Challenge #1: Choosing a Design Idea

Over this past weekend I worked on the "How to Design a House" section for my web site. Of course, the first hurdle was choosing an appropriate design idea. It's not that I don't have any ideas--I have many, it's that I found it tough to find an idea that was both "different" and yet close enough to the mainstream so as to make a reasonable example.

I actually do have a "real" design commission (well, "real" in the sense that it's someone else's idea). A friend of mine and his wife want to build a house with a 30' clear dome, buried in a hillside. He's even found a company that can make a 30' Lexan dome. Yep, that would about do it. The problem with using this idea for my "how to" example (and I spent a day and a half working on it), is that it's so far outside the norm.

Yes, that's the challenge. We want an example that's representative of the kinds of houses a typical amateur designer might want, but yet straightforward enough to cover most of the more common aspects of house design. And truthfully, if all you want is same-old same-old, you don't need to buy Home Designer Pro and spend a lot of time messing around with it. There are thousands (and thousands) of house designs available on the web. I'm pretty sure you can find one you like, if you look. But, considering that you're someone who doesn't want Vanilla, what can we come up with that isn't flavored Jalapeno Fudge Used Motor Oil Ripple?

I think I have an idea, and it's definitely not vanilla. It's not too bizarre, but it might have a few "complexities" that most people won't encounter. We'll see how it goes. I may have something to post to the web site in a week or two.

Oh, my good friend at sporkspace.org finally got his home page up and working, and he placed a link to my web site on his home page. Gosh! Check out his Antichrist Detector (assuming he gets the web service working, again).

Designing with Home Designer Pro

I've been thinking ...

What if I did a house design and documented the steps from concept to finished model?

OK. So, who cares?

I don't know, but this subject interests me. If you have an idea for a home, but aren't too sure where to start (and you don't have the cash to hire an architect, but are creative and individual enough to want to realize your own ideas), then this might be for you.

There are many, many tricks and techniques needed to "make the thing look like you want it to look," and I don't (yet) know all of them. But I do know my way around the tool pretty well, and I'm also pretty creative. I don't want to brag, though. I'd rather let my works speak for me.

So ... I'm going to fish around for a starting idea, and document the process here. That is, document my parenthetical comments and observations in this blog, and produce pages on my web site that detail both the process (the what) and the techniques (the how. This blog also allows others to horn in on the fun and comment/ask questions along the way.

All you need, then, is a copy of Home Designer, version 6.0. I'm using Home Designer Pro 6.0, but you can probably achieve similar results with the "lesser" Home Designer Suite 6.0 product.

Let's begin.

The Orc, Spork, and Blog

Just visited a good friend's blog, called The Orc, Spork, and Blog. So, in retaliation, I thought I would blog his blog just so our blogs would get cross-linked.

He doesn't like my blog theme, though. Of course, I don't especially like it, either. Just give me some time to get it changed (to something more appropriate). First things first.

Now! All New! All Mozilla Firefox!

Now, this former MS techie has abandoned IE in favor of Mozilla Firefox. Smaller, faster, cooler, easier to use. Of course, it still has some small bugs (as if IE didn't). I especially like the "tab" feature that allows you to open multiple windows inside the same instance of the browser (I hate all those stacked task bar icons). Switch from page to page with just a click. Also, if you display large images (such as those on my web site), you can just click anywhere in the image to enlarge it to full size, then click again to restore the image to its "optimized" size.

Tres cool, mes amis!

Go here: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ to find FireFox. I recommend it.

CSS: The Adventure Begins

I've been reading a lot about CSS, lately, especially since my web site template came with one. I've modified it, some, but I haven't done anything very interesting. The template used tables for page layout, so I was adding, deleting, and modifying table rows and columns till the cows came home. At the time it didn't seem overly tediuous, but that was before I began learning about CSS "float" and the properties that can be applied to <div> tags. Ahem! Very quickly it has become apparent that all the table crap can be replaced with CSS.

Why do I care? Even more relevant, why should you care?

Using the <table>, <tr>, and <td> tags places a lot of HTML "cruft" in the content that's not at all related to the "content". Tables are not text; tables are not images. Text and images are our content, and our HTML files should (primarily) contain the content. "We're only interested in the content, ma'am. Let's stick to that." CSS defines the layout. The presentation. Our modern multi-tiered application development wisdom says that presentation and business logic should be separated into distinct "layers" so that one can be changed without affecting the other. In any business application, the "business logic" is the meat, and the UI is just the "fluff" that's needed only to please the user. But of course UI is important, or we would still be using god-awful ugly green screens filled with cryptic codes and unintelligible instructions.

So (and not to overly tax my metaphor), if I care about the content of my web site (and I do), then I should worry more about what's there, as opposed to what it looks like. Of course, I do worry about how it looks, because if it looks terrible, no one will want to visit it. Ugly guys don't get dates (except from blind girls). IMHO, the building and maintenance of the web site content should consume a greater portion of time than does the maintenance of the look-and-feel. That's because content is universal and enduring. UI "fluff" is a flag whipping in the winds of change. And above all, I'm a substance over appearances kind of guy.

How's that?

So, what am I saying? Only this: I plan to redo my site using CSS for almost all the formatting (probably all of it can be done with CSS); eliminate the tables (they're so 90's, after all); and make the whole site arguably a breeze to modify as time goes on. As a creative person, my tastes and latest ideas change rapidly, so perhaps my web site should change to suite the desires of the moment. Yes, indeed. Perhaps it should.

BTW, if you are interested in CSS, here are a couple of links to places that the CSS novice should go: http://csszengarden.com/ and http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp. The CSS Zen Garden has links to many sites offering CSS tutorials, tips and tricks, and discussions of all the bugs prevalent in today's "modern" browsers. Think IE is perfect? *Ahem*

Well, that's all I have for now. Stay tuned, this may get more interesting before it becomes less interesting.

Prepare to be Assimilated: The Blog Begins

This is my blog. There are many others like it, but this one is mine. Hmmm, on the suggestion of a friend, I decided to add a blog to my web site. Perhaps (in my copious free time) I will feel compelled to post my observations on the world. Perhaps not.
No matter. I have a couple of ideas for creating some content that would be suitable for a blog, so we'll see how this goes. I can always go back to more traditional methods if things don't work as well as I expect.