deninet staff

Cinematic Titanic Live 2008

tess — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:31:18 -0700

Live from the State Theater in Minneapolis.

Stranded in Trainlight

themes

tess — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:39:14 -0700

Visual themes created for websites and applications

deninet staff

deninet staff

tess — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:36:22 -0700

Root gallery staff-contributed, site-wide images.

deninet staff

State Fair 2008

tess — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:18:23 -0700

Pictures from my visit to the Minnesota State Fair in 2008.

deninet staff

DOR 2008 Sketches #01

tess — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:59:46 -0800

Concept art for my Transgender Day of Rememberence Webcomics Project submission this year.

Paper-Girl

Yeah...that was fun. ^_^

tess — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:39:36 -0700

deninet staff

The Road to deninet 6.0: An Idea is an Idea, is an...

tess — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:54:26 -0700

I have been thinking a great deal lately about what do to about the Idea Database. After the long drive to complete the new Windowlight theme (now up and running on the site), this core feature of deninet 6.0 hasn't received nearly enough attention.

When I originally set out to recreate the system we had under deninet 5.0h and earlier, I'm confronted with two basic strategies. The first is to search throughout the Drupal module repository and attempt to find a solution that would create the necessary facilities to meet the original spec. The second is to write our own module from scratch. I've dabbled in module creation before, but ultimately found the projects I was going to undertake too complex or unnecessary.

Relying on contributed modules does have some serious advantages. Instead of a development process, the effort becomes largely that of configuration. Once the possible methods have been reviewed and compared, the list of possible methods can be reduced to an acceptable solution. After that, it's only a matter of implementation and adjustment to the new features and consequences. I've reviewed a number of modules that could possibly work, but the only one that met expectations was the Node Comments module.

Node Comments is unique in Drupal as it replaces a bit of functionality provided by the core product. While Core Comments is packaged as a module, it is such an essential component that it is a dependency of several other modules. While this would provide a functionality similar to what I was hoping to achieve for the Idea Database, it affects a larger swath of the site functionality than I would prefer. Taking this option would have some serious drawbacks.

For that reason, I've been investigating creating a module to implement the functionality. How to go about doing that, however, becomes a discussion in of itself.

The module could be developed in one of two ways. It can be created as an integrated, drop-in solution that would provide everything necessary in order to function. It would be an "Idea Database" module in the truest sense. This has advantages of integration as well as being a contribution to the open source community. It would be easier to implement add-on modules to enhance functionality later (Idea sponsorship and donation). The other method is to write modules only to implement features in a generic way. Instead of an iidb module providing Idea and Thought content types, there would be a "revision review" module that could attach to any CCK type. This would be more generic but would certainly implement the Idea/Thought topology originally drafted in the spec.

There is a line of thought that suggests if something is part of your core business, then you should develop it in-house. You shouldn't trust it to third parties that may not be in line with your vision. The Idea Database is part of what I consider as the core business of deninet. If it's really so important, shouldn't it be written in-house?

The problem, as ever, is time. Developing any sort of module takes a degree of time and effort that I could be putting toward other pursuits such as Paper Girl. With my time and energy limited as they are, I'm concerned that this "simple" module would require a lengthy development cycle.

At the moment, I haven't quite decided what to do. The clock is ticking for this years DOR submission, and I would not want to opt out if at all possible. It may be best for me to let the issue of the Idea database to sit for a while I work on my DOR submission. Perhaps the time away will give me some perspective.

deninet staff

Undead Story, from out of a dream...

Pazi — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:10:19 -0700

The following was typed to Tess upon waking up...

----

(8:09:51 AM) Pazi: It started with a zombie outbreak.

(8:11:23 AM) Pazi: At first it was almost just a game. I was at a party, a big event somewhere at a club in the city, and zombies start trying to get in. I need to hold 'em off with some sort of squirt implement. It had some kind of chemical that could re-kill zombies. It was something unusually obvious.

(8:12:34 AM) Pazi: Eventually others start to help me with that, and soon we have a general of some kind on hand (I only know that because I called him a general a few times) and there was a sense that resistance to the undead was growing, getting really organized.

(8:12:49 AM) Pazi: Elapsed time hits.

(8:16:53 AM) Pazi: I hear a narrative in my voice talk about how zombies are only a part of what was unleashed by...whatever force/entity/event it was that caused the undead to show up. We'd seen many manifestations of the contagion by now, with all sorts of different names -- they sprang from a common agent, but it could alter living things in various insidious ways. There were infected snakes called Honey Eaters, which are sort of twisted boas with a stumpy lower half on which they sit, and a twisted upper half. They blend in with trees. They're called Honey Eaters because they'll strike if people happen by in pairs, they can swallow a person whole astonishingly fast, and they only eat one member of the pair. If you weren't looking, the person you walked with could just vanish and you'd have to be sharp to spot the thicker tree stump.

(8:17:21 AM) Pazi: There were various things not unlike orcs and goblins that were mutated from humanity by this contaminant, as well.

(8:17:44 AM) Pazi: All of these creatures, human or otherwise, were just labelled "undead" as they were discovered.

(8:18:28 AM) Pazi: So in this fast-forward version, I'm in something like army training. The sort of low-end boot camp that happens when you try to mobilize a previously-civilian population with a fractured chain of command.

(8:18:47 AM) Pazi: Everyone's a soldier, or at least military support personnel.

(8:19:42 AM) Pazi: I happened to acquire a reputation for quick thinking and observation, and with my science acumen I eventually wound up in the Special Forces. So it was a lot like the Chtorr books in this way. Also, I had de-transitioned for practicality's sake, but I still had long hair.

(8:20:03 AM) Pazi: Elapsed time shifts again.

(8:22:34 AM) Pazi: Now it's winter, snowing, and we've found an underground complex infested by undead. It's an old apartment building, or something equally innocuous, but those can be hives of undead activity because so many people were crowded together, infected and then unable to leave. This one is odd -- we see lots of frozen zombies in the lower entrance (a garage entry, I think), and a number of frozen ogres and goblins (ogres are big, orcs are medium-large, goblins are small, and hobgoblins are some really mutated variant off goblins that are tiny, about half a meter, and nobody knows much about them because they appeared recently).

(8:24:06 AM) Pazi: I've got a camera in addition to my gun, and my squad has jumped ahead by just a couple meters to break into an apartment. And they call me, I show up (looking through the camera) and freeze, gun drawn and pointed straight ahead.

There's a zombie in there wearing a shirt with a joke about Perl and looking like some wisearse hacker kid. Only he's not shambling. He's just looking at me with dead zombie eyes, and surprisingly steady about it.

(8:24:21 AM) Pazi: We've stumbled into a nest of...well, sentient undead. They can talk.

(8:24:26 AM) Pazi: They have us surrounded.

(8:24:31 AM) Pazi: But they aren't hostile.

(8:24:51 AM) Pazi: It's hard to tell who takes whom prisoner. I think both sides were really unprepared for it.

(8:25:00 AM) Pazi: Nobody's shooting. We're even talking amicably.

(8:25:27 AM) Pazi: I go through their kitchen cupboards and determine they're rationing normal human food, which must mean they eat it, or they feed it to something that does.

(8:26:57 AM) Pazi: One of the zombies, the ringleader of sorts, explains that what they're doing there will change what it means to be undead. And he gets into this chamber that I think at first is a rocketship seperated by a door they've manufactured, but was actually an elevator. They apparently had the ability to produce some really advanced tech.

(8:27:08 AM) Pazi: Sleek-looking and custom-made.

(8:29:06 AM) Pazi: They leave a hobgoblin to guard us. He's *tiny*. Some of the squad doesn't even want to believe it. I just say aloud, and to the hobgoblin, that he's been left to guard us -- which means either he can do it, and we don't want to mess with him, or he can't, but the bluff will keep us on our toes long enough to work, or he has some other reason to be doing what they say when we could kill him.

He kind of just looks at me, shrugs, and goes back to it.

(8:31:04 AM) Pazi: When the others get back, he whips out a knife about as big as he is, and blood starts to spray as he kills all his comrades messily. It's brutal, like they're in a food processor -- he just slashes, and then hits them again as they fall. It turns to chaos. The recording goes fuzzy and skips. I can see my squad reacting. I'm moving to respond too, but I don't know what to do... none of my people have been harmed yet, but he's killing the first sentient undead we've ever encountered...

(8:31:09 AM) Pazi: <end>

EDIT: I also recall a detail that's missing from the above IM exchange. After this point, and just as I was waking up, a narrative voice-over that sounded like me was explaining the biology of the undead, presumably to students. While I spoke, I saw video images of all the things I was describing. I mentioned competing theories of undead physiology, how the ones that purported to explain zombies as not actually dead, but merely altered metabolically, failed to account for their lack of appreciable body heat, decay over time, and tendency to freeze if exposed to cold, and comfortably thaw out despite massive tissue damage when the weather warms up again. That zombies ate was the only real problem with the theory; after some years of living with the undead we still had very little idea how they moved their muscles or operated their biosysems, though the notion that they somehow derived ATP from prokaryotic fermentation in their bodies was a popular one. There were still many unanswered questions.

I discussed the case of an undead creature called Amphisbeama; that was another undead snake variant that was surprisingly lively and difficult to peg as dead, other than the demonstrable presence of the undeath agents. Two small boas or pythons can get infected with "ugly" and in the case of that species, their bodies begin to pass chemicals less-discriminately across cell membranes. If stuck by themselves, they'll die -- but if they encounter one another, they fuse at their terminal ends (head or tail, it varied) and their bodies integrate, stabilizing the intake of outside chemicals. They still die, having succumbed to poisoning of their cells, but the undeath mechanisms take over from there, and amphisbaemids are famous for being a boundary case between life proper and unlife.

----

So...thoughts?

deninet staff

The Road to deninet 6.0: Better Breadcrumbs, Better Errors

tess — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:14:57 -0700

The Windowlight theme made some progress this weekend despite my limited time. Since my last, hastily written entry, it dawned on me to check out drupal's themeable functions. While these functions solved some of the string-replace hacking, it's far from the proper separation of data and presentation I would prefer to see.

This weekend I focused on two particular aspects of the new theme: breadcrumbs and error messages.

Breadcrumb trails are today considered a standard website UI element. They allow you to quickly navigate deep hierarchical structures by providing you a series of links that refer to "parent" pages. From my own experience, I know that no complex website should be without a breadcrumb trail element. In my previous theme efforts of Citylights and Starlights, I had left the breadcrumb trails provided by drupal relatively unmodified. I was still new to theme development and as a result, did not put as much thought into their value.

This time, however, I wanted to improve the deninet UI experience, and proper breadcrumb trails are essential. After some research at the venerable listamatic, I came up with a preliminary design. Implementing it in drupal, however, proved far more difficult than I had expected. The HTML provided by drupal wasn't ideal for this sort of modification. Unaware of the theme functions, I resorted to some ugly hacks to even try to get it to work. Even then, it wasn't as good as it could have been.

As I was clicking through Stumbleupon in a zombish attempt to stay awake, I ran across this article from Janko at Warp Speed. The article lays out how to create http://apple.com style breadcrumbs using some simple CSS. While my opinion of apple has suffered lately due to their poor attitude toward iPhone developers and 3rd-party systems, I still find their software UI standards to be the best around. Drawing upon the article and the theming functions, I set about coding a new breadcrumb widget.

During the process I began to find it difficult to find a spot to put the thing in the web design. I eventually narrowed it down to two locations. One was over the main header graphic, the other at the top of the content area. After some debating, I settled for immediately above the content area. It's closer to the text, meaning less mouse travel for users. Even with the issue decided, something felt wrong. It wasn't just mouse travel, but scrolling.

Previous versions of the theme had the header graphic taking up a majority of the screen space. This forces the user to scroll downwards just to see what a page is about. In other words, the graphic was unnecessarily dominating the design while contributing little to usability. For this reason, I shorted the header area by several hundred pixels. This reduced horizontal scrolling and tightened the overall feel of the theme.

Also, Windowlight will feature the return of something not seen in the current Starlights theme -- the Denizen Entertainment logo. The "brick" didn't seem to have a good place in Starlights. I was also away from the notion as deninet as a organization toward that of a solitary effort. The logo didn't feel appropriate at the time, but I've grown to miss it more and more. Staring at the earlier versions of Starlight also felt...lacking. There was a distinct sterility I wanted to correct. Placing the logo in the corner of the content area was the obvious choice for placement, as it's be the standard location going back to deninet 2.0. Sizing, however, was a concern.

I didn't want to make the logo appear too small. A small logo almost seems apologetic. Too large and the logo would dominate the page. I wanted it to be just right, present and quietly proud. After some trial and error and encouragement from a friend, I selected the size you see in the image. Interestingly, it also solved some positioning problems with the breadcrumb trails.

As I was working with the new theme -- testing it out on different pages -- I also began to find another problem. The breadcrumb trails provided by drupal aren't particularly effective. More times than not, I would find the trail to be "home > Current page", a nearly useless configuration. After some searching, I located the Custom Breadcrumb module, which allows you to control your breadcrumbs. Combined with views, I believe the usability of the site can be greatly improved.

Today, however, I wanted to cover a different series of issues. For a while now, I've wanted to customize the status and error message boxes provided by drupal. In previous themes, I've simply styled them without seriously examining their usability. In deninet 4.0, I made a special effort to create friendly error pages. (This incidentally, also spawned one of my favorite error messages ever: "Uncaught FeatureNotImplementedException, explaination: programmer lazy.") Drupal provides two kinds of error messages, status messages and error messages. The only difference between the two in Drupal's default presentation is that of color. Status messages are green, error messages are red.

I felt this could be improved through the use of the theme functions. I created a override that interpreted the error type as it is sent to the theme engine. Then, it would either print "The following action has been performed", or "The following errors occurred" in addition to a list of what actually happened. It was easy to add an additional line at the bottom to suggest to the user how to react to the message.

Oddly enough, I spent most of the day trying to get the background of the message boxes just right. Originally, I wanted to include a simple icon. As I began working on it, however, I felt I wanted to give it more than a simple solid-color background. Windowlight has a recurring theme of stripes throughout its UI and I felt that the same could be used here for a subtle, but aesthetically enhancing effect. The stripes were easy enough to produce, but the message boxes still lacked an icon.

There was no easy way to add one without adding enough div to the message. While I could easily do that, I stumbled upon another problem. I had wanted to identify status messages with a round 'i' icon, and errors with a triangular or octagonal '!' icon. As you can see, 'i' and '!' next to each other are kind of difficult to tell apart. After some more thinking, I decided to go with large, subtle text in the upper right corner of the boxes.

The theme is shaping up. Whenever I go back to the production site after working with the new theme all day, I shudder a bit. Hopefully, the new theme will be ready soon so I can focus on competing the 6.0 features.

deninet staff

The Road to deninet 6.0 Part 2: Unabashed UI Ranting

tess — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:07:32 -0700

As a departure from previous site upgrades, I'm stressing a high amount of usability in deninet 6.0. By nature, I tend to be a UI snob, preferring to tweak and tune aspects of the user experience that would make everything easier and more intuitive. While this is commendable, Drupal itself is not making this easy.

Creating a strong UI experience was a key aspect of deninet 4.0. I was able to tweak nearly everything in the experience. Form organization, buttons, site layout, and so on. At the bottom of nearly each page was a two column section labeled "Where to go", providing links or actions for the current page. Each option was explained with clearly written text. While I made the blunder of using javascript links as opposed to standard Submit and Reset form buttons, I loved the site I had created. Deninet 4.0 was a clear evolution from versions 2 and 3, and easily the most refined deninet experience yet created.

While working on deninet 6.0, I pulled up my archives and reviewed my ideas from that period. I began to think, Wouldn't it be nice if we could provide the a strong UI experience for the next version? The biggest problem, unfortunately, was that tweaking that experience is no longer a simple matter. All versions of deninet prior to 5.0r were build on a custom content manager (or no content manager at all). I had maximum control of each individual page. If I wanted to implement a particular feature or change the presentation of a page, it would simply be a matter of making the necessary code changes.

Now that we are using Drupal, things aren't nearly as easy. For example, I recently had an idea to modify the Create Content page to be a table of icons and friendlier descriptions as opposed to the current definition list of links. To my annoyance, there appears to be no way to nicely modify this page short of ugly theme hacks or module development. Web searches show that few people have even considered such a thing. I'm not even sure it is possible to write a module to modify the page. It's possible to supplant the entire page with a custom one, but without hooks into the content types, it would be no better than a static page.

Block and breadcrumb themeing is particular annoying, as both are provided to the theme as a scalar variable containing HTML. If I'm unhappy with the output, I have to resort to string or regular expression replacements that would execute for each page display. If that doesn't work, the only means available to me is complex string manipulations and HTML parsing. As someone experienced with PHP development, I'm sensing a serious lack of separation between the data and presentation layers.

It's possible I will have to accept what I can when it comes to UI in deninet 6.0. As long as I continue to use Drupal to power the site, I will need to continue researching just how far I can modify it.

deninet staff

Windowlight, Beta Site, and Blocking Issues

tess — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:34:12 -0700

I have been attempting to do more than meander when it comes to the deninet.com upgrade. Unfortunately, I'm running into a lot more issues than I expected, even when attempting to upgrade from Drupal 5.5 to 5.10.

Throughout the upgrade process, I am looking for "blocking issues" -- situations or errors that currently have no immediate or easy solution. One of the biggest I've run across is the lack of support for the CRAM module, which helps to secure our logins. The modules allows an encrypted hashcode to be passed in liu of a plaintext password. Granted, it's no match for a tried-and-true security solution such as SSL, but I currently do not have the $80 required to configure it on our hosting provider.

Right now there's a debate between myself and the other active staff members on this issue. Overall, we want to set up SSL, but the money simply isn't there this month. Without CRAM, our passwords will be sent clear over the wire. A temporary workaround would be for all deninet users to change their login with an "untrusted" password. This assumes that you are using the password only for the site, so that it cannot be captured and used for other internet accounts. I'm not terribly fond of this method, and I'm still investigating other options.

Windowlight DR5In the meantime, I've put some work into a new theme for the site using a different method. The previous two themes for deninet, Citylights and Starlight, both use a CSS technique called "fluid layout". Fluid layouts have the benefit of using all the space provided by the web browser. Creating a visually rich liquid layout, however, is fraught with difficulties and pitfalls. The previous two themes have significant problems and hacks in order to make them work on Firefox and Internet Explorer. I've often had to make unfortunate trade offs to make them work.

This time, I wanted to avoid the vast majority of those problems while making the theme visually rich. After some research and copious examples from various websites and blogs, I decided to try a "fixed-width layout". Unlike a fluid layout, a fixed layout does not expand or contract with the size of the browser window. Instead, it stays the same width all the time. Typically, these themes are centered, so that the content realigns itself to middle of the browser window horizontally. If the website width is less than the browser window width, the user will be forced to scroll.

While developing the new theme, "Windowlight" (see preview on the right), I quickly discovered that creating a fixed-width layout corresponds better to my preferred web design methods. It reduces the number of hacks, image slices, and other things that are endemic to fluid layouts. The design degrades nicely to a limited set of large images, making it easier to use photo-manipulation techniques to achieve new graphic effects. This does not mean that fluid layouts are horrible things that should be avoided, it means that they work better for me, and better for deninet.

Currently, Windowlight draws from my 2007 submission to the Transgender Day of Remembrance Webcomics Project. I still like the piece and consider it the best I've yet produced. However, I'm concerned that my repeated use of this image (it's my desktop wallpaper) I may quickly tire of the new theme. Furthermore, I am not happy to see Akisa depart her presence as part of the web design. Given my complete lack of drawing output this year, I very much doubt I'll come up with a new graphic any time soon.

I've tinkered with other pieces of artwork in my library for use in the layout. One such attempt was with "Answer" -- a not terribly subtle bit of Akisa art. I very much doubt I will use it, as I do not consider deninet a horror media site, and am dubious about the shock value. Other graphic I've considered is the incomplete "Akisa Listening" graphic I had drawn years ago. I like the graphic as well as continuing the motif of Akisa and her portable music player. The problem is that this image is hand drawn, and will have a grainier appearance when scanned and colored compared to the DOR image.

In addition to working on the theme, I've spend a great deal of time investigating what new features to add to the site. I have already created a new event system, allowing members to create their own calendar and list of appointments and meetings. These events will be tied into each individual channel, and viewed collectively on the Springboard. The Springboard is a user dashboard allowing users to view all their events, submitted Ideas, as well as keep up to date on their subscribed channels. This feature is currently available to registered users, but is not yet complete.

The majority of my development time has been geared toward recreating the Idea Database. I've investigated several different options for creating the Idea, Version, Thought, Vote hierarchy that was available in deninet 4.0 - 5.0h. It's been long decided to use Drupal's built in revisioning system to create new Idea versions. There are several useful modules that attach to this mechanism, including one that shows the difference between selected versions.

According to the original Idea Database design, Thoughts are attached to each version, not to the Idea itself. This way, each new version has a clean slate for development. Currently there is no way to implement this feature short of writing code. I've wanted to avoid this because I have only limited time to support a programming project. Right now, the solution seems to be heading towards the Node Comments module. This module allows comment nodes to be replaced by any CCK type defined by the site administrator. Comments can also be displayed through Views for dynamic ordering.

Node comments, however, are not without their down side. The module is incompatible with three key modules within the Drupal core -- Comment, Forum, and Tracker. We will lose all of the some 149 comments currently applied to content nodes. I may be able to migrate them to the new Node comment system, but this has yet to be tested. While we have forums on the site, there's not much to keep and the functionality can be (possibly) created using CCK and views. Tracker provides a list of your activity on the site on your user profile. This functionality can easily be recreated using views and integrated into the Springboard -- a more appropriate place for it anyways.

In order to discuss these options with other deninet staff members, I've created a new beta site. The site is currently only available to current deninet users. The beta site serves both as an online backup and as a proving ground for new deninet features. Members can also give the new theme a spin, keeping in mind that it is not yet complete.

deninet staff

The Meandering Approach to Server Adminstration

tess — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:06:28 -0700

I have been slowly updating deninet over the course of the last few weeks. I was hoping to be at v5.3 by now, but the process has been meandering in practice. Originally, I had intended to practice a complete backup on the test server prior to running a complete upgrade on the production server. I've gone through this process before -- from 5.0h to 5.0r, and again from 5.0r to 5.1. Not only can it be disruptive, but tedious.

Adding new features has been foremost on my mind. Making upgrades doesn't rank all that high on my scale of enjoyable tasks. I have a day job to support and a rigorous workout schedule to support leaving me little time for deninet or fun. Deninet can actually be a great deal of fun for me, but I have to pick my battles in the 2 or 3 hours I have free each night. Developing new features is simply more fun.

This is not to say that some upgrade work hasn't been done. I have updated the modules that power the website backend. The content manager core has yet to be upgraded, a task I should complete sooner rather than later. The module upgrade process is actually quite time consuming itself.

Each upgrade requires a review of all modules powering the site. If some didn't work out, or were underused, they may be removed in the next release of deninet. Furthermore, alternatives need to be researched and tested for each module. Newer modules may implement features in a more efficient way, or provide a better user experience. Once reviews are complete, updates for each module are downloaded, installed, migrated, and finally tested. This takes a lot of time. Furthermore, as the sole developer for the site, I'm the only one available to test. This can result in missed details or use cases that I wouldn't have imagined.

Updating the core is far more worry prone than trouble prone. Since I'm upgrading within a version (Drupal 5.x), my modules, themes, etc. should work without modification. The problem is that if the core updgrade fails, I can potentially break the entire site, rather than just a key feature. Even if the update appears successful, I need to repeat the entire feature testing process. All core and module features. Understandably, I don't take the core update lightly.

deninet staff

In the Heritage Gallery

tess — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:19:22 -0700

deninet staff

Nightlights

tess — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:19:22 -0700

deninet staff

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