A New Face

I’ve updated the theme for our site. You might notice the interactive archives at the bottom of the page and the swanky flickr images at the right.

This is still a work in progress: the flickr images aren’t cached so I’m pinging flickr each time the home page loads. The old photo album plugin (FAlbum) is broken — it just stopped working — so I need to find all the references in our older posts and fix them. Plus I need to bring back the search and contact features, but at least the new face is up.

Because we no longer live in Newburyport, we changed the name back to just metrocat. The server changed names some time ago, now the site reflects that.

Fresh for Spring

I started out wanting to redesign my nerdy Web site nerd.newburyportion.com, but instead I came up with a new design that best suited our shared site.

Almost a million years ago I toyed with the idea of having a banner photograph at the top of the page, however, I didn’t seem to be able to find any photos that worked. When I was perusing my iPhoto library this morning, I came up with 9 good photos and probably a half dozen acceptable ones. The key is to be ruthless about cropping.

The banner is 800×200 pixels or a 4:1 aspect ratio. My camera captures photos in a standard 35mm 3:2 ratio and Anna’s the common digital ratio of 4:3, so you’re looking for a great slice of the photo rather than the whole thing. Lots of photographs were wonderful but because the real focal points didn’t fall in a narrow band, I couldn’t use them.

Can you guess which one of the banners is my favourite?

Of course, there are also some new features: Ajax-powered searching and contact forms. For those of you not on top of the latest Web 2.0 trends, that’s pure gold, man. It’s all the rage. People are raising serious capital just to replace your tired old Web pages with Ajax-enhanced ones for your viewing pleasure.

I’ve got some additional ideas that are proving just a little difficult to execute. So I decided to postpone them and roll out the design as is. Please let us know what you think.

Brain Freeze

As part of my post-operative care, I’ve been irrigating my sinuses with salt water. The instructions pretty clearly state that I should use warm or room-temperature water.

This morning I made some more “nose water” with the filtered water from the fridge. In went 3 tsp of salt (iodised instead of kosher, sorry) and a tsp of baking soda, which for some reason known only to her and her cadre of winged monkeys, my wife keeps in the bathroom. And up my nose went the “nose water”.

Now I understand why they recommend using warm water: my brain is still frozen.