. When I went back to Fireworks this time all I needed was the names of the pictures and to change one part of the link on each mouseover to load the picture I wanted over the part of the slice on the page. It was that easy. Told you it was a cool little graphics program.

So Friday night was spent making the changes to the site and Saturday was spent fine tuning things and uploading again.

This leads to Sunday night where I'm brain dead, the site is up and working again, and I'm banging my head to "Smooth Criminal" by Alien Ant Farm.

Get down with your bad selves.

k9

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