Updates
This page acts as both an online history of Liminality, so I can keep track of how the site has grown, and (more importantly, at least for you) as a quick way to learn more about what’s new on the site (journal entries are not considered updates, since they are dated and on the front page anyway).
Updates are divided into three categories: Content (actual content I have added to the site), Presentation (changes that affect the way the site appears) and Technical (“under the hood” changes, which should be mostly invisible).
2008.9.3
Content
- It is amazing how long it has been since the last “update.” This one is a small one—basically I made a few changes to the About page. For one, the old Links page has been gone for some time, so I finally got around to taking out the reference. The Workshop has also been defunct for a while, so I added a note to that effect. I also updated the “About the author” section to reflect my current situation.
2008.2.13
Content
- I have a new Imagery gallery up today, The Namdaemun Tragedy, but this is not ordinary gallery. Instead, it is a companion gallery to the latest Journal entry. I wanted to provide larger versions of the photos I was going to use in the Journal entry, and I decided that since I was going to make smaller and larger versions anyway, I might as well go whole hog and just create a gallery for those who want to view the photos in slideshow fashion. I think that this is actually a pretty good idea, and I may do this for future Journal entries that feature a decent number of photographs.
2008.1.14
Content
- Exactly a year to the day that we returned from a trip to Busan, I have finally put up the photos in the Busan, 2007 gallery. Although I haven’t been as quick about working through the photo backlog as I had hoped, I am actually making progress. If nothing else, this gallery is noteworthy in that it is the first to contain the new, larger sizes: 600 x 450 for the smaller pics and 1200 x 900 for the enlarged pics.
2007.11.14
Content
- It has been over a year since the Imagery section has had a major update (or any update at all, for that matter), but things are going to change, starting with the new Andong, 2006 gallery up today. It is insane how long these photos have been sitting around, waiting for me to put them in a gallery and put them online. The backlog is still tremendous. I’m not even going to worry about updates to the theme galleries before I get up all the backlogged event galleries. But now that I’ve gotten started, I hope to do this in relatively short order. In the works are galleries for a brief trip to Busan taken at the beginning of the year, and more recent trips to Mt. Songni and Mt. Naejang, both taken this autumn. Then there is the Taiwan travel journal from June—although it will go into the Writings section, there are a bunch of photos to go along with it (most of which will have to be scanned because my digital camera broke and we had to buy disposable film cameras). Let’s just say I have my work cut out for me.
- I have decided that future Imagery galleries are going to feature larger photos. Up until now they have been 400 x 300 for the smaller photos and 800 x 600 for the larger versions. I have decided to up that to 600 x 450 and 1200 x 900. The reason the Andong gallery uses the old sizes is because I actually finished processing the photos quite some time ago—it just took me a really long time to get motivated to write the captions and put everything together.
2007.10.4
Content
- In the past few months I have received a number of emails from students wishing to cite my essay, “What is Liminality?” My full name is not too easy to find on the site (in fact, it doesn’t exist anywhere, and only the careful reader will be able to piece it together), not because I am loathe to disclose it, but just because I never felt the need to. Since it seems that this particular essay is being cited, though, I have decided to add my full name, along with some other pieces of information, at the end of the essay to make it easer to cite.
Technical
- Just a quick note: as I promised in my last entry, I have removed the Dynamic Online Workshop Notifier from the top and bottom of every page and the link to the latest Workshop content from the Writings page. Although the Workshop still exists, it is now officially disconnected from the main part of Liminality.
2007.3.11.
Content
- I’ve made a minor update to the About page, namely the “about the author” section, which I apparently had not touched since I launched the site. Also, the podcast mentioned in the previous update is unofficially dead in the water, meaning that I have no intention of pursuing it at the moment, but may return to it at some point in the future. Oh, and the Workshop is officially on hiatus as well. Basically, I am shutting down everything but life support here. The journal entries and photographs will continue, but that’s it, at least until I finish my dissertation (at the end of the year).
2007.1.1.
Content
- It has been a very long time since I’ve had any sort of update. This latest update, though, is something completely new. I have decided to do a podcast entitled Liminality Bites. I’m not sure how it will go, or even if I will continue it, but I did give it a shot. It was a lot harder to just talk off the top of my head than I expected it would be—on my first listen after recording it I counted 68 variations of “uh” and at least half as many “you know”s. At least now I know what my verbal tics are. Give it a listen if you’re interested, but I have to warn you that it’s pretty painful. Maybe I will improve with practice. Until I figure out where these podcasts will fit in the greater scheme of things, I’m just going to put them in the RSS feed and provide a link to them when they come out, like so: Episode 1.
2006.10.7
Content
- I cannot believe how long it took me to finish the gallery for our spring trip to Danyang. After returning from the trip I joked that I would probably have the gallery up sometime during the summer. Little did I know that it wouldn’t be until autumn. Our recent trip to Andong also needs deaing with, but after that I hope to dig into the tremendous backlog of photos for some of the Osan-ri seasonal galleries and other theme galleries. But time is a rare commodity these days and NaNoWriMo 2006 is just around the corner. We’ll see how it goes.
2006.9.17
Content
- It has been a month since the last non-Journal update, and quite a while since the last new wallpaper. But this gallery finally has a new entry: the Statue of Liberty Wallpaper. As I note in the caption to the wallpaper, this photo was taken by my wife while I was studying in the library. I was quite impressed when I saw the photos she had taken later on.
2006.8.15
Content
- The New York, 2006 Imagery gallery is now online. This is the sequel to the previous Tokyo gallery, chronicling our three weeks in New York with my family.
2006.8.11
Content
- I don’t often remove content from Liminality, but it has happened in the past. However, I have never removed an entire section of the site before. I guess there is a first time for everything: the Links page is no more. I have been contemplating this move for a while, and I think it is about time I just get it done with. In preparation for this I actually took a look at my server logs and discovered that there were 16 hits on the links page in the past week, which means that people actually are looking at it. For this reason alone it pains me to remove the page, but I personally can no longer see a reason for its continued existence. I haven’t updated it in forever, and I feel no desire to update it either. So it is gone. It may return at some point in the future, but only after a site redesign, when I can make it into a worthwhile destination.
2006.8.5
Content
- There is a new Imagery gallery up, Tokyo, 2006, which chronicles our recent trip to Tokyo, Japan. I still have quite a backlog of photos to get through, even after I complete the gallery chronicling the next part of our trip in New York, so hopefully we will be seeing a lot more action in the Imagery section.
2006.3.22
Content
- I added a few photos to both the Flowers gallery and the Osan-ri: Summer gallery, chipping away at the still-mammoth photo backlog. I have about three more galleries to update, and maybe even a new theme gallery to create. More news on that later.
Presentation
- The latest addition to the color schemes collection comes almost eight months to the day after Cherry, the last addition. While Cherry was subtle and understated, Carp is much more outspoken. For starters, it’s an orange color scheme, and it’s really hard to make an understated orange theme. On the advice of my wife, I did consider making the left panel black to highlight the fish, but it ended up being too dark. So I decided to stick with the orange. It’s probably the loudest color scheme yet, and I doubt it will become my favorite, but I’m happy with it. I think it’s a great photo, and I’m glad I got a chance to use it.
2006.3.12
Content
- Wow. It has been a really long time since I have put anything in here, which means it’s been a really long time since I’ve done anything in the way of updating the site. I haven’t posted any new Imagery galleries for the past seven and a half months, but I have finally ended that slump with the Jeju Island, 2005 gallery, a fifty-photo gallery that documents our trip to Jeju Island last September. I also got a new wallpaper out of this gallery—the first new wallpaper since I ended the “wallpaper a month” project so long ago. I still have a tremendous backlog of photos, and now that I’ve gotten this gallery out of the way, I hope to chip away at the rest of the photos that have been wasting away on my hard drive. Many of them will go into existing theme galleries, but I imagine I’ll put some more new galleries up as well.
2005.10.18
Content
- I finally put up a lengthy essay addressing the question: what is liminality?. This is something that has been in the works for a very long time—eight months, in fact. It didn’t take me eight months to write it, though. I started writing it, stopped, wrote more later, stopped, etc. I think I actually finished it a month or so ago, and I have been fiddling with it on and off since then. Not only is this something that I have been personally wanting to write for some time, it is also something I felt I owed to the community (meaning, basically, “everyone who uses the internet”). Liminality.org is the #1 hit for “liminality” on most major search engines, and I get several dozen hits a week from people querying the term. Now, people looking for a definition of liminality won’t leave empty-handed—in fact, they’ll probably get more than they bargained for. Hopefully the search engines will pick it up soon and people interested in liminality will be able to get straight to the information they need (update: a week after posting this, a Google search for “what is liminality” in quotes returns my essay in the number one spot. That certainly was quick.)—and I will finally be worthy of my search engine ranking.
2005.8.24
Presentation
- I have decided to make the larger photos in the Imagery galleries larger. They were originally 700 x 525 pixels, a figure I arrived at because I think I wanted to keep the largest dimension under 800 for smaller screen resolutions, but if you think about it the vertically aligned photos would be too big anyway, so why not make them a clean four times larger than the smaller photos (which are 400 x 300)? Scaling photos down by half is also cleaner than a 7:4 ratio. Anyway, the larger photos are now over 30% larger than before. This change will not be applied retroactively.
2005.7.29
Content
- Just a minor change here—I added a brief blurb about the Workshop to the About page. It is only worthy of mention because it is the latest step in the process of actually acknowledging the existence of the Workshop here at Liminality. When I first launched the Workshop, it was very hush hush, with one measly little link at the bottom of the main Writings page. That link then metamorphosed into a dynamic link that displayed the title of the latest piece at the Workshop (and still does). The next big step was to create the DOWN, which effectively brought a reminder of the Workshop (not to mention a reminder of my laziness) to every page. The DOWN didn’t have a text explanation until very recently (the recent color schemes menu reworking mentioned in the last update), and today I wrote the blurb and linked the text explanation to it. I imagine this is about as prominent as the Workshop will ever get on Liminality, and that suits me fine.
- When I uploaded the new Cherry color scheme, I forgot to add a corresponding blurb to the About page. Said blurb has been added.
2005.7.23
Content
- A new Imagery gallery is up: Ho-Am Art Museum Garden. It is exactly three months to the day (and, interestingly enough, it is the same day of the week—Saturday) since we made the trip, and this gallery has been a long time coming. It focuses primarily on the flowers and statues in the garden, but my wife and I do make an appearance (for those of you who complained that there were no pictures of us in the last gallery). It’s blazingly hot here in Korea right now, and looking through all these spring pics was a nice look back at cooler days.
Presentation
- There’s some new stuff going on at Liminality today, visually speaking. For starters, the ninth color scheme, Cherry, is now available. It is based on a photo that belongs to the Ho-Am Art Museum Garden gallery, and for those keeping score at home, this is the third flower scheme and the fourth scheme to use a white content area background. In other words, it’s not very original, but it has a nice spring feel to it, and I like the colors. In the current heat of summer, it’s nice to have a reminder of cooler times.
- The second presentation update is the way the color scheme choices are presented, something most people will probably already have noticed. The row of color scheme icons has been replaced by a single drop down menu, done with straight HTML and styled with CSS. Depending on which browser you’re using, you will see a slightly different visual presentation. In Firefox, for example, the browser does not apply the styles to the currently selected item, so the drop down menu box is always white and always uses that weak typeface. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, applies the styles consistently, except it does not apply borders to the items. The important thing, though, is that it is guaranteed to work (appearances aside) in every modern browser, which is more than can be said for some of the “CSS drop down” solutions I fiddled with and subsequently abandoned. I could go into a lengthy technical discussion of why this solution is superior, but if you care for that sort of thing at all you probably already know what I’m going to say. At any rate, there is now more room up there, and I don’t have to worry about the row of icons getting too long.
2005.7.5
Content
- With the June wallpaper of the month, I have decided to bring an end to the WotM project. The main reason for this is that I don’t want to feel pressured to take a wallpaper-worthy photograph every month. It may not sound like a very difficult thing to do, but in the colder months I don’t take as many photos as I do in the warmer months. Anyway, the WotM was becoming more of a burden than a joy, something that hung over my head each month. This doesn’t mean that there necessarily won’t be any more wallpapers—they just won’t be monthly.
2005.6.7
Content
- The May wallpaper of the month is now available. It may seem to be an odd choice, but after staring at hundreds of pictures of bees on daisies this past month, this was a refreshing change. See the comment accompanying the images for more information.
Technical
- This is actually an addendum to the last presentation update, where I reported an adding a “quote” class selector to my style sheets. Shortly after, I added another class selector called “strike” to emulate a strikethrough. Recently I realized that I was creating class selectors where none were necessary—HTML already has element for both quotes (“blockquote”) and deleted text (“del”). There is a “strike” element as well, which displays text with a line through it, but this element has been deprecated in HTML 4.0. I have changed my stylesheets to use the proper elements. No sense reinventing the wheel, is there? Not only is this the semantically correct way, but (at least in the case of blockquotes—I've heard that support for del is spotty) the text will still be visually differentiated even without CSS. This oversight has been bugging me ever since I realized it, and I’m glad I finally took the time to fix it.
2005.5.26
Content
- I put up 32 photos from a trip we took to Wando Island and Jeonju at the beginning of April. I am still incredibly backlogged on photos, but I hope to clear up that backlog in June.
2005.5.8
Content
- Yet another wallpaper of the month is up: April. I happen to like this photo very much. It is one of many I took on the day we visited the Hoam Art Museum, and once I get caught up on my photos it will be part of an Imagery gallery as well.
2005.5.1
Presentation
- I usually don’t write about minor changes like this, but this minor change has far-reaching ramifications. I’m referring to the introduction of the “quote” class selector, which is used to set quoted text off from the body text. It indents the quoted text and draws a thick, colored border on the left side. It also happens to be justified, but I don’t know if I’ll stick with that. I made this class selector independent of the paragraph element so that it can be used for either a single paragraph or for a div to contain several paragraphs (which is how it is used in today’s journal entry).
2005.4.21
Content
- I have finally put up the Osan-ri: Winter photos in the Imagery section. The newest photo in the group is three months old now. I don’t know why it took me so long to put them up. Maybe it was because I was sick of winter. Anyway, they are online now, allowing me to move on to bigger and better things.
2005.4.6
Content
- This is a pretty exciting content update for me, as it is something I have been meaning (and promising) to do for a long time. A year and a half after I originally announced my intent to do this, I have finally put my travel journal from our 2002-2003 trip to Thailand online. This is also the first content update in the Writings section in quite a while, and the first non-fiction piece since Liminality first launched.
2005.4.5
Content
- Yet another wallpaper of the month: March. I am rather backlogged on planned content now, especially in the Imagery section, but I hope to do some catching up soon.
2005.3.9
Content
- It’s been a month since any new content has appeared here at Liminality. As with last time, the newest edition is also a wallpaper of the month, this time for February. Not much more to say. The Osan-ri: Winter gallery is still in the works, although now I have no excuse for not putting it up yet.
2005.2.4
Content
- The seventh wallpaper of the month, January, is now available in the Imagery section. This is a taste of what I have planned for the Osan-ri: Winter gallery coming up at the end of this month.
Presentation
- Continuing with the wintry theme, I have introduced a ninth color scheme: Frost. I have always wanted to do a pure white color scheme (aside from Retro, which is really just a default and not really a color scheme). In fact, the original design for Liminality included two color schemes that were negative images of each other. The black scheme was reborn as Lanterns, but the white scheme was never replaced. So, in a way, Frost brings some design closure to Liminality, coming full-circle. Not to say that this will be the last color scheme—although I have to ask myself, how many is too much? And at what point will I have to think of an alternative method of displaying color scheme choices? Anyway, info on the photo featured in Frost can be found on the About page.
2005.1.21
Presentation
- After much thought (and the realization that no one really cares about this as much as I do), I have decided to return to something similar to the original “latest at Liminality” box. The pop-up just wasn't working for me. For one, it wasn’t really stylable, making it even more ugly than the original box. More importantly, the nature of the technique meant that I couldn’t put links in the “latest” text, which is pretty much what made me decide to scrap the pop-up. The box still takes up vertical space, but I have made some changes that make it fit in better (I think) with the various color schemes and also take up less vertical space than the previous box (the text and line-spacing have been scaled down).
2005.1.9
Presentation
- Yup, presentation. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these updates, especially one that hasn’t been to announce the birth or death of a color scheme. The change this time was the death of the cursed “latest at Liminality” box and the birth of a link to the same content in a small pop-up. Not that I’m a tremendous fan of pop-ups, of course, but I believe they can serve a purpose. In this case, they help me get rid of that box, which had been taking up so much real estate and causing me headaches when designing color schemes. I like it this way. Much cleaner. And, as a bonus, my style sheets have shrunk in size a bit because I’ve been able to trim out the styles that pertained to the old “latest” box.
- A very minor change was made to the link to The Workshop in the Writings section; the brief description of the site now automatically shows the title of the latest entry.
2005.1.4
Content
- The December wallpaper of the month has been put up in the Imagery section. I only put up one gallery of 16 images in December, so the choices were somewhat limited. I’m glad we went out of our way to get this shot, as the actual Luminarie displays turned out to be way too busy to use as wallpapers.
- I suppose I should also mention at this point, just for the records, that I took down The Dream Tailor from the Writings section a few days ago (on the first). I redirected all links to that folder to the introductory page, which I left up both as a place holder and as sort of a memorial. This marks the first time I have ever taken content off of Liminality—I did remove all links to a couple of old Imagery galleries quite some time back, but the content is actually still on the server. Come to think of it, it’s probably about time to just bite the bullet and take those photos down.
2004.12.25
Content
- Yet some more photographs for the Imagery section. This time it is a selection of photos from the Seoul 2004 Luminarie, along with some of the usual Christmas lights up at this time of year. I hope everyone appreciates the bitter cold I braved to get these shots.
2004.12.18
Content
- This is the first content update in a month and a half: new to the Imagery section is Osan-ri: Autumn. It is a collection of photos from September to November, and one of the things I like about this set is that it shows the progression of the rice paddies toward and past harvest. I didn’t actually take all that many pictures over the three month period—the hectic pace of life and the cooling weather have severely decreased my photographic output these days. Nonetheless, I managed to get some decent shots, so go take a look.
2004.11.1
Content
- There is a new entry to the Writings section: NaNoWriMo 2004. My journal entry of 1 November explains this in great detail, so I won’t say any more here.
- I realize that I haven’t been listing the wallpapers of the month here, but this one is a bit unique because I didn’t draw it from a photo already on Liminality. I have a terribly long backlog of photos to put up, but with NaNoWriMo to get ready for I haven’t been able to put up any photos in October. Consider the October wallpaper a taste, then, of things to come. October photos, along with November photos, will go online in December.
Presentation
- For the longest time, Liminality has had seven color schemes: the default “Retro” scheme and six more colorful schemes. New color schemes always replaced old color schemes. With the addition of “Sunflower” and the retirement of “Bell,” though, I finally reached the point where I was happy with all of the color schemes. It is my pleasure now to present to you, for the first time in Liminality history, an eighth color scheme: “Dragon.” As with the other color schemes, a more detailed explanation can be found on the About page.
2004.10.12
Content
- It’s been over a month since the last content update, but hopefully this one will make up for the lacuna. It is a set of forty-four pictures from Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon, which my wife and I visited during the Chuseok holiday this year. Not much else to say about it—everything else you may need to know is in the gallery.
2004.9.8
Presentation
- There is a new color scheme available; following my tradition of giving my schemes simple and obvious names, it is entitled Sunflower. You can check it out by clicking on the color scheme button second from the right. It is based on this sunflower photo—probably one of the nicest photographs I’ve ever taken. At least it’s the photograph I am most enamored with at the moment. The color scheme took a bit of figuring out, but ultimately I decided to follow the trend of the Orchid scheme. Until Orchid, the content background area of most of the color schemes (with the exception of Lanterns) was a light, pastel color. Using white for a content background, though, not only looks crisp and clean, but also gives me more freedom with highlight and link text colors. I rather like how this one turned out—it has a very wholesome feel to it.
- With birth, there is also death—the introduction of Sunflower means the exit of Bell. I never really liked that color scheme, and I honestly have no idea what I was thinking when I made it. I might have been able to do a better job, in retrospect, but the photo just never did anything for me. I suppose I was trying to fill in some of the “color gaps” in the color scheme coverage (which might also explain the hated Forest scheme). I guess I thought, “Gee, I’d like a green/red/chartreuse color scheme, what photo do I have that fits the bill?" Now it’s more like, “Wow, I love this photo; let’s make a color scheme from it." Which is the way it should be, I suppose. At any rate, the demise of Bell means that there are no more color schemes on Liminality that I don’t like, so future schemes will be additions rather than replacements.
2004.9.2
Content
- The second seasonal Osan-ri gallery, Summer, has been added to the Imagery section. It draws about half of its photos from the Experimental gallery, the other half being new. This should pretty much do it for the photo backlog, until I fall behind again, that is.
2004.8.12
Content
- More content these days means more photos—I’m almost caught up on my backlog of photos now. I think one more batch should do it. Anyway, this latest addition is a set of photos from a recent trip to the coast, where we saw lots and lots of mud: The Mud Flats of Gungpyeong-ri.
- While I was preparing this gallery I noticed that I have been neglecting to add the little notice at the bottom of the gallery description in galleries that have larger pics. All of my new galleries have larger versions of each photo that can be accessed by clicking on the smaller version (the 400x300 pixel version, not the thumbnail). I guess I’ve gotten so used to it that adding the reminder just slipped my mind, but someone coming to Liminality for the first time would not know about it, so I went back and added the reminder to all the appropriate galleries.
2004.8.1
Content
- Two new Imagery galleries have been added: the Arthropods gallery and the Wallpapers of the Month gallery. Both of these were inspired by Monkey Boy, who told me that he didn’t like bugs and complained that my photos were too small. Touché.
2004.7.9
Content
- There is a new gallery in the Imagery section, an event gallery called Everland in the Evening.
2004.6.20
Content
- At long last, there is finally an original work of fiction in the Writings section: Black and White. I intend to post a commentary on the work in the near future, so I will make no further comments at the moment. (Note: the commentary can now be found in Journal entry #49.)
2004.5.22
Content
- Two new galleries have been added to the Imagery section: Lotus Lanterns and Osanri: Spring. Lotus Lanterns is an event gallery, meaning that it is basically closed to further additions. Osan-ri: Spring is a theme gallery, covering photographs taken in my neighborhood during the months of March, April, and May. This will be the first of four seasonal Osan-ri galleries; the next gallery, Osan-ri: Summer, will replace the existing Osan-ri gallery. I intend to continue adding photos to each seasonal gallery for as long as we live here (at least another two years or so).
Presentation
- The Lanterns scheme got a face-lift thanks to a new photo from the aforementioned Lotus Lanterns gallery. I selected new colors from the photo as well, keeping only the black background and white text colors of the original scheme. The highlight color is now a sky blue (instead of the old purplish color), and should be a bit easier to read. Also, I was pleased with the way the link colors turned out in the Orchid scheme, using green for visited and orange for active, and so I decided to follow the same philosophy here and abandon the “similar shades of the same color” practice I had been following. Strictly speaking, yellow would make a better active link color, while red would make a better visited link color, as yellow is more visible against black then red. I thought the menu looked better as red and blue rather than yellow and blue, though, so I switched the link colors. For now, I’m going to keep the current configuration.
2004.5.1
Content
- The Flowers (and Their Friends) gallery has been added to the Imagery section. It begins with three pictures moved over from the Experimental gallery, and continues with pictures taken over the past week. It is a theme gallery, which means more pictures will likely be added in the future.
Presentation
- The most important change on the presentational front is the reorganization of the Imagery section. Galleries are now classified as “dynamic” (open impermanent gallery), “theme” (open permanent gallery), or “event” (closed permanent gallery). More detailed information on what this means can be found on the About page.
- Next, we say goodbye (and good riddance) to the unfortunate Badlands scheme. Badlands has been around since the very beginning, and its original incarnation was actually quite nice—a white, centered content area sat over a sky blue background with the mountainous formation running across the bottom. When I decided to standardize my color schemes based on the Coastal layout, though, Badlands was mangled. I replaced the white content area with a beige color drawn directly from the photo, and I struggled to find red link colors that wouldn’t clash. I was never really satisfied with it, and now I am finally removing it from Liminality. One more color scheme is scheduled for demolition as well, but will remain until I can find a suitable replacement.
- In Badlands’ place, a fresh breath of spring has come to Liminality in the form of the Orchid scheme. I am very happy with this color scheme, and hope that it will become a favorite. It is a departure from previous schemes in a number of ways. First and foremost, it is the first color scheme to use a white content area (I don’t really consider Retro a “color” scheme). The predominance of white allowed me more freedom to play around with colors, and thus Orchid is the first color scheme to have different normal and visited link colors. Let’s face it—slightly different shades of the same color (the convention I followed with all other color schemes) are just not readily distinguishable. Orchid also uses the highlight (purple) color to divide the content from the background. Overall, I think the judicious use of the various colors on white creates a light, pleasant color scheme.
2004.4.24
Content
- A new gallery has been added to the Imagery section, entitled Experimental. As the title indicates, it is not an official gallery yet, and thus there is no link to it on the main Imagery page. This may change in the future once I figure out how to handle the paradigm shift that has accompanied my recent acquisition of a digital camera (which, by the way, has a 4:3 width:height ratio, meaning that all photos posted from now on will be 4:3), but for now it is simply a place for me to toss random photos that don’t belong to a themed gallery. The gallery will always be reachable through the preceding link (or simply by typing the URL into the location bar), but I cannot make the same promise for individual pictures in the gallery. Despite my loathing of moving things around and possibly breaking links, this gallery is a temporary, dynamic collection of images. As I take more photographs, I expect themes to emerge, and those photos that fit these themes will leave Experimental for their new homes. Right now, I can foresee a “Flower” gallery springing up real soon. Bottom line: bookmark and/or link to Experimental if you’d like, but don’t bookmark or link to individual pictures, because I can’t guarantee that they will stay there. This is a period of transition for Liminality, and it may take me a while to figure out how I want to do things.
2004.4.17
Presentation
- This is the long-awaited change to the Imagery code. In the latest gallery, and hopefully all future galleries, you will be able to click on each photo to see a larger version in a pop-up window. I deliberately adopted the method described in Accessible Pop-up Links at A List Apart. What this means is that you can still right-click on the image to open it in a new window, and users browsing with JavaScript turned off can still see the larger photos. I also adopted JavaScript code originally written by Bugimus, with advice from InI. This code dynamically creates an HTML document in the pop-up window, allowing me to manipulate the document margins and add a title to the window. I have no plans at present to refit older galleries with larger photos—the photos in these galleries will remain unclickable.
2004.4.9
Content
- Pictures from the second part of our most recent trip to the States, the west coast, are now up in the Imagery section. (Note: I forgot to include this when I originally wrote this update—just adding it now for the sake of continuity.)
Presentation
- This is not the long-awaited change to the Imagery code, just a minor change in the image sizes. I used to make all my photos 4:3, even though the original photos were 3:2, and this generally meant chopping off the sides. I have decided to preserve the 3:2 ratio from now on, and this is reflected in the photos, the thumbnails, and the preview photo on the main Imagery page. And, although it is a minor change, I have decided to make the thumbnails full magnification, rather than making them 50% magnification. I think they look better this way.
2004.3.15 (Happy Birthday Liminality!)
Content
- I have finally put up some of the pictures from our recent trip to the States. These pictures were taken on the east coast, more or less—the next set of pictures will be from the west coast.
- Technically, the next two changes are content, but nothing earth–shaking. I updated the Links page with some sites that I visit regularly, and I added site listings to the About page (see the link for more info).
- Lastly, for the first time since the launch of the site, I have removed content from Liminality. The White Sands photo set was a test set that I put up during the development stage to show what the imagery galleries would look like, and I never took it down. It had reached the point, though, where it was just taking up space, so I decided to remove it. The original photo will return when I post the pictures from that particular trip. (OK, the photos are actually still there, there's just no link to them on the Imagery page—I will probably leave the photos online, at least for a while, just in case someone somewhere linked to them for some reason.)
Presentation
- I decided to hijack the styles for Liminality and replace them with a single “birthday” style for this week. This style will be gone with the next journal entry, and the original style choices will return.
2004.2.24
Technical
- Somehow it managed to take me almost three whole months to realize that the year for the most recent January and February entries on the Archives page read “2003” instead of the correct “2004.” I took a look at my code and was mortified to discover that I had hardcoded the year into the code. As soon as I saw it, it all came back to me. I remember not really having a clear idea of how I wanted to do it at the time, and I remember thinking that I would come up with something long before 2004 came around. Well, 2004 is now almost three months old, and I’m finally addressing the issue. The fix is a bit of a hack, since I didn’t want to add the year to my flat file list of entries. What I ended up doing was just making the current year a variable and counting backward from that as the archive progresses. It’s not an ideal solution—an ideal solution would most likely involve a database—but it will work for now.
2003.12.9
Presentation
- I made a very minor, but hopefully significant update to the Contact page. The site has been up for almost nine months now, and today was the first time anyone mentioned that the comment message box was a bit small. I looked at the box again and it was indeed rather small, so I made it a bit bigger. It used to be 30 colums by 5 rows; it is now 35 columns by 10 rows. I would have made it wider, but 40 rows makes the content area expand in 800x600, and I know there are still people out there using that resolution.
2003.12.5
Content
- The pictures from the award ceremony have been added to the Imagery section, as promised.
2003.11.15
Content
- A new set of pictures taken in Gyeongju is added to the Imagery section, as a compliment to journal entry #24.
2003.10.31
Presentation
- This update is purely cosmetic—two new styles are introduced (Bell and Osan–ri), one old style is retired (Forest), and another old style gets minor modifications (Badlands). Info on the two new styles can be found on the About page. Forest was retired because, to be honest, it was hideous. I’m not really sure what I was thinking when I put it up. I do know that I wanted some green, but Forest just wasn’t cutting it. Osan–ri fills the need for green rather nicely, I think. The minor change to Badlands was made after I glanced at the scheme for the first time in a long time, and the glaring pure red of the links jumped out at me. The link colors have been toned down, making Badlands much nicer, I think.
2003.9.11
Content
- There's a new set of photos up in the Imagery section—a set of photos taken around our new house and neigborhood in Osan-ri (Note: This gallery has since been replaced by separate Osan-ri galleries for each season).
Presentation
- Liminality has finally jumped on the syndication bandwagon with a new RSS feed. If you already know what this is, you'll know how to use it. If not, check out the About page.
Technical
- Although I regularly validate my code, I have just now gotten around to making myself accountable. I have added links to XHTML, CSS and RSS validation to the About page, along with a brief explanation of the rationale behind this addition.
2003.9.5
Content
- The final three sets of Thailand photos are now up in the Imagery section. This marks the completion of a project I've been meaning to do for a long time. The next step is to get my journal for the trip typed up and online.
2003.8.26
Content
- This is something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time, and I'm now halfway there—three of six sets of pictures from Thailand are now settled into their new homes in the Imagery section. The three sets contain a total of 48 pictures from Bangkok, Ko Phi Phi, and Ao Phang-Nga. Hopefully the rest of the pictures will be along shortly.
2003.6.24
Presentation
- I have just finished a major revision of the site, much of it taking place under the hood. Among the visible changes, though, are those to the color schemes. I have sacked the “Original” and “Flip Side” schemes and added three new schemes: “Lanterns” (as a sort of replacement for “Original”), “Buddha” and “Forest.” All of the schemes are now based on the layout of “Coastal.” I know some people are moving away from this and toward a design philosophy that embraces significantly varying layouts, but I really like the “Coastal” layout and wanted that to be a symbol of my site—something people can identify with. And, aesthetic considerations aside, it allows me to streamline my CSS, as described below.
- The other visible change is the removal of the “Site Updates” link (which nobody was clicking on anyway) from the front page and the addition of a “The Latest at Liminality” box. It is now more conspicuous, but, more importantly, it offers visitors some info about updates to other parts of the site. The updates link has been moved up to the main menu (which is where it should have been all along, I suppose), along with a link to the contact page.
Technical
- With the much-appreciated help of Dracusis (who promises he will have a site up soon), I have finally been able to solve the style-switching flicker problem (where the style would briefly revert to the “Original” style every time a new page was loaded). This involved dynamic generation of the style sheet links through PHP, working around the fact that the JavaScript function was only called after the page had finished loading. Again, much thanks to Drac for the help.
- Now that my site relies on a single layout (more or less), I have been able to streamline my CSS. I now have a “base” style sheet that contains all the formatting information, and the individual styles sheets containing the color and graphic information are applied on top of this. The new CSS is about a third of the size of the original.
2003.6.5
Content
- Yes, that's right—the first content update in over two months. I have finally gotten around to making the final revisions to my translation of Kim Young Ha's “Christmas Carol” and reformatting it for the web. It can be found in the writings section.
2003.6.2
Presentation
- In anticipation of more picture sets in the imagery section, I have reworked the way I present information there. The main imagery page originally contained long descriptions of the the picture sets, but I realized that adding even a few more picture sets would make the page very long and difficult to scroll through. With this in mind, I moved the long descriptions to the respective thumbnail pages (underneath the thumbnails) and wrote a brief description instead.
Technical
- I have finally gotten around to automating the archives. It should look exactly the same as it did before, but now it will update itself every time I add a new journal entry, making my life just a little easier.
- I have been aware of the flicker problem in Internet Explorer (new pages load with the original style, switching over to the selected style only after the page is loaded) for some time now, and I am trying to implement a solution. So far it has eluded me, and since it is not a fatal problem I have decided to leave it alone and concentrate on adding more content to the site. I hope that it will eventually be fixed, though.
2003.5.13
Technical
- Another invisible update, along the lines of the “Recent Entries...”. This time around I have written a snippet of code that automatically retrieves the timestamp (the last time the page was updated) for this page, allowing me to code a dynamic link for the site updates. This is important because my previous method required me to hardcode the site updates link (with the date) into the journal entry itself. Since the archived entries don’t have that link, I was uploading two separate files for the sake of that one link. That is a pretty ridiculous way of doing things, and I have finally gotten around to fixing it, thus reducing the number of files I need to upload by one whenever I write a journal entry. My next step will be to automate the archive page, thus eliminating another page that I need to alter and upload. This definitely makes life easier for me, and means I can spend that little extra bit of time on content instead of spending it on menial labor.
2003.4.14
Presentation
- On the advice of a reader from Spain, I have placed another color schemes “menu” at the top of the page to give users the option to change the color scheme before they start reading.
2003.4.7
Technical
- Actually, most of the week after my last update was spent trying to set up PHPDev so I can develop the site locally without having to upload it to my ISP every time I want to test something. The only actual change I have made to the site itself is automating the “Recent Entries...” list that appears at the end of the current journal entry. For all intents and purposes it is identical to the previous version, but this one makes my life a little bit easier. The next step is to automate the archives page and minimize the number of files I have to change manually every time I write a journal entry.
2003.3.18
Content
- Added this page (updates)
- Updated links
Presentation
- Fleshed out 404 error handling (“content not found” page)
- Made minor navigational changes to imagery section after beta tester pointed out usability issues (thanks Mom)
Technical
- Switched stylesheet switching code (thanks Slime)
2003.3.15 (Liminality goes live)
Content
- My background story, in five parts
- “A Red Devil Story” and “White Sands” imagery sets (Note: the White Sands set was removed on 2004.3.15.)
- Link list
- “About this site” page
Presentation
- Five color schemes: original, the flip side, coastal, badlands and retro.
Technical
- This site is more or less dynamic—url requests are routed to a single PHP file, which then analyzes the request and includes the appropriate content in a site-wide template. The advantage to this is that I can change the template on a whim and only have to make the changes in one place, rather than having to make the changes on each and every page.