chapter 6: blueflower.org v3.0
(november 2001 to june 2002)

Holy blurry photos Batman! Blueflower.org v3.0 was launched on November 29, 2001. The blurry photos weren't original. The blurry photo behind the logo on the top and the blurry photo of the stuff on the coffeetable were both taken with my digital camera, which I got for Christmas a month after the site was launched, and I don't remember what was there originally.

The blurry photo behind the logo was taken while driving around Appleton one snowy night. I was driving north up the hill on Drew Street just south of College Avenue by Lawrence University when I came to the intersection of Drew and College. I grabbed my camera and quickly snapped a photo while stopped looking west down College Avenue. Not holding the camera steady, I did a pretty good job of blurring the shot, which wasn't intended, but I figured later that a blurry photo would be less distracting to the logo itself, so I decided to use it. The logo itself is written using the Potrzebie font. I thought it looked kind of fun. Not knowing how to do drop shadows with Photoshop at the time, I overlapped the logo in two different colors and then offset one by a couple pixels, which was the same practice I had employed while doing all my graphics with MS Paint. Hey, when your resources are limited, sometimes you have to improvise.

Ironically, I redesigned the site because all the blue on the previous version was so depressing, yet this wasn't any better. I'm not sure what was going through my head when I thought this was a good idea.

The side column made its triumphant return with version 3.0, and I also moved the navigation menu to the side column. Making its first appearance on the side column were the "Quick Links", which is nothing more than a short list of websites I access often, so I wouldn't have to try to find them on my Links page whenever I wanted to access them. It remains a staple of blueflower.org to this day.

With this version, I first started exploring the wonderful world of Cascading Style Sheets. I had employed the use of them in the past, but never to the extent I did here. In a very primitive manner, I discovered the ability to make quick changes to the appearance of the entire site just by using CSS. I made quick use of it by changing the colors to a green-and-red Christmas theme the day after I posted the new version. I also later made the site a very gaudy shade of pink for St. Valentine's Day and a very ugly green for St. Patrick's Day.

Also with this version, I went on a kick of trying to use proper HTML when coding my sites. I figured that if I used proper HTML and my site still didn't appear correctly for people, it was a problem with their browser of choice and not my coding. Of course, we all know it's not that simple, but I went by that line of thinking anyway.

This was the version in use during the Malapropism project. Like Malapropism, I got bored with this design and moved on.

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