Click Here for the TS4051 Journal
2007? When did it get to be 2007? Ok, it's out of date but we're working on it.
—October 2006
September 12, 2005
Farmer Dave and His Barnyard Friends made a trip to northern Maryland (near Frostburg) to Cherry Grove UB this month. It was a wonderful time of ministry, and we got to hear reports of kids who gave their hearts to the Lord over 10 years ago when we were in the area. Several of them are now in Bible College! Praise the Lord! It is amazing how God can use crazy things like Pork & Beans, and Moo, and the Yellow Guy, and Farmer Dave to touch peoples lives!
However....we also found out that we had flood damage during this summer's flood, and all the puppets and many of the props were waterlogged! Who knew there was a split in the trailer roof? Poor things had to be hung out to dry. We lost a bunch of paper props, but the "kids" look like they'll be OK once they make a visit to the washer and dryer. (not the washer....I go around and around and around....—Yellow Guy)
July 2005
Floating church on the river...We went to City Island to church on the Pride of the Susquehanna. It was a very nice service, and an hour-long ride on the Susquehanna River (although it was a hot trip on the upper level!). It was cool to finally get a chance to sail in it. This trip inspired us to finally get our bikes on the Harrisburg Greenbelt. Lots of bikes tooling around City Island and across the river on the "steps". The carousel was cool, too!
Summer 2005
Flash Flood like we've never seen before! The creek next to the house rose 4 feet in 5 minutes. It was at least 8 inches on the sidewalk outside the house, up to the bottom step of the porch.
July 3, 2005
It's Knoebels time again! It just seemed like it was time to visit our favorite park. Not 15 minutes after we got there, DAVE CAUGHT THE BRASS RING AGAIN! The FIRST RIDE on the Carousel! Now, it's definitely Daena's turn to catch that elusive ring. Well, she had to buy one in the gift shop, just in case....We had a lovely time, nice weather, and of course, a Phoenix Burger. Much to our delight, they've torn down the loop coaster (30 seconds isn't what we consider a good coaster!) and are supposed to install a "vintage looping coaster" whatever that is.... We can only hope for something as good at the old "mouse" that used to stand there. We'll have to go back in August and see!
June 4, 2005
Littlestown's St. Paul's Strawberry Festival is here again. This is our 9th year helping at the festival. Dave has scooped 8 out of 9 years, and made the paper last June! It was a wonderful day and together with a team of others we raised around $3,000 to benefit several charities in the community.
May 29, 2005
We outran the rain and finally found the Stony Valley Railroad Grade. This is one of the oldest rail trails in the country, purchased in 1945 by the state and converted to a trail. It's about 20 miles from end to end, but today we were only "checking it out" We rode 10 miles, and it's a beautiful shady ride. We are planning to come back for an all day adventure out and back again.
May 21st & 22nd, 2005
We made it back to West Virginia after five years' absence—nothing like 700 miles in 36 hours to cheer you up! It was so good to be "home" again. We left late Saturday afternoon, but still arrived 
in daylight at Seneca Shadows campground in Seneca Rocks, WV. After continuing our tradition of adding peanuts to a couple of Cokes at the circa 1905 Harper's Store, we coaxed a really fitful fire into making supper and banana boats. It gave up on us pretty early, so we went to bed. It was 40 degrees that night, and it was tough sleeping!
At 3:00 a.m. we got up to do some stargazing for Daena's astronomy class project about an hour south at Green Bank. The ride was so beautiful, and we could hardly wait for the moon to set and reveal the millions of stars you can see there. At 4:30 a.m. the moon set and the sky was a delight. We were treated to 20 minutes of total darkness before the sun began to rise. We drove the hour back to camp and spent a few more hours trying to get warm.
Sunday, we toured the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank. (Yep, we drove another hour back down!) The free tour is phenomenal, and our group of five spent 90 minutes poking around the radio telecopes on the grounds. This one is the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. It is the world's largest fully steerable telescope, and it's the size of two football fields!
Afterwards, we drove down to the Greenbriar River Trail just to put our feet on it, and then stopped back at the observatory to have a picnic under the trees. Just five hours later we were home again. Such a short trip to "almost heaven, West Virginia." Hope we get down again soon.
TS4051—How this site was created in Fireworks:
Unit 1 Notes | Unit 2 Notes | Unit 3 Notes | Unit 4 Notes | Unit 5 Notes
Unit 6 Notes | Unit 7 Notes | Unit 8 Notes | Unit 9 Notes | Unit 10 Notes
The final week at last!
I've been having fun this week. I'm filling out the site and working on a few things I wanted to tweak. I've added a heading (and our favorite game) to the Journal page. I used several pictures of the two of us adventuring to make a collage (Dave's idea!) which will eventually lead you to each of those adventure destinations. Below the header will be a blog-type journal of our recent adventures.
On the Roadtrips page, I have finished the rollovers for three different trips. When you rollover a route on the US map, the graphic at left changes to a picture from that trip, and a smaller icon on the map itself also identifies the trip you'll take if you click. Each individual trip has the same map and routes, but by changing the frame order for each heading I was able to have that trip's info as the default for its page. Only minor changes had to be made on the routes to change the frame number of the swapped image.
Beyond that I've made some CSS changes to make the links more uniform and to change the colors and rollover behaviors.
It will be a work in progress for years to come I'm sure! Now off to another adventure...
This week I created an animation on the Cool Stops page of my site. I took the existing graphic of “The Big Stuff” and animated it.
I copied “The Big Stuff” text from my original Cool Stops layout to a new file. I created two graphic symbols, one with the text all at the same size, and one with BIG at a much larger size. On the “BIG” symbol, I opened it to remove the splashes around the “B” in Big. I converted the text to paths and used the subselection tool to delete the splashes.
In order to get the little “splashes” around the B by themselves, I converted a B to paths, ungrouped it, and used the subselection tool to delete what I didn’t want, leaving the four splashes. I converted this to a graphic symbol. I duplicated the symbol three times, then edited each one so that each symbol contained one splash.
I started with “The Big Stuff” symbol with the same-height text. I put one instance off to the far left out of sight and one squished on the right using Free Transform. Then I selected both and clicked on Modify | Symbol | Tween Instances to created the motion between them.
Next, I selected that last few frames of squished text (shift-click to select multiple frames) and dragged them to the New/Duplicate Frames button at the bottom of the Frames panel. This reversed the squishing.
After adding a frame at the end for a new section of animation, I took “The Big Stuff” symbol with the large BIG text and I squished it at the right using Free Transform Then I placed another one full size at center. After selecting both, I used Modify | Symbol | Tween Instances to created the motion between them.
I added a frame for each of the “splashes” by first duplicating the previous frame and then adding a splash on each frame to surround the B.
I played around with the speed a little bit and ended up with most of the animation at 8/100 th of a second. The squishing at right averages 2/100 th of a second, and the splash frames are at 10/100 th of a second.
I exported the graphic in 8 colors with no transparency, and no looping. Finally, I placed the animation in Dreamweaver in place of the static graphic that was there previously.
That’s it! I plan to continue working on graphics for other pages between now and the end of the course. I look forward to any comments.
Not too much new and exciting this week, but I've added copy, links and photos to the Cool Stops and Thrill Rides pages. It's been fun sifting through 25 years of pictures and trying to remember where some of them were taken!
I’ve been using slices all along to break up my large header graphics, but I’m learning a lot about where and when to slice. I’ve been trying to “tidy up” my slices a bit this week and I’m still tweaking them. I definitely need to watch the videos a couple more times to get the hang of all the extra settings. There are slices on all of my pages’ graphics.
I haven’t used hotspots in this site, so on the Road Trips page, there are now hotspots that link to particular Road Trips based on the route you select on the US map. Those page links work, but the individual pages have not been fully developed just yet. I’ve put a hotspot on the Thrill Rides page to link to the Knoebel’s website from the text of the park’s name.
Rollovers have been part of the site since the beginning. My main section links on the first page and also the smaller versions on each section page are rollover buttons. They have an Up state, an Over state, and a Down state. It was much easier to create them by making a button symbol than by just creating a slice behavior.
I may experiment with slice behaviors for the US map—maybe have a swap image when the visitor mouses over the route. What do you think?
This week I’ve been working more on finalizing the layout to translate to other pages. Symbols sure came in handy!
The buttons from the entrance page were created as symbols, and I simply reused them on the other pages.
I dragged instances of each symbol to the top of the page and resized. Then I double-clicked each to edit them individually. Since the text would have been way too small to read in its original form, I changed the over state text to cover the graphic and glow. The down graphic is simply the color version of the icon. I added a pen symbol for the Journal button. I tried using the word Journal like the front page, but it took too much attention away from the wording near the top of the page.
Live effects are cool, and I’ve been using them since Unit 2. I’m adding different main graphics for the section pages which are still in progress.
For the Thrill Rides page, I’ve started with a coaster from Six Flags Great America (near Chicago) and scanned it directly into Fireworks. Based on the size of the graphic on the Bike Trails page, I used the marquee tool with a fixed size to select a 239 x 318 pixel section of the photo, and then right-clicked to Crop the document.
With a round eraser tool sized at 63 and a 100 edge, I randomly erased the edges, and gave it a drop shadow with a distance of 12 and opacity of 33%, and also changed the Brightness to 12 and the Contrast to 21. Sure livens up those pictures from my old Kodak 110 camera!
I’ve put a preliminary text path on the Thrill Rides page, but I’m not sure I’ll keep it. I may focus on all the rides in each park rather than just one coaster, so the text would change in that case. For now, I attached the text to the path drawn with my Wacom stylus, converted the text to paths, and then combined paths where they overlapped to created the punch out.
That’s it for now!
This week I've been studying up on CSS! The lynda.com site is a wealth of information, and I'm getting the layout to do more of what I wanted it to. I know this isn't a web layout class, but that stuff is necessary to make a place for the graphics to live!
Here's what's on the site that fits in with Unit 5:
The bar across the top of the Bike Trails page is a vector graphic with a grass texture applied at 35%. Some of the letters from Virginia were added to the vector graphic last week to create the punched out effect.
On the SORH webpage I was working on last week, you’ll see a rectangular vector graphic with a linear gradient applied, as well as a linear gradient grouped together with the banner’s photo to create a mask that fades the picture to white.
On the Bike Trails page, there is a photo of Dave riding on a railroad bridge. This also was grouped with a bars gradient as a mask.
The words “Bike Trails” on the main graphic have a 1 pixel soft stroke and a drop shadow with a softness of 1 and opacity of 70% from the Live Effects.
This coming week I am planning to get the section pages in line with this one, adding the main upper-left graphics and (hopefully) some navigation.
I’ve been busy this week creating a website for a community organization, Save Our Rural Heritage. You can take a look at www.sorh.org. I used the text tools we studied this week in the heading. In addition to the stroke & shadow effects, I also used kerning to spread the letters apart to match the organization’s brochure.
On my “Adventures” page, I’ve added a few things to the Bike Trails page this week. I’m working on getting the basic format of this page set before I translate it to the other pages so that all are uniform. Hopefully that will happen this coming week.
I’ve already used the text tools to make the “Bike Trails” text look the way I wanted it to. I’ve set the kerning to 4, the scale to 105%, and used the Free Transform to stretch it (the point size ended up at 42.19). I’ve also added a drop shadow with a softness of 1 and 70% opacity.
I’ve been toying around with the idea of having a “road” for the top of each page that matches the subject. I’ve drawn a trail with the Vector Path tool using my Wacom tablet, and typed out the trail name. I then aligned the text to the path. I had to play with the kerning a bit, even between individual characters to get it just right.
Next I converted the text to paths (Text / Convert to Paths). Then I Combined Paths for “ Virginia” to get the reverse effect where it crosses the top rectangle graphic. Finally I added a tiny “me” riding on the text path “trail.”
I’ve also defined CSS properties for the links which (for now) link to websites for each trail. I am hoping to link these to pages about our adventures on these trails with further links to the trail websites themselves.
Bitmap Week! I am playing around with a design for the main section pages. I want a corner graphic that will be similar for each page, but with different photographs relating to the category. I have created the first one this week for the Bike Trails page. This particular photo is from the Greenbriar River Trail in West Virginia.
The text at the left will be links to the trails and/or our stories about them. These are still in the planning stages, so they are just placeholders at present.
I started with a photo scanned directly into Fireworks. After struggling for a while trying to make Fireworks do what Photoshop does, I gave up and poked around a little until I found some interesting effects.
First I used the oval marquee tool with a feather of 31 to select the large upper left section of the photo. I inverted the selection (leaving the bottom right corner selected) and cut the selection. That gave me the nice curved corner, but still straight side edges. Not what I was hoping for.
I decided to play with the gradient tool. I chose a linear gradient, going from a green selected with the eyedropper tool from the photo to white. I set the edge to anti-alias, the texture to Grass at 80%, and checked "transparency"; set the tolerance at 97%, and checked "preserve transparency". I used the tool to fill the photo.
Next I changed the brightness and contrast using the filter.
I wanted to rough up the edges a little bit, so I used the lasso tool to select irregular areas around the photo's edges, and set the feather to 17. I cut the selections and kept choosing and cutting until I was satisfied. I used the smudge tool and blur tool to blend things together here and there.
Finally I added a gray drop shadow with a distance of 10, softness of 9, and opacity at 65%.
Like all of us, I am just getting used to what Fireworks can do. I originally thought it was just another “Photoshop” type program, but I was so wrong! While Fireworks has some of those capabilities, I love how I can design my layout more intuitively and then export to Dreamweaver. I’m in love!!! ;-)
Here’s what I did this week to create the first page of my site:
First, I followed Velma’s great feedback and made the “Highways..” line a lot smaller, and also shrunk the image size itself. I decided to add the text to the main image, much like info is written on the paper frames of old pictures. I used Transform/Distort to stretch it to the width I wanted. I used kerning to spread the individual letters out a bit to make them easier to read. To make the writing look like it was part of the paper frame, I added noise, changing from the default setting to 19 using the effects area of the property panel, and changed the opacity to 71.
I added a placeholder for descriptive text (as yet unwritten) to the right of the main image. I also added divider lines. Below, I’ve added graphical links to the future sections of the web site. I created these by first choosing a photo and isolating the object I wanted. (I can’t believe how long it took to search the photo albums for these!) Then I made two versions of the object—one in sepia tone and one in color with a glow, both with drop shadows.
To get the sepia tone, I selected the object and used the effects button on the property panel to select Hue and Saturation. I then checked the Colorize box, and changed Hue to 25 and Saturation to 20. I also added a drop shadow using the effects button and selecting Shadow and Glow. I saved each image as a transparent gif.
To add the glow to the color images, I also used the effects button, and selected Shadow and Glow. I chose a color and also changed the width, softness, and opacity to “fit” each graphic.
To get the rollover effect:
When the graphics were finished, I imported the sepia tone graphic to its location at the bottom of my page. I chose Modify | Symbol | Convert to Symbol. Then I chose the Button selection. Double-clicking the graphic opens a window to add the button states. I clicked on the Over tab and imported my color graphic. I also added text to describe the link. I then clicked on the Down tab, and at the bottom clicked the button for “Copy Over Graphic”. By selecting the copied text with the text tool, I was able to change it to “Let’s Go” When Fireworks asked if I wanted to change the text in all the states, I chose no. This kept the Over and Down text different.
For the Journal graphic, only the word “Journal” is actually a button. After converting Journal to a button using the same method as before, I increased the font size and changed the color in the Over state. Back in the main window, I increased the hot spot to cover the entire picture so that visitors don’t have to “find” the link. By mousing anywhere near Journal, they go to the linked page.
I’ve also added future pages so that the links actually go somewhere. That’s it for this week, I can’t wait to learn more!!
Unit 1 was not really a page—All I had was the main graphic and tag line.
