The Pixel Post

[Peppermint Pig]

With the new site comes new services, and one of those services is the newsjournal blog: The Pixel Post. This part of the site will operate as a news and information hub for the community and abroad, with articles about recently released games, activities and events, and other relevant pieces. Now, on to some of the design details:

During our stay at Ptoing's Pixelation, I made a post containing some of the avatars designed to be used with the blog. Here they are again.  As new ones are created, they will be listed here!


Helm Hammet, by Helm


Flonne, Peppy Diablo, Janus Corlione, and Vincent Ice, by Pep


Chia "Chilly" Sahara, by Chilly

Here are the minibanner designs:


Pixel Post Banner, by Helm


Pixel Post Banner, by Pep

Favicon designs:


Favicon, by Pep

Here's a WIP of the design for the main page:



Because this is a community service, I'm inviting everyone to offer input and ideas to help improve the overall design, though you'll have to excuse my limited talent at implementing any code based features.

By the way, we've yet to choose contributors for the site. If you're a decent writer and would like to contribute, speak up. By the way, for anybody interested in those avatars, check the Pixel section on this forum, as we'll have a place for you to post your own creations. Whether you post to the blog or not, it's a fun exercise to pixel a self portrait!

I'm moving on to code the page now. More information later!

[David]

Can favicons be animated?

[Blick]

I think it'd be truer to the newsprint look if it had a light sepia tone to it.

I really love the old private eye film look some of the avatars have. Especially Flonne, with the net and all.

[Peppermint Pig]

Can favicons be animated?

My initial thought is no. But, I would LOVE to see someone do multiple emoticons for theirs, which is almost as good as animating

I think it'd be truer to the newsprint look if it had a light sepia tone to it.

I really love the old private eye film look some of the avatars have. Especially Flonne, with the net and all.

Thanks Blick. As for the sepia, just adjust your monitor calibration . Honestly, we went pure gray because nobody gets confused about what particular saturation/color value to use, and it also saves a bit on file sizes for the totals... I've since put together the page in HTML, but I'm waiting for the coder to build a backbone for it... I still need to come up with a halftone art design for the top two corners of the page. I welcome anybody to try and come up with something appropraite there!

Go to the pixel art section and post yours in the thread 'it was a dark and stormy night' if you do one!!

[Xion]

Great idea.
I like to think I'm a decent writer and would like to contribute. ?

[sedgemonkey]

Love the idea and it would be fantastic to have it coded perfectly to keep vertical matching perfectly, but the more I think about it -- it seems like fixed inline frames or expanding div tags with height attirbute is the only way to keep the vertical elements tight.

[Peppermint Pig]

I prefer the method of counting the byte size for an entry. Secondly, we could have some calculation that adds X for an image tag, and use fixed sizes for images (thumbnails) in all articles. Since all entries would also have author icons, we can assume those are about similar in size and don't need a check.

Furthermore, have a required minimum byte length for a column, a preferred byte length, and then have the system compare each for the minimum.. if they're within X bytes, print, if not, then add an additional post to the shortest column, check again, print, if not, repeat the process again up to X times. We might get some bad looking alignments, but at least we'll tend to have more that line up more closely. Would that be too difficult for you Sedge??

I'm fine with some imperfection... The center two columns below the middle(feature spot), would need to compensate for the size of the side columns.

[sedgemonkey]

The problem is that you're not using a fixed width font so a 'W' takes up a lot more room than an '.' so you can't do exact counts to determine line counts.  You also have to take into account breaks and all that. Not that hard, but it won't be exact.

[Peppermint Pig]

Ah, good point. Don't think we'd be willing to grind it down further.

Right now my mind is dwelling on a 100% Table height solution with each entry located in the table (or nested further within) and then the largest column sets the maximum height, while the other columns would add space evenly so that each entry is splayed, with the first entry touching the top, and the last one hitting the bottom and all others evenly spaced between. Byte length can still be calculated before entries are injected into the table mold, so to speak... I have to test this out first to make sure it's possible.