As some of you may have noticed all sorts of things have been going wrong here the past couple of days - not being able to read or edit stories at WPT, stuck images at IS, mail complaining about said problems not getting a response. Well, this is all related to a server upgrade by my webhost and my mistaking a number of the side effects as being things that would straighten themselves out without pestering support, plus a few old and improper settings catching up with me.

If you’re able to see this message then things should be working ok for you. If you hear from any cappers who are still having issue and can’t see this post yet, tell them to wait another day or so for their ISP to catch up with the server switch. If you have any other irregularities, let me know so I can fix them. And despite request(s), grabber freezes will have to continue to happen naturally. I don’t like looking like an idiot more often than need be. (”But what’s more often that constantly?” you ask. “Is ‘up yours’ an answer?” I ask. Well, it is now.)

Since my attempts to design a new menu for Inventing Situations and Wasting Precious Time have met with mild enthusiasm at best, I’m throwing the floor open to you guys. I’m a programmer, not a designer, and I figure at least one of you must be a better designer than I am or know someone who is.

The winner gets their work used on a popular site and a credit well below the fold. (The whole idea is to reduce clutter. I could hardly give you a headline before the gallery even starts, could I?)
Here’s my usual long-winded rules:

• Entries should be sent as text files to menucontest @ lustforlunch.com by September 15th, 2006.
• Soon after the deadline, an approximately one week polling period will be opened here. Entries that don’t meet all the requirements will be included in the polling at my discretion.
• The submissions should consist of html & css (and limited javascript, see below) only.
• The voting page will feature the menus filled in with the same content seen on the first two examples on the current sample page, along with screengrabs from Firefox.
• The contest is for the design of the menu only - I will be determining the actual links and categories, and writing the code to populate it. Anybody wanting to add their input on these subjects is welcome to, but that’s separate from the contest.
• The main (only?) difference in the menus for IS & WPT should be the colors defined in their css. (They should of course work with the css files already in place on each site.)
• The design should not rely on javascript. It’s ok to use it, but the user experience should not be complicated if it’s off.

Thanks in advance!

In a classic example of doing things the long way around, I’ve just completed a revamp of the largest chunk of Inventing Situations grabs from the 1939 World’s Fair. As many of you are aware, there used to be a cluster of 333 images (minimum run time 2 hours, 47 minutes) from the fair in the middle of the rotation. These were the old automatically generated grabs from archive.org’s copies of the Medicus home movies of the fair. Here’s a mosaic of all the old images (454 kb). A lesser, saner mind would have solved the problem of the monotony of these grabs by removing the least cap-able images, spreading the images out over the rotation, or just throwing the lot of them out.

Being me, I went and downloaded all of the movies (except for the one that seems to have vanished from the archive), hand picked images from each and placed them in three blocks spread through the rotation. The new groups are each 140 images or less (minimum run time 70 minutes). Take a look at mosaics of the new images here (144 kb), here (161 kb), and here (171 kb).

I’d like to think this is an actual improvement, though I’m not sure if the sample images shown above make it clear or not. The first cluster should be showing up on IS today or tomorrow, which should make it easier to judge. Of course, there are still a bunch of other films from the fair in the rotation, but most of them are in much smaller bites.

Why am I telling you this? I like stories.

Despite promises to leave the site’s code well enough alone, I’ve been tinkering with an addition to the layouts of IS and WPT to make them a little cleaner and easier to use - a menu.

Here’s a sample page to show how the menu will look for you.

The WPT one will behave similarly, but have slightly different colors. Anyway, let me know if the menu acts up for you or just plain doesn’t work. Or if it does work. If you wouldn’t mind including your browser and OS that’d be peachy.

(In my defense, the changes to in the IS code iteself have been relatively minor. The changes have been mostly to the so called “presentation layer”. But I suppose that’s literal technicality.)

Has it really been a month? More? Geez.

Anyway, it’s time for another Round Robin — #13 in fact! The way it works is, each person chooses and captions an image and inexplicably something resembling a story emerges. We know, it’s amazing. Modern science is baffled.

If you’d like to participate, be sure to sign up by Sunday, August 20. We’ll start bushy-eyed and bright-tailed on Monday, August 21.