making sausages
Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.
- Otto von Bismarck
If that were true, then why is that show on the Discovery Channel, the one where they show, amongst other things, sausages being made, so popular1? Because it’s fun to watch things being made. On that premise, I offer, for your amusement, a window into the creation of a website. Last year, I developed www.thecocoagallery.com, an online presence for ACKC Cocoa Bar, my friends Eric and Rob’s stores in Washington, DC and Alexandria, VA.
Now, I am working on a site for Eric’s other venture, Artfully Paper, located in Alexandria, VA. The domain, artfullypaper.com, still points to their old site. The new site is accessible via IP at http://161.58.102.185/. First, some expectation management:
- It’s a work in progress, so you never know what you might see when you drop in.
- I am using several pieces of JavaScript that I can only test on the server. So it’s not just a draft gallery, it’s an actual test tube.
- I’m testing on IE, Firefox, and Safari. While I’m working out bugs, some things might work in one browser, and not in another.
For anyone interested:
- The drop-down menus are via HV Menu.
- The Apple-esque cover flow is via Finn Rudolph’s ImageFlow picture gallery.
- The image pup-up functionality within ImageFlow is via Torstein Honsi’s HIghslide JS JavaScript thumbnail viewer.
Oh, and what of poor Otto? Ok, so he did unify Germany in the second half of the 19th century. But most of us know only of the WWII Battleship that bore his name, the largest warship of her time and one of the most famous ever. The warship that, after the Battle of the Denmark Straight, where she sank the HMS Hood, the pride of the British navy, was hunted and sunk by the same at the famous direction of Winston Churchill: “Sink the Bismarck.”