Junk for Code : just exploring

looking for something firm in a world of chaotic flux

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November 17, 2003

Tonight I've just been exploring around after reading Barista & Bonyton, quickly skimming things magazine and following the links to a brutalist architecture that is about being noticed:
brutalist arch1.jpg
Owen Luder, The Tricon Centre, Portsmouth, 1964

One of the junked spaces of late modernism. There are so many, especially thsoe that deny the contradictions, dissonances and tensions of modernity and dump politics, economics and culture under the label of a harmonious and unifying progress.

I am too tired, and its too hot in Adelaide tonight, to work on mega architecture or Federation Square.

Suzanne was really impressed with Federation Square. Alas she could not describe how the built form represented or expressed Federation. Would it be layers and layers of history, rather than an expression of the idea of federation (becoming a nation or one people?) Federation for me is the interpreted history from 1901 to 2001.

Whilst exploring I came across Photojunkie, a collaborative site based around photoblogs.

I'm looking for design ideas for a photoblog with a gallery attached that would be an outgrowth of, and linked to, junk for code. As Jean over at her newly designed Creativity/Machine though content is king, design is still queen on the web.

Design is the key.

Came across Shutterfly by Amanda Gilligan, who lives and works out of Sydney.

This image caught my eye:

It's called Rust.

Amanda is connected to Jarod Pulo who ran the now closed Nuke.net, and now runs Vanilla Shots. The latter uses both movabletype and phpgallery to create the news page and photo gallery respectively. A photoblog is attached

H'mm. I've been toying with that kind of assemblage myself. But it requires techno knowledge as creative design to swing it.

But I reckon Typepad is a goer. It's easier.

My thinking is muddled. I need to find a designer to help me cut through the thicket I'm entangled in.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:09 PM | Permalink

| Comments (4)

Comments

Typepad is great if you've got money to pay for it, and don't have initial webhosting. But if you've already got hosting and a domain, then to my knowledge, theres nothing that you can't do with a bit of php, mt, and phpgallery.

(and in fact, if you know what you're doing, MT still proves far more customisable)

Posted by: Jarod | November 18, 2003 8:46 AM

Jarod,
thanks for that advice.

You put your finger on where I'd got stuck. Given that I already have hosting and a domain name I could not see the point of paying for Typepad. Yet I could not design it myself

That bit you say so lightly ---playing around with php, mt and php gallery----is way way beyond my technical expertise, which is close to zilch.

I do not know what I am doing.

So where do I go to find someone who knows what they are doing?

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson | November 18, 2003 10:21 AM

I think Shelley Powers, i.e. Burningbird designed some kind of photoblog using php? and she said that she was willing to share it with anyone that was interested.

She's busy moving all the sites associated with the Wayward Webloggers right now, but I suspect that she would be willing to offer some advice given a little time.

She's been a real assistance to me, which was why I ended up joining her community of bloggers.

Posted by: Loren Webster | November 18, 2003 1:00 PM

this looks pretty good as it is, you know. We are close to the same stage with MovableType - you can post photos as files and I presume manipulate their size first - but you are not coding for positional instructions. I came unstuck by trying to post small gifs that would sit inside paras and have type wrap around. No idea how to do that.

My assumption is that this is an easy set of instructions which are probably somewhere inside the actually fairly bad manual for the thing. The right person could probably email you the code..

as you can tell, I like MovableType.

Posted by: David Tiley | November 18, 2003 1:18 PM