27 Jul 2006
Oh dear. I’ve finally succumbed to the allure of Photoshop. In one moment just then it all clicked and suddenly the GIMP is vastly inferior. Now I’m going to find myself trying GIMPshop or something ridiculous. Not that it’s ridiculous at all, because the GIMP remains an infinitely faster and ligher-weight program that performs admirably… it’s just not as feature rich.
Please note, above statements should not be taken as constituting a revelation of sudden visual-creativity to the point of designer prodigy: my creativity remains as it always has been (take that as you will; I still think my crowning design achievement would have been the now-passed SC500 theme for this site, sad though that may be).
The straw that broke the camel’s back? Nothing complex or difficult or even unusual. It’s just layer/selection scaling in the GIMP is excruciating when juxtaposed against it’s $900 rival. Sigh. So I might end up purchasing CS2 plus Macromedia stuff under an academic license sometime in the future.
25 Jul 2006
I tried Nvu ages back when it was still fairly new (but a while after the fork from Composer) and was pretty uninspired by the whole experience. Just recently I’ve been giving it a whirl for more complicated semantic markup (i.e. tables) and it’s performed admirably! You’ll note in the screenshot the HTML tag view gives you a pretty precise look at what’s going on. I managed things with regular tabbing between HTML tag and Source views (the Source syntax highlighting still isn’t realtime, which is a bit disappointing) — this is really helpful in reducing the time it takes to churn out good quality tables. You can also create unsemantic tables and whatever else with this, but it fixes things fairly readily and has “header” styles inbuilt for TH things, etc. The only thing it really doesn’t seem to want to do even manually is add thead elements, but if you edit them in yourself it won’t try and get rid of them.
Really good (free) tool for certain types of maintenance stuff. If it had a half-decent templating system (ala Dreamweaver Templates, which have got to be pretty simple to implement on top of an existing code base doing all the hard WYSIWYG work, etc.) I’d be seriously considering making more static page templates and handing administration over in a client-side sense using this program. Great stuff, and if you haven’t looked at it for a while/ever, worth considering.
Edit: Maybe it does have a half-decent templating system! I just saw the very prominent Insert → Templates → Insert Editable Area option. Doh, now I have to seriously think about such things. And, upon more serious reflection, the advantages afforded by web-based content management systems are generally too great to ignore. The only case it could be justified is where there’s no budget (or, in the case of volunteer work, no time), in which case chances are the website isn’t too likely to have dynamic requirements, anyway.
24 Jul 2006
I never thought I’d use my vocational training Information Technology credentials to any great effect, but have discovered otherwise in my first subject this semester (Computers in Education, part of EDUF1019). I [will, on submission of a bundle of photocopied joy (also known as certificate documentation) sitting next to me] be exempt from attendance for the rest of semester until the open-book exam in week eleven. Spectacular.
I don’t particularly believe Certificate III training in Network Administration is particularly relevant to Clarisworks, but no matter! The ramifications of this one HSC subject (and very very little associated effort/work!) are astounding!
Despite all this, some interesting stuff about education-research-specific databases, etcetera, so I might go along next week anyway as the lecturer (facilitator? It’s not a lecture nor particularly a tutorial, so I’m uncertain!) says it’ll be a bit more of the same stuff… after week 2 it’s meant to get into mundanity (important mundanity, I’m sure, but not particularly stimulating if you don’t have to!)
Maybe IT and education/arts aren’t as dichotomous as once thought… hmm. Along that line of thought, looks like Education get all the cool toys! I walked downstairs to level 2 on my way to the Computers in Education thing and there were two guys setting up a room with a Panasonic MX-70, heaps of LCD preview monitors, video distribution amps, audio gear (including valve pre-amps and other such nice thingies), and various other wonderful geeky things. It’s a pretty strange rig for an editing suite, but an even stranger security monitoring setup (like, unbelievably wasteful if that’s what it’s all for!)… but anyway, I’m hoping to figure out what on earth it’s for then spend lots of time in there by whatever means possible! Muwahahahaha.
In other uni-related news, I changed my timetable for this semester around a bit so that I don’t have an English seminar ending at 7pm and can get to The Night Train (and our Wednesday night bible study once that kicks off again in the second half of the semester) without speeding/taxis/killing small children/missing seminars. Which is always a good thing!
24 Jul 2006
Ouch. All my subjects require readers and this semester comes to a grand total of $106.25 (25 cents they charged on top for my using a credit card–the reader pricing itself isn’t that erratic). I thought I’d escaped lightly this semester until I bothered checking the UCC website, which kindly informed me all my subjects had readers. And I plan to actually read them. Shock, horror.
Has anyone else noticed this blog has suddenly become all about uni?
24 Jul 2006
Launched very very quietly about a week ago. It’s hardly content-ready but that should hopefully come over the next week or two. We’re keeping busy and hopefully there’ll be blog thingies going eventually. It’s currently built around WordPress, which is a choice I made a few months ago [and now... you finish this sentence]. The content was taking ages to get perfect so our staff team decided it’d be best just to launch it and replace the old thing. So now we’ve got an incomplete new website! ;-) But it’s getting somewhere, praise God for the gifts of technology for communicating!
The upcoming events thing doesn’t have anything yet (and should), and will be incredibly interesting. I think the calendar system is probably still too counter-intuitive (it’s a WordPress plugin designed to link to blog entries) so I probably need to look at other options for that. There’s also a distinct lack of media library aspects that could mean more work when graphics or other documents need uploading, but we can address that in good time. By address, I mean change to a real content management system. Sigh, no-one but myself to blame, really.
Speaking of church websites, I found one in the Sydney Anglican diocese that I actually like! Shock, horror! It belongs to St Peters Church Cooks River (located in St Peters the suburb, that is). I’d probably make the navigation square on the corners and if I were to use anti-aliased text make it something legible, or just plain HTML nav, but other than that I quite like the feel of the site. The less I say about markup the better, I think. It’s all done with Dreamweaver templates, which is an awesome option I’d be tempted to embrace but for the cost which we really can’t afford for the flexibility it doesn’t give compared to a multi-user CMS. One other new website of note is Moore College’s recent update. Semantically beautiful, solid design, okay CSS implementation (it… really doesn’t work too well at higher resolutions in Opera at least, I can’t be bothered opening another browser right now)
Anyway. Ours is good for the minute. It’s getting better, promise. And we’ll have half-decent creatives for it sometime in the hopefully-not-too-distant future once the one or two graphic designers in our midst are politely roped into creating such things :) I’d love to see more blog content, publication of more material we produce internally (most recently is the sheet on “How to choose a good church”, but there are plenty of others), a high-quality kid’s/youth ministry section (not just for youth — Dave Blowes is trying hard there with the JAM website — but for sharing what we’re doing with parents and childrens/youth programmes at other churches), greater multimedia stuff (mostly for those who aren’t regulars at Matthias and want to see what we’re doing, but also for archival purposes), electronic giving to make that easier, and online partner database that would effectively be a searchable church directory (secured, obviously).
I’m just praying we don’t slide down the slippery path into technology dependence along the way, because it scares me so much. I’m not afraid of us turning into a church that embraces technology and uses it effectively and extensively: I’m afraid we’re going to wake up one day and will be playing a video that’s all about a passage from scripture instead of actually reading the bible itself in a meeting. I’m not afraid of the power of media under God: I’m afraid we’ll see the power of media and slowly God could slip from the picture as we think we can evoke a response using it without turning to His word.
This is the single most difficult thing for me about being involved with technology implementation in an Evangelical church in Sydney. We’re new to this stuff. The difficult thing is that it hasn’t been done before (except in Pentacostal/’charismatic’/AoG circles, which are slightly different — I won’t comment further for fear of saying anything divisive here), and even where it has been it’s not been done holistically. Approaching media is approaching the world’s way of communicating, which is so deceptive and shallow and often ill-informed. The challenges that face us are relatively new, though their essence is not. We must hold onto what we believe whilst trying to communicate those beliefs as clearly and effectively as possible — but our communication is nothing without the growth provided by God.
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.
– 1 Corinthians 3:5-9
Planting and watering can take the form of a DVD or a website or a sermon in MP3 format as readily as it could a book or an evangelistic sermon: none of these things are anything without the growth provided by God.