about

What's the point?

Created 4-3-09
Last updated 4-14-09

Quick FAQ

Q: Why the name flaptipulon, and what the hell is a flaptipulon anyway?

A: Flaptipulon, (pronounced: flap tip ya lon) is a fictional name I came up with and doesn't actually mean anything in reality. It's not yet officially decided as to exactly what flaptipulon is/means in my own strange imagination so I'll just leave it at that...for now. In fact, if I end up actually making something interesting out of this site, I'll probably move it to a different domain name that I feel is more fitting for the site at that time.

Q: Whats up with the morbid homepage picture of the guy getting run over by a truck?

A: Again, long story. The short version is that it was a picture I took as part of a project for a photography class. I don't know why, but I like it. I had to put something for my homepage pic, so I put that. No, the guy isn't actually getting run over, and it isn't photoshoped either. The truck is jacked up, and the jack is hidden in shadow with a black blanket. It was a somewhat dangerous (yeah kinda dumb too) trick photo, but that was how it was done. I'll probably replace it later with something less (or more) bizarre.

Q: Your site looks crappy. The background/colors/fonts/etc. hurt my eyes. Whats up with that?

A: Yeah, I know. I'm working on it. I kinda like the white text on black background but the fonts are all screwed up. They display one way in the preview pane of my web software and then look totally different in a browser. I'm guessing this is just due to something I don't know yet about page building. I'll try to sort it out eventually.

Okay, Moving On:

    I wanted to experiment a little bit with web design for multiple purposes. I guess I would call this site my online brainstorming experiment. My primary goal is to learn how to build a website capable of expressing/documenting my interests and hobbies. I'm also interested to see how well I can accomplish this using free Linux web development software. At this point I know basically next to nothing about web design, so it's slow going and this site is nothing more than a rough draft I'm playing with just to see if it's even remotely possible for me to make something useful out of this project.
    One of my main goals is to just keep it simple. I really want to try to stick to the basic, yet functional design principle. I don't want a bunch of fancy eye candy or flashy animated buttons and all that junk. I just want a simple site with mostly text and images for most things. One exception would be to add some sort of player for audio and video for some parts of the site as needed, particularly the music page. I'm not sure how I'm going to get this done just yet, but I have some ideas I'm looking into. In the mean time, I need to focus on getting the basics right.
    The only software I'm using at the moment is a program called KompoZer (that I just discovered and started using today) which is available for free and works on Windows, Linux and MacOS. I'm using a computer running Ubuntu Linux (version 8.10 Intrepid Ibex) but I'm actually running the Windows version of KompoZer (with no real issues yet..) under a program called Wine due to stability issues I've encountered using KompoZer in this version of Ubuntu. (the program crashes while doing just about anything, maybe there's a fix I haven't discovered yet?)

Update: 4-6-09

Ok, So I found some tutorials online yesterday at www.thesitewizard.com that deal specifically with KompoZer, and it looks like a good place for a beginner to start. I didn't have time to go through it all yet, but I've read enough to get the feeling that I'm probably going to have to re-design most of what I've done so far, maybe even start over again from scratch. Thats really not such a big deal considering I haven't really done much yet anyway. My next update will probably include more about how that goes. I think I'm done for today.

Update: 4-11-09 (feedback form added)

Short story long: Well, I didn't really do much yet with the tutorials mentioned above except try to add a feedback form. I figured that was a priority at this point since it's the only way someone would be able to contact me regarding the site other than me just posting my email address outright, which I'm reluctant to do in the interest of avoiding a spam fest. Being as I'm a "noob" to all this website junk, I opted to try a feedback form instead. The one I attempted to use was a PHP script offered for free use from the site wizard, which is linked in the previous post. I spent a considerable amount of time figuring everything out and trying to get it all set up only to find out in the end that my hosting service apparently does not allow PHP scripts for the type of hosting package that I have...... So, back to square one. Fortunately I discovered that my hosting service offered their own simple CGI script which I have now (Finally..) successfully implemented on my homepage. The downside of course, is that their script can only be modified to a very basic extent and thus looks somewhat out of place compared to the rest of this site. It's damn ugly too... Well, at least it works, which also means I actually got something done today.
Long story short: If you'd like to send me any comments/criticism/suggestions/amilliondollars/etc. just click the "Got something to say?" link. Oh yeah, and the "Your comments" (obviously) and "E-mail" fields are required, just so ya know.

Update: 4-14-09 (whole site updated)

Well, I finally had some time to read up on some of the online tutorials I've found relating to KompoZer and I decided to try out a two column table design. I made some templates which have helped me out considerably. I wanted a way to keep all my page links in the same order and on the top left instead of the bottom center of each page. I even learned a trick to get rid of the underlining of those particular links since it looked pretty weird having a green underline under the black text. I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out so far. It's definitely not the greatest looking site, but right now my focus is mainly on just figuring out how to make things functional. I'll worry about making them look better later. Speaking of looks though, I also managed to fix the font issue's I was having and things are much easier to read now, although I'm wondering if maybe my font size is just a bit too small? Maybe some day someone will actually come to this site...and actually read this far...(I know, it's a stretch)...and then send me some feedback regarding it. For now, this page has really just become sort of an online log for me to document what I've learned since starting the site, and I think It's going pretty well considering that the site has been in existence for a whole eleven days as of this writing.
What's next? I'm looking into a bunch of things. I'm doing some reading on CSS (something I didn't know the first thing about until yesterday) which looks like it could be a very useful tool to implement. I'm debating on trying out making some CSS navigation buttons to replace my current page links. I'm learning a few things about GIMP to help me out with images. I'd also like to use it to make a banner for the index page, or possibly all the pages eventually. That then brings me to whether I want to try adding a full width header and footer? Honestly, the more I read about all this stuff, the more ideas and questions come to mind, and it gets overwhelming. As I said before I'm a noob to web design, so I'm just going to stick with my current trial and error method and see where it takes me.