Website 2021 updates

[iKarith]

Well the Firefox and Safari versions look the same to me. This may be an issue with Chrome itself.

Good to know!

Talked to drathe, and he agreed that we probably want to stop using the HQ logo in our logo, just to not poke the bear too much. I suggested the sign hanging down from the top of the page, and he liked the idea. I started playing with this (EPS original):



Cropped, sized to 250x168, changed some colors, here's a PNG export of the 250x165 SVG version:



I need to darken those chains a bit, they're too light by far. I dunno what they were going for there, but it's at best hard chrome or aluminum, and we would want high carbon steel or more likely basic iron. Otherwise I'm thinking the orc with a mug should be burned in along with Ye Olde Inn. I've gotta find a suitable mug.

I'm in no rush, won't be using this one for awhile yet. That was just what I did over the past ~ 1 hour so I could close a couple of tabs I had open to the source page for later. "Later" was about an hour ago. In other news, I'm "down to" 465 tabs. Hey, yesterday I had 589. (And now you people know why I use Firefox instead of Chrome. Hi, my name is Joseph, and I'm a tab whore. It's been seven minutes since my last new tab.)

[Stig]

I like the smooth version, it looks a bit slicker in my opinion

[iKarith]

…hmm…



Wow that becomes fuzzy when imgur gets hold of it. Whatever, it's sharper than that. However, a SVG is not always smaller than a PNG:

Code: Select all

-rw-r--r-- 1 tjcarter tjcarter 3.1K Sep 24 12:43 mddhosting-small-orig.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 tjcarter tjcarter 21K Oct 16 07:38 mdd-small.svg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tjcarter tjcarter 3.4K Oct 16 08:31 mdd-small.png


I could probably carefully hand-tune that, especially since I know the output resolution, to minimize the geometry and use some straight lines where I know my attempt to quickly autotrace that logo used splines to match the font more accurately. But … nah, I could very quickly take this and create a bigger vector for them in a similar art style on the credits page if I don't artificially limit the geometry here, and likely I will. Plus, no matter what resolution you zoom that into, it'll look like it's intended to. That's the real value of a vector graphic, after all.

Little touches, but I'm playing teaching myself new techniques now before I start doing things that are likely to need these SVG skills I'm only just developing.

[Daedalus]

Your version of the mod hosting logo definitely looks nicer. I don't
recall--was it a bar linked to the site? Apparently it has been temporarily removed from the bottom of the page. Is that part of the redesign process?

[iKarith]

Your version of the mod hosting logo definitely looks nicer. I don't
recall--was it a bar linked to the site? Apparently it has been temporarily removed from the bottom of the page. Is that part of the redesign process?

It's on the bottom of http://www.yeoldeinn.com/ (and other pages I've loaded), and there's still the old one on my inntest page. I haven't uploaded anything in a couple of days, and I haven't even dropped this into my own copy of the Inntest page. It was just something I did yesterday because I've been developing some SVG skills.

Y'all would probably be mortified by how much of this is me building this plane while I'm flying it, as we have been saying at work for the past 20 months or so. That's one of the reasons I have been very careful about touching most of anything that's actually on the live site—I have the tools to build a new site, and I have the needed skills to learn how to put it together. Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But this MDD thing shows that a programmer can make art with a little bit of theory and some time spent learning some tools.

Or … there's clipart.

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That last one looks promising for our sign. They're all too detailed for the purpose, of course, and I just converted them all to PNG at width 180 for the comparison. But if I remove some of those details outright and simplify some of the others, I can resize it to fit the orc and merge and subtract to get a woodcut/woodburn and burn it into the sign. Then I just need to burn in the text. I can actually picture it in my head (which given my disability means I've got a very good description.)

[Stig]

Hey, I've had a go at making an SVG logo here. It's "Ye Olde Inn" written over the hanging board. However the website says SVGs are not allowed as attachments. Here's a screenshot:

Screenshot 2021-10-19 234349.png

If we're going to state our name, I don't think we need an image too.

Fun fact: the reason pubs have pictures here in the UK (eg the "Coach and Horses", the "Elephant and Castle", the "Angel" etc) is because people couldn't read back then, so they needed images instead of names to refer to the various pubs in conversation

[Daedalus]

I'm not sure if this is appropriate to mention in light of all the effort here, but I gotta unload an alternative idea: YeOldeInn done in the font style of the HeroQuest logo, arching metallic gold over stone. Hell, a hanging sign with an ale toasting Orc might look good below it. Too difficult for SVG?

[Stig]

That's cool too! We should give it a go

[Stig]

So I've had a go at your suggestion Daedlus, and here's what I've done with my limited GIMP skill. I don't know how to upload an SVG (the website says it's not allowed) so I've added screenshots of SVGs.

The original sign:

ye olde in with green orc.png

When converted into SVG, which limits the number of different colours, the gradient didn't look good:

Gradient sign SVG.png

So I flattened the colours in the logo to look like this in the original:

ye olde inn logov2 with orc flat.png

Which looks like this in SVG:

flat sign SVG.png

I thought I could make a nice effect on the text by adding one darker colour to texture it a bit, which would convert better into SVG than a gradient of multiple colours:

ye olde inn logov2 with orc textured.png

However that didn't covert well to SVG and looked splattered.

I reckon the flat one is the best of the bunch.

[iKarith]

I'm not sure if this is appropriate to mention in light of all the effort here, but I gotta unload an alternative idea: YeOldeInn done in the font style of the HeroQuest logo, arching metallic gold over stone. Hell, a hanging sign with an ale toasting Orc might look good below it. Too difficult for SVG?

Yes, it can be done, in fact the 3D printed model of the HeroQuest logo can be turned into (and probably started out as) a SVG file. The question is whether Stig or I are able to do it.

We've already seen that the automatic noise generation is inconsistent across implementations, but you don't have to use it. So the question is, if you don't, how much of that kind of effect do you want to use? Flat or gradient colors are easier to do in less file size.

Hey, I've had a go at making an SVG logo here. It's "Ye Olde Inn" written over the hanging board. However the website says SVGs are not allowed as attachments.

I've been using rsvg-convert to convert the output to png for posting here on the board and then uploading that to imgur with a Linux script.

I think I definitely like the text being "straight" more than curved like the original HQ logo. I can curve it directly in Inkscape and export the path (which is necessary for doing any significantly complex effects out of it anyway), but I'm thinking ahead a little to a future page design where the navigation and everything is cleaned up a bit more when having the text be straight will provide more options for that.

I haven't accomplished anything with this stuff over the past few days … I've been feeling a bit sick lately, and then to add to that on Sunday I had a support NIGHTMARE come to life. At work I do Linux tech support, and not for like what you'd expect to be normal Linux users. No, we give machines running Linux to people who would consider the average Geek Squad employee to be a master guru of technology. They're not technical users, at all.

So this one needed to do a backup, reinstall, and recovery … remotely due to covid. Normally we charge like $30 and do it for them. But because we're so short-staffed I'm like, I can help people do this remotely, it's not a big deal, I've done it before several times, etc. And this guy had only a couple of gigs to back up… He copied everything to USB following my instructions and then pulled his USB stick, without ejecting it. That's not a problem by default on Windows anymore, but Linux has the old default. He plugged it back in and said, "oh, my files are still there!" So no problem, right?

Yeah, the exact opposite of no problem. His files weren't actually there after fresh installation. Dammit, I could've had him run fsck (chkdsk equiv) and re-rsync everything back over. I mean, I probably wouldn't if it'd been me, but I don't just pull USB sticks randomly! But if I had, I'd have done the same check he did and I'd have lost files and been mad at myself. But I could've/should've taken the extra steps because it wasn't me and I knew this user was not technical. But I didn't.

Yeah, so I've spent the past couple of days being mad as hell at myself.

This is why we tell you: BACK UP YOUR FILES. It's also why I'm being damned careful to operate almost exclusively in a subdirectory of the website, and I've made sure that drathe is taking backups (and occasionally making them myself) while working on the website. Accidents happen. Don't let them happen to you.