chapter 4: blueflower.org v1.0
(june 2000 to june 2001)

Blueflower.org was officially born when I registered the domain name on June 8, 2000. The name is a reference to Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen. For those who know their German Romanticism, you know what I'm talking about, but for those who don't, you best read up. I was a German major in college, so I, of course, had to read it for a class. Much like the rollover images of the navigation menu on Planet StarRaver, it never occured to me how fruity the name was until later, but I've had the name for too long now to change it.

This first design started with the logo and expanded from there. The first blueflower.org logo was my first ever attempt at using Adobe Illustrator. I created a sickly looking flower with blue petals and a center of maize. To the right of the flower, I wrote the name of the website using the font Girls Are Weird. The colors for the rest of the website were then based upon this same sky blue and maize, with a yellow border and blue navigation menu. The initial layout was actually very similar to Planet StarRaver. The screenshot above is a poor representation, as the original layout had the main content on the right like PS. The change to the layout pictured above with the main content on the left came several months after the original design.

Over the years, I've never been able to decide upon the best place to locate the navigation menu. Sometimes it's horizontal and above the logo, sometimes horizontal and below the logo, and sometimes vertically at the top of a side column. For this first version, I went with a horizontal navigation menu below the logo, and that seemed to work out fine. For as similar as this layout was to PS, it's amazing how much difference a little color coordination can make. This was far from perfect, but still light-years better.

The photo on the front page in the screenshot above is of a sign welcoming people to the Town of Menasha. I was amused by the "NO DISCHARGE OF FIREARMS" sign, as it made me think of signs posted at the edge of town in westerns saying that guns must be checked with the sheriff or marshall. This was actually one of the more relevant photos to appear on the front page of this first version. At various times there were photos of Grace Kelly and others. Although I liked the photos - one color photo of Grace Kelly actually looked really good with the colors of the website - they had nothing to do with the rest of the site. You know, they just looked cool.

The menu options on the navigation menu definitely weren't as clear as they could have been. SOAPBOX was, of course, the weblog. NARCISSISM was a page about me. SITE INFO and LINKS are self-explanitory.

By this time I had quit pretending I was making a website for the people of the Twin Cities and come to terms that it was a website for myself. For that reason, there are links to weather and transportation information for both of my homes at the time: Appleton and Minneapolis.

After going through all the work of messing around with templates and configuration, the weblog finally got started on July 3, 2000. At 5:03pm CDT I wrote, "Okay, let's try this shit again. I'm not sure how well it's going to work, but oh well." And with that, the blueflower.org weblog officially began.

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