Dec. 7, 2011 - Improved Art Galleries
I have made some substantial changes to the art galleries. First of all, "galleries" is now a misnomer; there is one central place for drawings, including the older illustrations of Tolkien's works. All drawings have thumbnails, and there is a hover effect to make it immediately obvious that the thumbnails are, in fact, links. The miniature pages displaying the art all contain dates, medium information, and comments about the piece. More importantly, however, all the drawings have been converted to Flash. This is to make them a little more protected from blatant theft. To my knowledge, this has not happened, but there is a reason why most professional art galleries are loaded in Flash. There are no more preview images in the artwork display mini-pages; instead, the entire Flash file of each drawing is loaded. This should be noted by anyone who may have bandwidth caps. The largest Flash file is a newly uploaded piece (of an alternate-history storm chaser) that is 771 KB in size, but most of them are at least 100 KB, roughly 10 times the size of the preview images that used to be present. I decided that it was an unnecessary and arguably annoying click to have to go through a preview image, and it was definitely annoying to have the full-size image appear in a different tab.
With the elimination of the Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion character drawings from a separate gallery, I saw no point in continuing with a "Tolkien" section. The four humor pieces have been merged into the main Writing section. The links have been updated in the site categories as well.
Was the Joplin Tornado the Deadliest We Can Expect?
31 Dec 2011Meteorologists and weather-watchers are bidding the year 2011 a less-than-fond farewell. While it was certainly a banner year from the point of view of storm chasing—6 EF-5 tornadoes, 17 EF-4s, and many of them highly photogenic, as the dozens of home videos on Youtube illustrate—it was a catastrophe in terms of the human impact. With [...]
Read the full entryGo to Synoptic Flow
Thoughts On SOPA
18 Jan 2012I’m not blacking out my website. Color me jaded, cynical, or whatever adjective you choose—if it’s a synonym of that general sort, it’s almost certainly correct—but I just don’t have much—no, any—faith in the effectiveness of boycotts or protests. That’s part of the reason why I’m not taking part in this. I’m not going to [...]
Read the full entryGo to PolitiCalypso
What Is This Website?
My name is Erin Thead, and this is my personal website and two blogs. I custom-built the main site—that is to say, the site that you are reading—and the WordPress theme for the blogs, and I maintain everything on this site independently. Some people think that is strange in this day and age, but I have found that I prefer it this way. It makes backups very straightforward, and I have full knowledge of the program code and markup used in the site, having written almost all of it.
The main website contains mostly creative work that I have done relating to subjects that interest me, and the time frame for the work spans roughly a decade. The PolitiCalypso blog is primarily political (hence its name), but not exclusively. The Synoptic Flow blog is about weather.
For more information about me, visit my About Me page.