N241 - Final Project Proposal Margaret Lion Originally written February 28, 2000 REVISED and FINISHED March 26, 2000 (Note that new material will be marked by ****.) STATEMENT OF PROBLEM: Create a humorous website that will make readers laugh out loud by combining Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" history and the 12-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. AUDIENCE STATEMENT: The audience will be both Tolkien fans and the recovering community on the Web. (Yes, this can be done! Just you wait and see!) The site will be, hopefully, visited by the many Tolkien fans and recovering community members who surf the Web. Each audience will find something humorous in the site. Tolkien fans will enjoy the references that any true frothing-at-the-mouth-oh-I-can't- wait-for-the-movie fan will love. The recovering community will enjoy the recovering-from-an-addiction humor in the site. Both groups may also enjoy identifying the 12 Steps as applied to Tolkien. Both audiences range in age, race, creed, socio-economic status, and sex. The audiences are comprised of people ranging from 12 to 112. Fear not, there will be something for both audiences to enjoy. And for the third audience, the Tolkien fans who are also recovering addicts, I predict great gales of laughter and immediate bookmarking of this page. (And along the way possibly educate each group about the other.) TOOLS: For Text: * My computer at home, an IBM compatible with a Pentium II chip. * My Notepad program for a text editor as I feel I can do my best work on something familiar. If I can do the work on Emacs, I will definitely do it. * I will save work to both my hard drive and my N241 disk. **** I will also need to refer back to my Tolkien books, including the original source and my Middle-earth encyclopedias and dictionaries. (Yes, I own most of them.) For Graphics: * My computer at home, an IBM compatible with a Pentium II chip. * PaintShopPro, possibly Adobe Photoshop and www.flamingtext.com. * If I can get the graphic I downloaded from the web to work I will use that. If not I will use the graphics I have made from scratch. * I may use the work on flamingtext.com. The products you make from this site are yours to use and I will of course reference them if I use their site to create my banners/buttons, etc. **** I also used the goodies off of www.free-graphics.com for backgrounds. For Uploading: * I will use the Communications 3.2 software to upload my material onto my allocated class website on the ds9 server and set the permissions. DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS: NOTE: These considerations are for now and may not end up on the final project. Color: * The site background will be black (representing the darkness of Mordor from whence came the dreaded One Ring). * Banners will be in red. * Text will be in yellow. **** Please note that these considerations caused me the biggest heartaches. I do not like websites that give you eye strain hence my boring white backgrounds. However, this site needed something, well different, so I went with black. I may change it, but there is something sinister and yet humorous about the colors. I really wanted a good black and white muted marble but I just couldn't find one - and I didn't have three years to find it. I am very proud of the content and very disappointed with the form. Any suggestions? Font: * Default will be New Times Roman for text unless something else can be found. **** I played around with a wonderful looking medieval type font that looked awesome in PaintShopPro32 and totally was awful on the Web. So I changed it to what you see now. Sigh. * Banners will be done in fonts that look slightly sinister and medieval if they can be found and are easy to read. **** Same with the above font. I found some I liked but they wouldn't translate like on the web. Drat. So what you see is what you get. I noticed that when I checked the site in IE some of my font changes showed up where they didn't in Netscape and hey I'm still loyal to Netscape. Graphics: * Graphics will consist of the Ring-Bearers Anonymous symbol (see Labs 4 & 5 at www.cs.iupui.edu/~mlion) * Other graphics may be added but they will be simple and will be used as markers for the text. **** I am disappointed with my graphics as I feel they look flat. I don't know how to get them 3D. I think I need to take a web graphics class. Links: * Not sure about this yet but there may be links to other 12-Step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, etc. There may also be links to other Tolkien sites and hopefully the site will be put on a few webrings. ****Did this with my image map. Oh my. I don't know why these things didn't work as well as they did for my image map assignment. I went through FIVE different maps and 10 different coordinates until I got what you now see. I am so thrilled that it actually works now. I couldn't figure out why the links wouldn't match up with the images until I realized I had given the wrong pixel size listed in the html document. Ah, it's always the little things. Once I fixed that the page worked and I could feel better about myself. Site Map: Key: * denotes text Number) or Letter) denotes link Main Page: Ring-Bearers Anonymous - One Millennium At A Time * Introduction explaining what this is all about * Links on Main to: 1) Questionnaire: Are you a compulsive ring-bearer? * Questionnaire to be taken to determine if one is a compulsive ring-bearer. a) Link back to Main Page 2) The 12 Steps of Ring-Bearers Anonymous * The text of the 12-Steps a) Link back to Main Page 3) Meeting times and locations for Ring-Bearers Anonymous * Text of meeting times and locations members a) Link back to Main Page 4) Events for recovering Ring-Bearers to attend * Listing of annual RBA event a) Link back to Main Page 5) Other related sites * Other sites you may be interested in a) Links to Tolkien sites b) Possible webring links c) Links to 12-Step groups d) Link back to Main Page * Special thanks and credits to those who need it * Webmaster's name and email address Note: Depending on how it looks, each page may also have an image map of the rest of the site. ****Well once you look at the site you will know a great deal of this changed. First, since I used frames I didn't need to do the links back to the main page. Ok, a good thing about frames. I didn't do the Tolkien links, decided that it made the site look "unreal" (no comment on that one, please) but I did make an image map of the recovering sites and that was fun. Next time I will use a better font that translate better to the web. I also added a prayers page which I am again, proud of in terms of content. ****(below is all new) ALGORITHM * Do my Stair after I read the old one. * Map a picture on some paper about what I want my site to look like with page names. * Create style sheet. * Start marking up the text. * Create the frames. * Create any more needed graphics. * Upload to ds9. * Finish Stair and then upload. * Email Leanne, Tedra, and Andy about my humorous good read. IMPLEMENTATION * Did the Stair bit. * Made my site picture. * Marked-up my text. * I then spent an entire day agonizing over the colors. As stated above, I do not like glare and yet I couldn't see a way around it. I just needed those dark colors and I hope I compensated for them enough. I hope to learn how to make a more 3D site in teh future as I feel my colors and graphics are flat. This however could be due to the brightness of the colors. The nice thing is, I can change it pretty easily due to the style sheet, rah style sheets. * After finally deciding to bite the bullet and use my bold colors I finalized the style sheet - or so I thought. * Finished marking-up all of the content. I spent a lot of time figuring-out what I would name different pages and how they would work together. There are somethings that I have not yet figured-out how to easily map in terms of how frames work with each other. I spent some time figuring out the names. I wanted one of thsoe pages that has a graphic in the beginning and then you go to teh site. I did that and that took some figuring out. * I spent another day just dealing with teh graphics. For some reason I just couldn't get the graphics to work properly. They're there but I'm not happy with them. Could be better. * I then had to make a list of all of the graphics and pages to upload so that I could keep track of them. * Please note that I had been continuously checking my work on my web browser. Now I felt ready to send it to ds9. * Once it got on ds9 I discoverd that my front page didn't work and had to redo it. * I once again adjusted the style sheet. I would like to now add that I am greatful for being able to reuse my own code. What a relief to not have to rewrite it, just merely cut and paste it. Don't be surprised if a lot of my code looks familiar - you've graded it before. ;) * I originally forgot to add my name and the free-graphics site onto the content page, so I reworked that in. * I reworked the style sheet again. Site still looked blocky. So I played with it again and decided that if I didn't stop soon it would be May. * I called it quits. I decided that after the site was graded I would notify Tolkien webrings and the recovery community on teh Web. Hey, everyone needs a good laugh and that was the purpose of this site so now I feel better about it. * I finished my Stair and will email it to ds9 and then inform my instructors that hey, it's done. REFINEMENT I really feel I need more work in web graphics, making them and creating good colors. I feel like my site looks very amateurish and I am disappointed in taht. Maybe I need some distance from it before I decide to get it onte a Tolkien webring. We shall see. Thank you for your time and help. -Margaret Lion