Some Updates

I hate when things take me away for a little while, but won’t make any apologies just yet for having little activity here! It’s mostly a one-man show here at the moment so I do beg for some patience as I build things out and get articles together.

Speaking of building things out…

Site Structure

I have been giving some thought to the general site structure lately. I thought it might be fun to talk about it briefly.

My original (and still current) intention for the main piece of content for PIXLS.US is a tutorial. It’s the main type of content I was writing on my blog as well as what I’ve been trying to update on http://www.gimp.org/tutorials. It’s a nice, known quantity…

So I spent my early time building the site focusing on the layout and design of tutorial pages. Fonts, sizes, weights, layout, and more. It’s just the way I think. Plus, if I did a decent job on this layout, I could not worry about fiddling with it later and instead focus on writing.

I finally ended up with a layout that I liked (basically what you’re reading on right now). The problem was, I wanted a bunch of tutorials, not just one!

So with a little work and the help of some contributors (yay Ian Hex!), I was looking at a few different tutorials now for the site. Yay!

The problem now was that I needed to create a nice page to help guide users to the various tutorials. This is still not done…

So here I am at the moment still working on how best to showcase the neat tutorials on an index page of some sort:

I need to find an attractive and usable means of listing the various tutorial articles. So this is one of the things that has been taking up some of my time.

The main page has also been occupying some of my attention, as I’m not 100% sure how to present all the site information (tutorials, blog posts, showcases, etc…). There’s kind of a running theme here I guess.

I’m also going to be trying to produce some “Showcase” type of article posts that will highlight a F/OSS photographer or images.

The blog pages I’ve already finished (it’s what you’re reading now). I’ve also mostly gotten the index pages for the blog in a workable state. I took some time recently to paginate the blog index pages as well so as to not try to load the entire post history on a single page.

To summarize, there are a few things yet to design and code. I’m working on getting them so we can have an actual launch.

• Main Page

  I still need to design and layout how best to show off the site content.

• Tutorial/Articles Page

  This is another page to design and layout. I have some ideas and neat content already written, so this is just designing the page.

• Showcase Pages & Index

  These pages will be functionally the same as the article pages, but the content will focus more on showcasing FL/OSS artists and their works. I’ll categorize these pages differently so I can collect them on their own index page separate from the tutorials.

In Closing…

So, things are moving along (albeit slower than I would like). I’m building the scaffolding for the future, so I don’t feel so rushed. Better to do it well than quick in my opinion.

Contributing

Also, if anyone would like to immortalize themselves on the early pages of an experimental website to bring high quality tutorials and discussions to the the Free/Open Source Imaging world – well then you know where to turn: pat@patdavid.net.

I promise I don’t bite (hard).