Tien Chiu

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Web redesign progress

Hop on over to my new website, and you’ll see what I’ve been up to.  There isn’t any real  content yet, but I’ve managed to set up the  basic framework.  On my homepage, you see the following items:

  • the most recently posted unfinished work
  • the most recently posted finished work
  • Excerpt from my latest blog entry
  • Randomly selected finished work

There’s a lot yet to be done (set up the sidebars, format things to look pretty, add real content, etc.) but the underlying code is there.  I know it doesn’t look like much, but there was a great deal of custom code required to put this together!  By default, WordPress just displays the 10 most recently completed posts on the home page.  I had to figure out how to get the most recent post from a given category to display (finished works, unfinished works, blog), install a plugin to generate a random post, and get a “cover image” for each finished/unfinished work to display.  It wasn’t easy, but I figured it out.

A plug for WordPress here: it is a wonderful platform for the artist and novice developer: highly customizable, but also EXTREMELY well-documented.  If you want to know how to use a particular function, the documentation will probably contain not only the information you need but also the code snippet that does what you wanted it to do.  It’s very clear and easy  to read, good for someone who doesn’t program PHP professionally but can understand syntax and modify code snippets.  (i.e., me!)  The documentation was one of the primary reasons I chose WordPress; with its help I’ve been able to do quite a bit of magic that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to accomplish.

Meanwhile, I have beamed on the 120/2 silk warp and am about halfway through threading.  It was pretty challenging at the beginning (I had a hard time distinguishing the threads) but, 500 threads into it, it’s starting to go quickly.  I expect to tie on and begin weaving today.

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A new definition of "forever"

The Joy of Cooking, which is one of the most entertaining cookbooks ever written, defines eternity as “a ham and two people”.  But I found a new version today, when (you guessed it!) my 120/2 silk finally arrived!

Unfortunately, it arrived on only two cones, one of 500g and one of 1500g.  This meant I couldn’t wind the warp straight off multiple cones: given the unequal sizes, the tension would be different on the strands coming off each cone.  I also wanted to wind with at least four threads at a time (at 96 ends per inch, this would be a real timesaver).

What to do?

Well, I whipped out my trusty Silver Needles electric conewinder, ran the yarn through a tension box to improve the tension, and started the cone winding.

And winding.

And winding.

It’s now been about an hour and a half since I started, and the conewinder, laboring valiantly, has wound off…about 100g.  In other words, about 2/5 of a single cone.  A little math says that winding off 1 kg onto four cones of 250g apiece will take about 15 hours, or almost an entire dawn-to-dusk day.  Thank GOODNESS I don’t have to do it by hand!

The Silver Needles electric conewinder, by the way, is not designed for this kind of load.  The plastic housing is largely unventilated, and while there’s a small fan inside the housing, it’s way too small to cool the motor.  So I have removed the housing and pointed a household fan at the motor.  This seems to be working pretty well.

And, for those who like pretty pictures, here is the header image for my new website:

header image

Take a look at it close up; there’s a lot of detail missing from the thumbnail.  The fabric, of course, is that marvelous study in iridescence, and I really like the way it’s rumpled.

Of course, it two hours of reading up on CSS and PHP to get the right code into the right libraries to display that header image on the new website, but I’m starting to understand how this WordPress theme “thinks”, so I’m content for now.

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Split attention

So much to do, so little time!

I had a wonderful time at Sandra’s – her DH, B., repaired my warp beam and made an adapter that will allow me to wind cones on my double-ended AVL bobbin winder, and Sandra and I talked a lot about weaving and interleaved network drafted threadings.  She does beautiful work, some of it holographic, with interleaved threadings, and I find it extremely exciting.  I must explore this! – well, AFTER the dress is complete.

Sandra also showed me her electric skeinwinder – essentially, a conventional skeinwinder with a flywheel attached, driven by a sewing machine motor at the base of the device.  A magnetic counter counts revolutions.  I’d post a photo but I can’t currently locate the gizmo that will let me plug my little portable camera’s memory card into the computer.  Maybe in a little bit.

This is an extremely neat gadget, and one I’d like to try making sometime – but for now, the skeinwinder on my spinning wheel will work just fine.  It’s great, it’s foot-driven, and I can easily estimate weight of the yarn on the skein by sticking the cone I’m winding from on a scale at the beginning, then subtracting the weight at any given point from the original weight to give the amount of yarn wound off.  I also don’t have to store One More Thing, which is extremely useful since my studio is looking pretty crammed right now.  (Where on earth did I store everything back when I was working on the dining room table???)

Needless to say, as soon as I got home I tucked my properly-adjusted warp beam into the loom, leaped for the AVL warping wheel, and started winding on a new warp, this one of white mohair.  Sandra had given me lots of useful tips for working with the warping wheel – run the yarn through a tension box on its way onto the wheel (for even tension in winding), use plastic tubing to guide the yarn into the sectional hoops when winding onto the beam, and lots of other helpful stuff – and it was a breeze.  I really think most of my woes were caused by (a) the misalignment of the sectional hoops, and (b) having the tension set WAY too low on the warping wheel as I wound each section onto the beam.

At any rate, I wound on a 19″ wide, 9-yard warp of fine white mohair this morning, now sitting on the beam ready for threading. It went on beautifully – of course, the proof will be how it weaves up!  I can’t wait to find out.

I might have gotten the warp on earlier, but I spent the first three hours of my day reading up on WordPress and realizing just what a Herculean effort I’ve let myself in for, in the website redesign.  It’s not that the task is complicated; it could probably be done by a competent web developer in about a day and a half.  However, I’m not a full-time web developer!  I have a decent idea of HTML and a hazy idea of CSS and a very limited understanding of PHP, so I’m having to puzzle it out bit by bit.  I did locate a theme that is very powerful (low on pretty graphics, high on customizability) and have installed it.  I also found a lot of great info on theme design at http://themeshaper.com – if you’re into WordPress, and want to customize it, this is a great resource.

I have, however, managed to do the really important thing: I have created my own favicon for the new webpage!  It’s a simple orange and black tiger-striped design.  (I was going to do something weaving-related, but there’s only so much you can do in a 16 x 16 pixel area.)  I have also created the image header for my website, but still need to massage it a bit before it’s ready for prime time.  I also have to figure out how to get it to display properly in the header, which will require a dive into my CSS books and the WordPress documentation.

The other thing I’ve been doing, which is singularly unexciting, is doing online coursework to renew my PMP (Project Management Professional) certification.  This particular class is completely useless, an epithet I might use to describe the PMP certification as well, though it does decorate a resume nicely.  It’s basically memorizing jargon out of the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) and spouting it back.  Is there any real value in memorizing what the risk management planning process is and how it differs from the risk management control assessment?

Well, regardless, it is a good certification to have, so I’m working my way through it.  This is what I get for leaving my continuing education requirement to the last minute, I guess.

Tonight is a guild meeting, so I will be bringing the collapse weave shawl and some of my other recent stuff to show.  I’m also going up to visit Blossom, who’s a new production weaver documenting his journey into professional weaving at his blog here.

Finally, I’ve decided to do some more dyeing.  The plan is to create a full color range of graduated colors in 60/2 silk – a smooth color range going all the way around the color wheel.  As you may recall from my previous color work, this is a bit daunting – it took me 29 skeins just to get from fuchsia to turquoise – and also requires quite a bit of yarn.  However, since I bought 6 kg of 60/2 silk back when I thought I would use it for the wedding dress, I should have enough to do 50-gram skeins in 120 colors, which should get me all the way around the color wheel with room to spare.

I want to do this while I’m unemployed because it’s fairly time-consuming, and also because you have to be around for a long chunk of time to watch the dye-pots.  It takes 1.5 hours to do a fiber-reactive dyebath using my methods, and I have to be stirring the dyepots every 15 minutes during that time.  Even though I can do six or seven dyepots at once using mason jars in a hot water bath, 120 colors will still take a loooong time to do.

The last thing I want to do is to dye up some sample sets using Jacquard acid dyes.  I recently purchased about 30 8 oz containers of Jacquard acid dyes at a yard sale, and before I can really work with those dyes I’ll need to know what colors they yield, and get some idea of how the colors mix together.  So I will be doing samples with those as well.

Whew!  So many things to do, so little time.  And I thought being unemployed was going to be RELAXING!

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Web redesign excitement!

Sandra and I stumbled across the new CNCH website yesterday (it’s gorgeous by the way), and it inspired me to TOTALLY rethink my concept for my website.  I had been thinking about using WordPress for a set of static pages, but their presentation is fresh (totally different from the old site) and totally cool.  Now I’m thinking about ways to add rotating content, put new content at the top, highlight recent work and work in progress, and a WHOLE lot of other stuff.  And (after investigating other options) I’m definitely going to be using WordPress…it’s simple to use, relatively easy to edit, and a lot more friendly to the web designer/nontechnical user than Drupal.

I was so excited, in fact, that I woke up at 2am and couldn’t get back to sleep until I had scrawled down some of my ideas on paper.  Sadly, no scanner, so I can’t put it into the computer, but here is a sampling of what I intend to do:

  • Organize in 7-8 sections with a link to each section at the top of the page
  • Left-hand context sensitive menu in each section with links to each section’s content
  • Homepage content contains:
    • Photo of most recently completed work, with link to that work’s page
    • Photo of works in progress, with teaser explanation and link to that piece’s page
    • Teaser for most recent blog entry
    • Random photo of previously completed work, linking to that piece’s page
  • Each piece will have a page with explanatory text, photos, links to blog entries about that piece, etc.
  • Image galleries with optional slideshows

Now, of course, I have to go through the list of WordPress plugins and see which of those items can be done with existing plugins.  Needless to say, I will be adapting requirements around what is achievable.

This is a huge undertaking, and I wouldn’t dare try it at all, but the Scrum framework gives me the option of breaking it down into smaller, more manageable bits, so I’m just looking at a series of small hills rather than a giant mountain.  The first step will be to get the basic homepage put together, which means selecting a theme (I’m leaning towards Atahualpa, as it looks both popular and very flexible) and starting to research how to get various types of content to display in WordPress.

A long slog, but who knows?  It might pan out, and then I’d get a new website.  And that would be very cool indeed.

I’ll be building the new website at my alternate URL, tienchiu . com, for those who feel like tracking the progress.  Up until now it’s simply pointed at travelingtiger.com, but it’s a nice place to build the new site.  It will also give me the opportunity to work with a new hosting provider, Dreamhost – which hopefully will be more friendly and reliable than Omnis.com, my current hosting provider (have been unhappy for awhile and would NEVER work with them again).

It’s funny – a lot of my thoughts on the design have been heavily influenced by Weavolution.  I didn’t think that Weavolution design was going to be so applicable to other things, but looking back on it, it’s amazing how much I learned about web design along the way.

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Weavolution excitement!

The company we contracted with to build Weavolution has delivered the first prototype of the site!  It’s still very much in development (sorry, no links yet) but visually it looks right, and you can add drafts, projects, etc., search by tags, and do a lot of other really cool stuff.  The volunteer team is currently evaluating the site and offering comments/finding bugs, and we expect to be in alpha by the beginning of May and into beta and/or release in early June!  It’s so incredibly close I can’t believe it.

And there are a couple of REALLY cool features that we had our contractor build in.  For example, thanks to the generosity of Kris Bruland (owner/programmer of Handweaving.net), we can display images of .wif files.  So you can upload a .wif file and instantly see a .jpg preview of the draft.  Every draft has a set of tags, and you can search by tag to find everything else tagged “overshot” or “straight draw” or whatever other tags have been used.  We will have an advanced search function to help narrow things down, too.

It’s really amazing seeing this take shape so quickly, after so much planning time.  I remember back in August, when Syne introduced me and Claudia, and we envisioned a very small project, me doing the programming on the Drupal open-source content management platform, and Claudia doing the administration.  We got together a team of volunteers to help build the site, and the vision expanded.  We started fundraising, and the generosity of the handweaving community was amazing.  Soon we realized that we really could build the site we were dreaming of, and faster than we thought!  So we changed the focus of the volunteers to helping us spec out the site (much wireframing, much debate over usability and feature design), and started looking for a company to do the programming.  We found Pulse Solutions in January, and they started working on the site.

Since then they’ve been sending us mockups on a regular basis, and we’ve been sending back corrections, but this is the first chance we’ve gotten to see an actual working prototype!  It’s unbelievably exciting to be able to push the buttons myself, upload drafts, enter projects, and see it display in living color.  I’ve already started entering some of my projects, even though I know it’s only dummy data and will get blown away later when we go to the “real” site.  It’s that cool.

Anyway, I need to get back to playing with evaluating the site, as we’re having our weekly development meeting tomorrow and I need to walk through more of the functionality so we can start sending bug reports back to Pulse.  But it’s our first working prototype!  Now how cool is THAT???