VG June 2005 Blog Archives

June 28, 2005

paula's never blogged before

I'm learning to do html, ha,ha.

Posted by PaulaRabinowitz at 01:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 20, 2005

favicon!

I added a favicon to the site. You'll see it in various places depending on which browser you're using. If you're using Firefox (which I personally recommend for a bevy of reasons, one of which it does probably the best job rendering this site) you should see the favicon next to the URL in the address section (same with Safari for you Mac users). IE users should see it in their list of bookmarks. Anyway, the favicon is probably the first piece of evidence you'll need that I'm not a graphic designer--though in my defense a 16x16 palette isn't much to work with.

Posted by DieterBohn at 11:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 17, 2005

Archives and Work to be done

The more organized we get here at VG, the more we discover that there's so much more work than you might expect. But that's a good thing, it means we'll have regular updates and new content on a fairly constant basis for the foreseeable future. As an example, right now a couple of our undergraduate volunteers are in the office with me now, one's working on making sure our permissions are up to date (a heady task) and another is filing printouts of every author biography. These printouts come out to just under 1000 pages right now. That's a lot. Yowsa.

Posted by DieterBohn at 11:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 09, 2005

Random Stuff.

We've had a couple of great meetings in the past week. First off we got some great undergraduate volunteers to help us out with getting our files organized and also doing some other work on transcription and editing and the like. Thanks guys!

We're also working on a couple of academic papers to present at conferences, which we'll post here when they're a little further along.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with the powers-that-be at CLA web services, who have been incredibly helpful despite my multiple annoying inquiries and silly questions. The main item on the agenda is multimedia streaming. I'm planning on going with quicktime for a few reasons, the main being I'm a mac evangelist, but also because it's technically easier and cheaper for us to do than Real. Ideally, we'll be posting the full hourlong artists interviews instead of just clips.

I guess my question here is what sorts of formats people like. I tend to prefer just posting .mov files so that they can be downloaded and saved elsewhere, but we may go the streaming route to make things easier on the servers. I'm also not sure if we should just standardize to one fairly small size or post multiple sizes for people with differing bandwidths.

One last piece of errata - I had the misfortune to take a look at the site in some very old Mac OS 9 browsers and it looks horrible! That's something I'd like to fix, though I have to say I'm not sure if I'll be able to - it was so much work getting it to look clean in IE across old Windows versions (should be fine all the way down to IE4), in IE on Mac OSX, and on modern versions of Netscape, Firefox, and Safari. For now, if you're having issues in OS 9, I would download the last Netscape that was made for OS 9, which seems to render it fine. You can get that here

Posted by DieterBohn at 11:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack