Happy days!

My portfolio has gone live today. It can be found at a brand-new address.

www.anti-originals.tk

Warning: Be aware that though the site works with IE/Win and IE/Mac, the quality of the lay-out in these browsers is less then poor. Content is viewable and accesible, but it looks like crap.

At the moment I am working on the IE-version of the portfolio (with some help and ideas from April). In the meantime I have checked all major browsers, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, Safari and they all display the content properly. CSS and HTML has been checked and has validated.

I hope you will enjoy your visit there, stay on the lookout for more goodies from that direction!

Merlijn

Where to begin? At the beginning of course!

Fall Of The Moon
Fall Of The Moon is updated. As promised. A little late, I admit. I had promised to post chapter seven earlier, but my promises are worth as much as a pound of lead; sure it feels like it has the same weight as gold, but the shine is less...

Portfolio being build
For the last week and a half I have been building a page that has to become my portfolio. It will be a showcase for the various qualities I think I have (you are free to disagree). At the moment, there is only this to see. If you belong to the 90% that still browses the intarweb with IE, you are (for now) sore out of luck. So far the page will work with Mozilla, Safari and (most likely) Opera and Netscape (higher then 6.x). IE will display the page less then optimal, to make a nice understatement.
Understandably, the page will have to be accesible to all people, including the other 90% who don't browse with standards compliant browsers (muttering something about awareness and evil empires...). This means I will have to rebuild the page to make it display properly in IE as well.
I have tried to make the page as I wanted it IE-compatible, but that proved impossible, so I will make a seperate page, with less eyecandy, but functional.
As to cater to my dutch audience, both IE and standard-compliant pages will be translated into dutch as well (that would be the easy part).

You could help me out by thinking about the "tone" of the text on the portfolio page. Should it be professional, can it have some humour, etc.?

120 GB
I was running out of space on my computer, mainly due to an accumulating music-collection (No! Not pr0n!). Yesterday I bought a 120GB Maxtor HD, which I installed today. I also bought another wireless network card for my dad's laptop. So next time you see me, ask where I am, and I will probably answer that I am sitting in the garden, in the sun, with a glass of coke and a bunch of cookies next to me.

Regards,

Merlijn

P.S. The portfolio displays perfectly in Opera.

P.P.S. For those who might have thought that my relationship was over: it was, but only temporarily. Lucky me!

Fall Of The Moon is updated. Part six already.

Enjoy,

Merlijn

P.S. It's a very short chapter, I will post another chapter tomorrow.

No regrets. Ever.

Suzanne Vega, Calypso

My name is Calypso
And I have lived alone
I live on an island
And I waken to the dawn
A long time ago
I watched him struggle with the sea
I knew that he was drowning
And I brought him into me
Now today
Come morning light
He sails away
After one last night
I let him go.


My name is Calypso
My garden overflows
Thick and wild and hidden
Is the sweetness there that grows
My hair it blows long
As I sing into the wind
My name is Calypso
And I have lived alone
I live on an island
I tell of nights
Where I could taste the salt on his skin


Salt of the waves
And of tears
And though he,pulled away
I kept him here for years
I let him go


My name is Calypso
I have let him go
In the dawn he sails away
To be gone forever more
And the waves will take him in again
But he'll know their ways now
I will stand upon the shore
With a clean heart


And my song in the wind
The sand will sting my feet
And the sky will burn
It's a lonely time ahead
I do not ask him to return
I let him go
I let him go

Love,

Merlijn

The photopage that you could enjoy only part of yesterday, has been finished and put online. You can find it here. Enjoy and let me know what you think of it.

I solved the max-width bug on IE/Win for my photopages, I now can do the same on this blog. I will do so tomorrow.

Sleep tight,

Merlijn

I thought I would give you a small update on the progress of the black and white photopage I am working on. It has not gone completely live yet, but you can see the preliminary result here. As for now, pictures no. 1, 4, 6 and 13 are "live".

On a slightly related note, I straightened out the bug in the other photopage, which caused the page not to load fully in IE/Win. ">" was all it took. Bear/bare (?) with me here, I am not using any wysiwyg-editor here, just notepad, I write the pages by hand, so once in a while things don't work exactly as planned right away. For all you IE/Win users, have another look here, it works now.

Have a good night, that's what I am going to do, sleep...

Merlijn

P.S. You might notice that loading the images takes quite some time. That was a conscious decision on my part. The quality of the images has taken precedence over the loading time. They are uncompressed .jpg's, roughly 300KB each, so take your time when viewing them. Just see it as an enhancement of your viewing-pleasure, good things take time...

Sorry for you lot still on dial-up, time to upgrade.

I have made some minor changes to the main template code of this blog. The code is in and of itself nothing spectacular, but still renders completely different on Mozilla then on IE/WIN. I am glad it isn't as bad as the photo-page...

The code changed is this:

.article {
padding-top: 5px;
padding-left: 5px;
padding-right: 5px;
border: #000000 2px solid;
max-width: 550px;
margin-top: 10px
}
(changed code in bold)

This is a screenshot of how this page looks in Mozilla (1.4). Two things are important:
1. I have limited the width of the "article-window" to 550 pixels, thereby assuring that this page renders the same on screens with a resolution of 800x600 and higher. (As if...) (This is not visible in this screencapture.) It limits only me in the width of the images I display here.
2. There is a notable gap between the two articles, namely 10 pixels, as defined by the margin-top expression in the code.
It looks clear, readable and clean, and should render the same in all browsers on all platforms on every kind of screen. It does not, look at the next image:

This is a screenshot of how this page looks in IE5/WIN (and probably not all that different in IE6/WIN). Again two things to note:
1. Not visible in this screencapture, IE completely ignores the max-width value, instead broadening the article across the remainder of the screen, no matter what screen-resolution you view it with, it always fills up the screen. This doesn't give problems, except that my carefully crafted lay-out is messed up. Sigh.
2. More important: the margin between the articles is gone! There is no visible gap between the articles, leaving an ugly double-line. It is ugh, very ugh. Again, IE has completely ignored a valid CSS-statement, in this case the margin-top value.

What do I want to say with this? Trying not to rant against certain software-writers (looking in the direction of Redmond), it would be nice if standards (or actually proposals) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.org) were followed more strictly, thereby easening the writing of pages that render the same on any browser, on any system, on any screen. Alas, a man can dream...

Merlijn

Part five of Fall Of The Moon is online. It is here.

Regards,

Merlijn

Something I had wanted to do for a long time, choose from the roughly 400 photo's I have taken so far with my camera the ones that I thought would be publishable. Don't be afraid, only nine (9) have been chosen to be published this time. I have chosen to publish only black and white, three portraits, three nature photos and three architectural photos. You can judge them here.

It was rather unfortunate for me to publish only black and white because that meant that one photo had to be left out. This one:



I hope you will enjoy the photos,

Merlijn

P.S. This photopage is giving even more problems then the last one. Both CSS and HTML4.01 are fully W3C.org validated, but IE5/WIN and IE6/WIN don't display the table (with the images and links) at all. Not even a notion of them being there. They do show up in the source code, though. I have really no clue as of what is happening here. The code is so clean I would eat from it, and simple as hell (look at the sourcecode if you don't believe me). Odd.

Workaround: download a decent (standards-compliant) browser here or here.

The last few days I have been working on the redesign of my existing photo-page, the walk around Doorwerth Castle. The main page has been transformed completely, using full CSS now. The individual photo-pages have been rewritten in cleaner code, using CSS again, to create a uniform effect.

Keeping download times acceptable (for those of you still on dial-up), and making the management of the individual pages far more easy for me, the results are quite nice.

You can find the main page here.

Important note
The photo-pages are fully W3C-standards-compliant, both the CSS-parts and the HTML-parts. Still, when using Internet Explorer 5 and 6 for PC, or Internet Explorer 4 for Mac, or Netscape 4 or earlier, you will find that some pages seem to display less then optimal. The information is accesible, the photo's are viewable in full resolution, though the formatting might seem slightly off. This is due to the CSS-rendering in the mentioned browsers. If you want to enjoy the full visual bliss of fully rendered CSS-pages, consider trying Mozilla or Firefox (free, open source) or Opera (free, adware).

Enjoy.

Merlijn

P.S. All images and texts are released under a Creative Commons License.

P.P.S. The coming days I will be sifting through the hundreds of photo's I have shot so far with my digicam, I will publish the best online in a seperate album.