One thing at a time.

There are a lot of things I want to do with my blog to turn it into more of a website with a blog included, but that will mean ditching Blogger and doing a whole lot of work. Some of the things I want to do are:

• Host a photo gallery of my own work.


• Have poetry eBooks viewable on like and maybe for download.


• Host music and have persistent controls across the site pages so you can listen to a selection of my awesome music while you're visiting.


• Have a section with short stories, another with editorials, and a true blog section.


• Have an area with funny or cool stuff I find around the web, either pictures or links.


• Have a review area: movies, books, electronics, whatever.


• Have a section like an almanac, with lists of all sorts and interesting facts.


• Have a lyrics section for all my favorite songs, with snippets of each song available at a click.


• A webcam fitted to Jackson's collar so we can see the world through his eyes (just kidding).


• A resume/CV but probably separated someone from the rest of the site (no links between the two), to keep employers from seeing my best fart jokes.


• I dunno...shrines to The Lakers, Barry Bonds, Kobe Bryant, Lance Armstrong, Magic Johnson, Coca-Cola, Polar Bears, Gibbons, Blade Runner, or whatever. Pics, highlights (including video) and facts, plus a message board at the bottom for guests to leave their opinion (if it disagrees with mine, it goes).


• A giant hierarchy of interests like a huge tree with each twig ending in web links that will bring you to the best sites I've founds on each thing - the Pyramids of Giza, Scuba gear, fielding fundamentals in baseball, choosing the best camera for you, and so on.


• Lists of my favorite books, poems, animals, sports teams and players, web sites, bands, songs, and whatever else I can think of (which is a lot).


• An interactive "tour of history" which presents a world map and has regions you can click on to get an ancient-to-modern summary of the place. Also, world facts, countries, capitals.


• Math worksheets which randomly generate their numbers and time and grade the results and lots of other educational tools I can think of.


• Loads of conversion tools - currency, metric to english, etc.


• Languages - what I'm learning, what I know, common phrases, forums for discussion...I don't know.
  
• My ethnic heritage (a genealogy page) which I will hopefully continue to work on and improve continually.


• Quizzes! Lot of them.


• Many other things, including snakes.

The idea is not to have a site narrowly focused on one thing, but have a home page act as a hub from which you can get to many pages or "mini-sites" that are mostly self-contained, and take whatever user interface design makes best sense for the information being presented. For example, a picture galley would probably have photo albums with thumbnails inside them, which you could click to enlarge, then go left or right from there to stay on the large size, or go "up" to get back to the thumbnail gallery, and up again to get back to the photo album gallery.

A final four bracket (US College Basketball) would be a big bracket, with blanks like fields on a form for you to type your predictions into. A quiz would be timed and would present you with one question at a time in a linear structure, then give you your score at the end, including maybe a high-score list. And so on. Each mini-site is going to take a different kind of expertise to do just right.

But this is a huge undertaking, so I'm not even going to lay out a grand plan for it right now. I'll never do it. Instead, I'm going to list a few capabilities I'm going to need to learn to use in order to just get off the ground. For now, I'll stick within the Blogger framework, and move on when it's time. I definitely need:

To be able to embed a music player in my blog. It could remain in a corner wherever you went, or not, and it could play random playlists that I choose or allow you a choice. I have to kept it legal, so I'm still thinking about how to to this, but one thing you need to do, just like with videos and pictures, it to get your songs online, because Blogger's not gonna play them off your PC. There are lots of free file hosting sites. Many of them are full of ads and bait-and switch stuff, some are ok but don't give you much room and force you to pay to upgrade, and a very few are both free and generous. Google Pages used to be one, but it's not accepting new applicants anymore, even though I have a Google Account and use Blogger, Picassa, and Gmail. Cheapskates. There IS Google Sites, but it's more of a full-fledged web site creation tool, and seems a waste just to use to store music. Yahoo has something similar. One possibility - I heard that Picassa, where my photos for this blog are stored, will also accept other filetypes as uploads, like mp3s. Now if you tried to link to an mp3 with a photo reference, your gonna get a little broken box or something. But there are also XHTML or Flash music players that will pull mp3s from a source online an autoplay it or wait for the user to use the controls to play it. That's what I'm looking into now. I also just signed up for a free account at a filehosting site called eSnips that exists precisely for the purpose of storing your songs, pictures, videos, and so so, and they give you 5GB for free. Not too bad. I'll report back if I have and bad experiences.

I need to learn how to break of out Blogger's throttle-hold on text formatting if possible and be able to specify my own fonts (or list of preferred fonts in descending order, contingent upon what's installed on the guest's machine) instead of Blogger's stupid 6 or 7, and to have finer control or their size, positioning, leading, and so on. Probably not gonna get kerning control and other page-layout features on a blog, but there's got to be a middle ground. I've seen sites WAY better than mine that AREN'T Flash, they're just using a lot of CSS (cascading style sheets) and Javascript trickery. I need to learn all about that.

That's good enough for now. Eventually I'll need to learn to keep persistent data during a user's visit via some kind of simple database backend, maybe even stick a cookie on their comp so I can welcome them back next time and keep their preferences. But as that will go beying Blogger's capabilities, for right now I'd be happy to get some darned music up and to make my postings a little prettier with all these lovely fonts trapped on my computer and unusable (so far) on my blog. Accomplishing either or both of these things would be the dog's... ball toy.