The saga begins

My ISP tells me that if I want to change my username I will have to cancel my whole account and create a new one. For this reason alone I do not have an ISP-based homepage as such. Now that I have my new online web presence, my persona, my alter-ego, I would like to set up a homepage as http://homepages.myisp.com/jedkantos but I am told that I will have to use http://homepages.myisp.com/myoldusername instead, which I no longer want to use. Yes, and I’m too cheap to register my own domain name too! So, instead I am creating my “home” on the internet here at Zude.

I have been looking at the Zudescapes of some of the other Zuders, and have picked up some great ideas. I found a really cool Flash-based hit counter widget on The Jack’s Zudescape which I will use on all of my new Zudescape pages. Also, I saw a very cool idea on 5Alive’s Zudescape which I am swiping as well. Their Main page has a door on it that you click on to enter their Zudescape proper. This got me to thinking… what if I did that with a Flash splashpage? How wicked would that be?! Of course, I don’t have Macromedia Flash and probably wouldn’t know how to use it if I did, but I know that there are websites that can generate a Flash splashpage for you. So that’s on the plans for my new Zudescape now too.

In keeping with the Barsoom theme for my new Zudescape, I have chosen the colors red, orange, yellow, brown, tan, and white, to reflect the colors of Mars, the Red Planet. I haven’t defined specifically which shades and hues of these colors I will use yet. I wanted a suitable background image and spent some time doing a Google Image search. Finding a whole heap of images from the Mars Rover, I soon found out that the reality of the surface of Mars is a lot more bland and boring than the colorful planetscape of Barsoom, as portrayed in the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. So, instead, I went for the artistic, stylized look. I am currently waiting on a reply from one artist for permission to use one of his works as my Zudescape background, and have also found a very nice website called Solar Voyager that is a collective of artists that focus on space and planetscape artwork. If I don’t get permission from the first artist I approached, I now have a whole forum of great artists to pester for permission to use their artwork on my Zudescape.

In the meantime, some of the artworks I saw on my trip through Google Image Search inspired me with one idea that I could implement immediately for a nice background. I like playing computer games occasionally, and have recently been really getting into Empire Earth. The Map Editor in this game, like many others, is nothing more than a 3D modelling tool with fairly simple controls that even someone as artistically challenged as myself can use. So, after playing a few hours of the game, I finally got back into productive mode and started designing a background for my Zudescape using the Map Editor. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be though. Even a 1024 x 768 screenshot looked diminutive as my Zudescape background without tiling it. And, of course, I had to work a lot harder to get an image that would tile nicely.

Eventually I made a background that I am reasonably happy with. It could do with more tweaking, and will no doubt be scrapped altogether when someone with more artistic talent than me allows me to use one of their pictures. But for now I have a background. Rather than inserting it into every new page I create of my new Zudescape, I have created a new page called _template and added the background to it, then I exported the page as a *.zpg file. Now, whenever I start building a new page of my Zudescape, I just import the *.zpg file into a blank page, and I have my background. I will continue using this technique as I build my Zudescape, adding common elements such as a navigation menu, logo, etc and then saving the page as a template. Eventually I will have a collection of templates for my Zudescape, following the evolution of the standard layout for my site, step-by-step.

So, next I created the page which would be used as my new Enter page, (a-la 5Alive’s idea). This is the first page that the public will be able to see of the new development, and will also be the first page that users view when they nagivate to my Zudescape. Creating a blank page and importing my template, I then started dragging and dropping objects. A quick trip to my Tools page, and the 3D Text Maker website which is embedded and rolled up like a scroll waiting on my desk, resulted in a scrolling marquee welcoming visitors. Then I unrolled the Glassy Buttons Generator website and made a couple of buttons to sit at either end of the marquee. Its not great web design, but as I have already admitted, I’m not an artist! Satisfied with my efforts so far, I then dropped a copy of the hit counter widget that I found on The Jack’s Zudescape. I can’t add this object to my template as each instance of it will require a new globally unique identifier (unless I want all of the pages to show the same number of hits).

Finally, for now, I had to link the new Enter Page to my existing Zudescape. This proved to be a little more difficult than I first thought. Initially I wanted to use a Flash button, with pulsating green light and sound effects as you hover your mouse over it or click it. My attempts to do this met with failure, despite using the FlashButtons generator. I uploaded the *.swf file to my Zude local files and obtained the file ID for it, then edited the object script to replace the *.swf filename with the file ID for my local copy of the Flash file. I then dropped the object script onto my Zude page. Not being too good with Flash, I gave up on this idea when my resulting object gave me a blank white rectangle on my page. Oh well, you can’t win them all! So instead I went back to my Toolbox and the GlassyButtons rollup, (after carefully deleting the Flash object and its supporting *.swf file from my local files, no point having it there if it won’t be used).

After uploading the generated button images to my local files, inserting the generated GlassyButtons code into the HEAD of my page, and dropping the object part of the script onto my Zude page, I had a wonderful button on my page that changed color when I hovered my mouse over it. I had carefully copied the internal page ID for the page that I wanted to link to when the said mouseover button was clicked, and it worked quite well, taking me to the requested page. The only problem was that it loaded the requested page inside the existing Zude page, so I ended up with two Zude toolbars at the top and two lots of advertising at the bottom of the page. Gah!

My solution to this little problem was to revisit my script and completely remove the URL reference that the script was calling. Now I end up with a pretty, color changing button that does absolutely nothing. Hang on, it’s not finished yet. Then, I went to the Object Properties, using the Zude built-in properties for my button. I edited the Action – Click property, to set the click action to load the relevant page of my Zudescape when the mouseover button is clicked. Now the script that I generated does the color changing part of the job, and the Zude built-in properties does the linking to the destination part of the job. And the page loads properly: one lot of adverts and one Zude menu bar.

Having all the elements of my new Enter Page in place for now, and having tested it all, I just had to let it loose on an unsuspecting public. For this I made great use of the page Import and Export functions of Zude, exporting both my new Enter Page and my existing Main page to my local hard drive. I then imported each into the other’s page, effectively swapping them around. I did this because it is the only way that I know of setting the contents of the Main page, which acts as the index.htm file of my Zudescape. The Main page is the one that load first when someone visits my Zudescape, so naturally I want that to be my new Enter Page. The final step of getting this all working properly was renaming the pages, and tweaking the Action – Click property of my mouseover button object to point to the proper page again, because having switched the pages over, it was left linking to itself. Lastly, my old Main page ended up inside the empty shell of the developmental stage of my new Enter Page, which was set to Private access. I just had to change it to Public and everything was working.

The first one to visit my new Enter Page, quite fittingly, was one of the 5Alive girls, and she said of it “oh my gosh its AWESOME really impressed nice work love the visit thing its awesome! good zudin.” I think she was being very generous, personally. To me it is a start, a beginning. I still want to get a picture from a real artist for the background, and also put a Flash splashpage onto it. Plus, there should be some information placed on the page, and perhaps the headlines from my latest Blog. I’ll revisit the Enter Page later, but next up I need to make the Welcome Page, which is to replace the old Main page. This is going to be the destination that the mouseover button links to, and which provides a first look at the standardized layout of my new Zudescape. The Enter Page is a one-off. It will be unique on my Zudescape. Everything else will be based on a standardized template.