First Addition

Welcome! While the majority of you were getting ready for and having a great time at Tolo I spent my whole day creating this, the first addition of the Wall Steve Journal. (Many thanks to Mason for the name.) First business, did you really look at this as soon as you got home from Tolo? Disturbing. For anyone who really did check this as soon as they got home's sake, I hope that you had a great time at Tolo, you probably need it. So as you can see I have revamped the site to make it a weird retro mix of a newspaper, a website and the colors red and blue. I also took the liberty of packing some sweet new features into the site along with the new design. For example, anyone can now contribute their own writing, music picks, animations and pictures to the site. Maintaining all of this will take a lot of censorship work from me, but I believe that it will be well worth the work.

The contributions feature was made possible by the blogging service Blogger. If you are ever interested in starting up your own blog I would high recommend using their free and efficient services.

To get your own material on my site all that you have to do is log in to blogger with the username: gelusojournal and the password: public. Once you are logged in you simply choose the category that you want to contribute to and click on the new post button next to it. This will direct you to a page with instructions on how to put your stuff up on the site and where to write about it. Fill out the page as directed and then hit the big orange button at the bottom that says "Publish Post." It may sound sort of complicated, but I think that it will actually be fairly self-explanatory. Either way, good luck. I will whip together a more thorough guide later.

Quite honestly, this design isn't what I first had in mind for the new site. I originally wanted it to look more like a newspaper. Newspapers proved to be a bit harder to design on a web page than I had thought. When I couldn't do one thing that I had wanted I just toned the design down a bit until I would up with something that I could handle, this. However, as some of you may experience, this site does not look good at all in some browsers. In my normal internet browser, Firefox, the site looks like this. For all of you who may be experiencing the same problem here is a picture of what the site should look like. It is kind of sad when I am so bad at web design that I have to use a different browser than usual to view my own site.

As long as we.. excuse me.. as long as I am on the topic of web design, here is a funny little story about the old legal pad design from, the now dead, steve.mathcaddy.com.

Some of you.. excuse me again.. one of you may remember my very first web site design. It was a white background sparsely populated with text. I would have said that it was pretty intense back then. Eventually I grew tired of the bland flavor of the site and decided that I wanted a new design, or rather a design at all.

I carried a small legal pad around with me for the next few days sketching different ideas of basic designs for the site. Eventually I had what I wanted set in concrete and sat down with the pad to whip the site up. The only problem that I ran into was that I had not considered what kind of background of overall image kind of look I wanted to give the site. I sat there for a bit staring back and forth between the blank HTML and the legal pad and then finally decided that the legal pad looked kind of cool and I just scanned it in and made it the site. Now that is being creative! So that's why the site used to look like a notepad and all the left side links were hand written. Amused? No? Darn.

And that brings us to the end of this first addition to The Wall Steve Journal. I hope that you like the new design and are looking forward to making use of all the cool new capabilities of this site. The Wall Steve Journal will become a living, thriving community of people from all over the world sharing their talents and interests with each other in one focused hub of awesomeness and it will continue to grow and grow until it becomes the coolest place on the net.

Or I will continue to write myself to sleep every night without ever earning a single comment or seeing someone else throw something up on the site and the site will dwindle and dwindle and *suck.* We'll see.



- Steve