Using things in ways they weren't intened can be creative or a car wreck or both.
Back in 2005 when I created this account I couldn’t have possibly imagined how much my useage of this place would change over time. I’d been lurking for a year or so and like everyone else was despondent over how things had gone since the 2000 elections. I was a disappointed Deaniac newly returned to Texas for the fourth time in my life and sick of being “alone” on the internet. None of the other political websites had anything close to a community that resonated with me and eventually I took the plunge and signed on.
It was scary, to be honest. It took me almost a month to write my first comment and when I did it was snide and hostile. Maybe that was self-protective considering the rough and tumble nature of comment threads back then. I suppose it was also a good representation of how I felt in general at that time. Hostile and snide, unhappy in general.
Over time that online attitude changed as I met folks and interacted more regularly. I wrote some diaries; most of them sucked. Then I disappeared back into lurkdom for like 5 years. Lots of things contributed to my Lost Time at Daily Kos. Work, kids, “life” and losing/forgetting my passwords (here and the attached email acct) were the biggest factors, but my internal passions shifted as well. While arguing politics is second nature, my native environment is an Art Studio with dozens of paintings and drawings in active process at any given time. It’s why I went into teaching, so I could be immersed in art even as I danced for my supper. That I am a pretty good dancer was an added luxury. My focus had shifted back to that work and thus ended Act I of my online life at DK.
Act II was a short-lived temp account because I had cracked my password problem, reclaimed bastrop as a username and thus began Act III. That third act is the important one and a big part has been an attempt to integrate my creative offline life with my life at Daily Kos through the use of Photos and Images.
In DK5 version of this diary this image is 5500px X 1274px, which is almost 5mb (the size limit at DK5). Impossible on DK4 (this one is 800) and leads to higher quality images across the board for image use on the Beta site.
Kos did an AMA last year and my question to him was basically “Will DK5 improve images, Image Library and the use of images and video in comments?” His answer was basically “Yes.” and that made me happy since it was really all I cared about.
When the Beta launched I was among the initial harsh critics yet very qucikly abandoned that position, partially because I didn’t want to be “that guy” who just complains and engages negatively about change. Mostly it’s because I realized that kos had come through on his promise for better images and a stronger, more functional Image Library and that made me happy. In all candor, though, I gave over as well because DK5 was coming, like it or not, and in the face of inevititability (insert Hillary Clinton remark here) I prefer to be on the side of the inevitable.
Plus, I wanted to see if I could break some stuff since they were "asking for it" (heh), and to some degree I was successful in that endeavor. I would encourage everyone to avoid clicking on my Diaries page at Beta, since a series of super-sized video diaries with titles like
Zelda at 206920 x 206920 First diary fixed to remove system-killing 15006920 x 15006920 video
and
Biggest DK Video ever? 206920 x 206920 FIXED! The diary will open now (for most people)
will probably hang up your system. In fact, those videos are so large it literally takes minutes to scroll past them, not to mention the super-sized ones posted in comments. Why would I do that? Well, it’s Beta and I wanted them to want me to break things. So these were nice to see from Development folks:
Where is the creativity in that, though? That’s just dicking around. What I
really wanted to do was find a way to be creative with
images, because at this point the options are limited, right? You can place images inline with text and align them center, left or right according to text placement Or you can run them inline straight up and down the page like in this diary,
Mr. Green Jeans Gets Tense. I wanted more, so I started playing with
tables.
Tables were about the only way to control placement of images outside of those established perameters, and even that wasn’t particularly controllable. The first try was Flower Test, which is just a grid display of a hundred images or so from my flower pix collection. Fun experiment but boring to look at (unless you are making an online field guide).
So, I decided to step it up and see if I could break tables with a similar kind of overloading I'd done previously with 10 and 24 hour videos in earlier diaries, except
this time using small instead of large aspect ratios as well as interspersed still images and other embeds. I started crafting this massive diary along those lines only to find it had
disappeared when I returned to work on it the next day!
At the Help Desk I learned the draft had uncovered a bug in tables and would be fixed. Wow, Beat and breaking things was fun! That diary remains unpublished, but here is the gist of that deal: my goal was 200 150x75 Nyan Cat videos, 200 Basement Cat images and 200 small round flower pix placed within a table to create undulating visual chevron patterns. I never finished the work but Mission Accomplished.
From Jason Libsch’s Beta gets Better
Bug fix: Someone wrote a story involving nyan cats, embeds, and tables that borked the editor- fixed.
Here are screen shots from that offending draft. Note the number of videos:
All of that led me directly to attempt managing image sizes within tables, again to create patterns, but this time
without trying to break things. I envisioned tables as a tool for creative display for multiples of images, sort of like a gallery. I saw the potential for something richer, for something MORE than simply lining pictures up in a row.
I wanted to discover a new way to use this place.
Then I got stuck in more table bugs.
For my next draft I used three sizes of images: 150x150, 200x200 and 300x300. The goal was to create patterns of interspersed images, but I found that cells resized them in weird ways that I couldn't control. In the screen shot below you see represented both 200 and 300 dimension images, but the large one at the bottom is the only one showing as its proper 300 dimension. The unexpected and barely reproducable reason for that being an Undo-Edit command, which triggered the image to show its true dimension.
As of right now I am unable to discover how to arrive at functinal control over this phenonenon. It would be helpful to have a broader range of options for manipulating tables and force cells to be directly responsive to the size of objects placed within them instead of the objects being at the mercy of preestablished limits of the tables and ceells themselves.
And FYI for folks who haven’t used Beta, these screen shots show the “Add a caption...” beneath photos not because I forgot to include them but because it’s still in Draft form, unpublished. With no caption and published these images would simply float in space. Well, not really; they would float inside othe grey lines of table cells.
Thus, I would ALSO LOVE the ability to assign color to cell divisions, with the choice of “None” being one of them so images can “own their space” in relation to one another instead of being caged. Maybe as we move forward, one can only hope…
So, what’s the end game here? That remains to be seen. My hope would be that images in general become more manipulable in terms of placement and control. We already saw this from kos in his latest status update:
* Resizable story- and comment-embedded images. Note, this is a big dev load, and will significantly add to the time before we fully launch the new site. However, we determined it was worth the effort and delay.
It’s a great start. Here is to hoping for more and bigger improvements on what I already see as a
vastly improved Image Library and a
majorly improved quality of display, with images being accepted at much higher resolution, not to mention the apparent fixing of compression issues seen regularly in DK4. As well, that images are simply easier to use in both diary and comments is an understatement of the benefit this upgrade brings. We should all be saying "thanks for that one" to TPTB.
As a final thought, I’ll take this opportunity to advocate for the ability to embiggen images via Lightbox or a similar mode the new archetecture might allow. OceanDiver discussed this in last Monday's Cranky Users' DK5 Metafestival. It is a greatly missed and valuable feature for anyone who cares about the images they present. Dare I say it's the Photo User's equivalent to how some feel about sig lines? I suppose that could invite
or at the very least
Dunno if any of this helps persuade skeptickal Kossacks to continue pushing forward into the brave new world of DK5, but I would encourage all of you who have yet to play around in that sandbox to get on over and try it out. The worst that could happen is you have a car wreck of trying to make things happen. The best is that you discover for yourself a new way of working in a new environment. We would all be the richer for that effort.
All the best in your endeavors! Please make your way over to the DK5 Beta version of this diary to check on the differences, particularly in Image/Photo quality at a higher resolution.
I'll also post some images in comments there which are impossible to achieve here on the DK4 platform.
Peace!
- bastrop