Monday, January 18, 2010

The Resolution Solution

I've made much of screen resolution and viewing the site because The Weirding was designed to be seen as it was... designed. I've made a lot of that, too. As I've said time and again, The Weirding is meant to be actual artwork - a functional piece of art: a print "book" distributed online; in its purest and most successful form, The Weirding is supposed to blend that separation of media and medium. The Web is both media and medium - both the materials with which the project is created and the means by which it is distributed (another concept I've driven into the ground here) - though this duality is all too rarely employed, and almost never for any functional purpose.

On the BBS, a "front-end" program was used to determine if the phonecall was data-based, answer it, and pass it through to the actual BBS software program(s). This, and much more, was accomplished through a huge batch file which was the ultimate control unit. The front-end batch file handled literally everything, from mailruns to maintenance to the aforementioned phone-handling.

One thing I had done was created random welcome pages. Whenever the caller was passed to the BBS, a RND command, a wildcard (welcome*.ans) file call, and several, numbered welcome pages (welcome1.ans, welcome2.ans, etc.), callers were greeted by a random welcome screen everytime they logged-on. I wanted to apply this idea to the website originally for the holidays. I used to change the index page and FAVICON to a seasonal theme, but it was far too much maintenance to continue doing manually, so I wanted to figure out a way to apply the random screen routine to the site for seasonal index page changes; that is, force the site to load the seasonal index page on its own only at the proper time of year. I knew that JavaScript could detect the date, but I honestly had neither time nor patience to fool with such machinations until I started fretting about resolution.

What I am about to undertake will handle all of this:

I am going to use JavaScript to detect both the visitor's screen resolution as well as the date, then continue to the appropriate index page. In this manner, not only will you be seeing seasonal and event-based indeces, but the entire site will be keyed to your screen resolution without forcing you to change anything!

Obviously, this is going to take a lot of time and I'm notorious for fucking shit up and taking forever to figure it out and fix it, so if you can't get to anything or it throws you into loops and so forth, please let me know.

© C Harris Lynn, 2010

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