Open Source or Bust!

With Superfish installed it was time to get the navigation animated. There is a chaotic elegance when it comes to open source plugins. On the one hand, they are absolutely free and that counts for a lot. The downside, however, is that a lot of these plugins do not come with proper documentation to help someone less experienced make sense of what they are doing and that is where the beauty of the internet takes center stage.

When using an open source plugin it’s a good habit to do a group of searches and try to find websites, blogs, or forums that discuss the plugin. More often than not someone else, somewhere in the world, has run into the exact same problem you are having and yet another person has come along to aid them.

Regarding Superfish; Joel Birch is a genius. He wrote the plugin and is surprisingly helpful. I scoured the web for working examples of Superfish menus, inspecting elements and analyzing the code to try and make sense of what I was looking at. During this process I found numerous forums and blog post where Joel Birch himself chimed in to help shed some light on the plugin.

With the navigation menu finished I found the time to start on the graphic slider at the top of the home page. For this I used a plugin called WOW Slider. Unlike Superfish or other JQuery plugins, WOW Slider is a stand-alone application with a cost for using. The developer offers a free version, but this version has the logo and a link plastered all over the output. What I did instead, was use WOW Slider to create the look and feel I wanted. Then I dove into its source code to study the implementation. It took a few hours to get right. Eventually I got it done.

I decided I'm going to introduce a recurring theme to the graphic sliders of my website. It has been a couple weeks since I painted anything. I can justify doing a painting for the sake of my website. I am going to do a matte painting of an airborne vehicle superimposed over the majestic vistas that are now in the graphic slider. I am considering the Daedalus airship from my novel.