Testing out our Nikon D40 the night we got our lens.
Making ‘England’
One night last week, just as I was slipping into sleep, I saw an image of an open magazine and realized that it was a magazine about our adventures in England. In the next moment, I thought with regret, “I am now asleep, and will never remember this in the morning.” But I did, and set to work trying to make the magazine as soon as I woke up.
‘England’ is the result, and is remarkably faithful to the vision I had. To this faithfulness there is, however, one caveat: I designed England using Safari on OS X. I haven’t looked at it in any other browser. It probably looks horrible in them. I am unapologetic (in the modern sense). If one reads much about web design, one knows about the dark ages of the internet called ‘the browser wars’ in which people struck this sort of attitude all the time, and are now remembered for it with contempt and distain. In those days, the big browser makers (Netscape and Microsoft) competed to win the market for browsers by introducing proprietary features and convincing web designers that they couldn’t live without them. This lead to a lot of alienation and unhappiness, and so eventually to ‘web standards’ and a more open, friendly internet abstracted from the browser one used. At least in theory.
Now, I have written England with web standards in mind, and haven’t used any non‐standard code. And it will still ‘break’ or look wrong in many browsers. I’m not going to worry about it, because I have enough unhappy things to think about and do. If you find England unreadable, , and I’ll send you a copy of whatever it is you want to read. That said, I hope that some of you will be able to share in what I think is a beautiful website.
The Tools, and other interesting things
Because we want to share with you as many of the things we get to see during our island sojourn, we decided to get a really good camera to document our lives in all their overcast and rainy glory. Unfortunately, really good cameras cost thousands of pounds, so we settled for a ‘just enough’ camera that still has enough features to keep us confused for the next decade. We bought a lightly used Nikon D40 on eBay, and a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D lens and 4GB SDHC card on Amazon. This gives us an expensive, but not‐too‐expensive, camera that can do almost anything. We’re still learning to focus, and we struggle with aperture and shutter speed, but every once in a while we take a really nice picture. We plan to share these pictures with you by including them in articles and by using them as ‘Title Pages’ for each issue we publish.
The rest of our tools are rough and unfinished relatively arcane bits of code and technology that store these pictures and our words and that attempt to send them back out to you in a relatively ordered and comprehensible fashion. Some of their names are listed in the colophon appearing on the table of contents pages.
Bon appétit!