JulianRitterCentral finally opened

I've finally opened JulianRitterCentral. NOTE: Site contains nude paintings.

It still needs a lot of work. The theme is the default with color change performed by the Theme Wizard and a new logo. I will be changing the theme to something more attractive (although I am getting positive reviews from people who have visited the site).

I will be focusing on adding additional content. I have 30 images to scan here and about another 150 or so after that. I also have five binders of Julian's records from which to draw additional material.

Anyway, I hope this site will become the nexus for people to discover and share the works of this under-appreciated artist.

Bob

Awesome!

your LIVE to the world BobS

Great stuff man… starting to look around.

I'd hide the details menu at the bottom of USERS ONLINE from NON-ADMIN

I hope to have another dozen paintings scanned by next weekend including some of Julian's nudes. It's a painstaking process to get the images properly scanned to the dynamic range of many of the paintings and the fact that Julian's glazing technique has specular highlights going every which way.

I hope everyone will enjoy the site. It's been a lot of work but also a lot of fun putting it together and ocPortal has made the job of getting this far so much easier then I had expected. But I still have much bigger plans and THAT is why I chose ocPortal.

Bob

Dude I hope you compressed the hell out of that video palette of passion

ocPortal_Noob said

I'd hide the details menu at the bottom of USERS ONLINE from NON-ADMIN

I never noticed that. I always just assumed that the link would not be displayed for non-admin.

Guess I gotta go digging around.

Bob

ocPortal_Noob said

Dude I hope you compressed the hell out of that video palette of passion

Well, it was only VHS quality to start so not very large (by my standards) but, yes, I did compress it quite a bit.

I'm going to be using the Cloudflare CDN which will help with the large static files like this. If you click the "View large image" lin on the Image Gallery detail page, there are really nice scans that you can zoom into further. This is really important in Julian's "lifescapes" which often have a tremendous amount of detail in the showdown. Take a look at the fully-zoomed image of "Dancers in Red" as an example.

Bob

I think I may have missed a permission. Looking at BLOCK_SIDE_USERS_ONLINE.tpl, there is this bit of code:

I'm guessing that is supposed to control whether the link is displayed or not.

Bob

EDIT: Removed permissions for the online members module for non-admins in the Permission Tree Editor.

Yea man you may want to consider the impact of all those bytes your pushing

punypng.com is awesome for compressing the hell out of your png's and keeping the end result high quality.

I'll look around for a free alternative.  

Thanks, noob.

I am not too concerned right now but I like to have options should the need arise.

After speaking with Richard at eLief, he feels that Cloudflare will reduce my bandwidth significantly and also lower my CPU which definitely spikes even now. Fortunately, eLief does not just suspend accounts for the occasional spike, they track average CPU use and how it affects others on the server. Of course, if the site takes off and I can figure out a way to monetize it, I will just move up the server food-chain.

Bob

You took the leap and shared your site with us. It looks like you were ready with lots of content in many creative spaces to explore and fill in the coming days. I hope you find the right theme to complement this amazing artist's work. Love the lucky monkey charm for the logo, and its incredibly rich tone oil painting can serve as a nice color palette for the theme. I would suggest as Julian did in the monkey painting that the lime green be used only on the monkey.

I'll be back.

Congratulations Bob!

Looking good Bob

A few things that spring to mind:

1) I suggest putting gallery images in the first column, not last. People will naturally start scanning the left side of the screen. Also, with so little information in the other fields it just looks wrong for those fields to be first because they take up so much space.

2) Do you really need sub-menus for "Tropical landscapes"? I don't know how many more images are to come in those sections, but if there are not a bucket load then it might be better without the extra menu depth.

3) In FireFox the users on line/stats block does not appear at the bottom of the screen. Its out of whack and is overwriting the right side panel and it pushes the stats almost totally of screen,

Thanks Jean-

I have a heck of a lot of work ahead. There's the scanning plus a lot more writing. I also have to transcribe audio - the audio will be available if someone wants to listen but I'll have the transcription available under one of those expander buttons for those who would prefer to read (namely, search engines).

Julian's daughter, Christine, who is herself an artist and also studied at Art Center is very specific about the color of green from the monkey's thigh that she would like to use, probably with some reddish-browns.

The Theme Wizard was a quick tool to get something workable but the neon lime-green buttons are a bit much. I just don't have time to deal with it at the moment. I am seriously considering one of the ocProducts' themes as an interim solution but then again I would need  to rely on the Theme  Wizard (and its disrespect for the seed color). Actually, it did a pretty good job given it was a rough color to work with.

I do enjoy one luxury: the site can be relatively plain because the real "jewelry" will be the art itself.

Thanks for the kind words.

Bob

temp1024 said

Looking good Bob

A few things that spring to mind:

1) I suggest putting gallery images in the first column, not last. People will naturally start scanning the left side of the screen. Also, with so little information in the other fields it just looks wrong for those fields to be first because they take up so much space.

I may give that a try. At least it's an easy change.

2) Do you really need sub-menus for "Tropical landscapes"? I don't know how many more images are to come in those sections, but if there are not a bucket load then it might be better without the extra menu depth.

Not sure here. Julian's son, Michael, pressed for the categories. Julian was a prolific painter who could produce high-quality work very quickly. Some of this has to do with the "leanness" of his technique which meant that things dried quickly and he could then build the next layer.

Julian and his family lived for almost a year in Mexico and I have no idea of how many paintings he did there but he painted pretty muchh every day.

He and Laurie lived in Puntarenas for six-months and sent back enough work for a one-man show at an L.A. gallery. Again, I don't know how many paintings he did.

Julian painted in the South Pacific for nearly two years. I know he had a large number of paintings from the Marquesas Islands and from Tahiti and Moorea. But, again, I have no idea of how many paintings there are.

I hate the way the link doesn't stay expanded so I tend to agree with you but I need to be respectful of the people who are providing me with all this material and their wished to make sure that their father and his work is presented in an appropriate manner. It's strange, it's my site but I essentially still have a client - two actually, and they are both very nice and pleasant people.

3) In FireFox the users on line/stats block does not appear at the bottom of the screen. Its out of whack and is overwriting the right side panel and it pushes the stats almost totally of screen,

Fletch mentioned this to me. This was one of the first issues I had when I started using ocPortal: View topic: Bottom panel content breaking loose in Firefox - ocPortal. It works fine in Firefox on the Mac but seems to have a problem on the PC version. I've rechecked all the divs and everything seems right but there is obviously some issue. Not sure how I will solve this one.

EDIT: I just checked the home page and there are the same number of opening and closing divs so that is not the problem. I suppose one could be misplaced but then why does it work okay in every other browser. I am not sure how to attack this.

Thanks for your input.

Bob

A couple of things:

Can people please try to load the video, Palette of  Passion, and let me know if it is working. I've gotten a report that it is not loaded for someone although it works fine for me. You don't need to load the entire video, just a minute or two will do - he has problems getting it loaded up.

Also, curious if anyone has any thoughts on why the Users online block is once again breaking loose from panel_bottom in Firefox on the PC? It seems to be isolated to that.

Please let me know if you run into a problem with either of these.

Thanks for any help.

Bob

Works fine for me in FF 3.6.8, IE8 Chrome 8.0.552.215.

EDIT: For those people reporting problems, I wonder if they have flash blockers (different blockers behave in different ways). If so that might be a possible cause.

Thanks temp-

It will be interesting to see if anyone else from the forums runs into problems with the video. I've  yet to experience any problems with my gear and just had my sister who lives in the relative boonies and she has no problem with either her landline of 3G.

Puzzling. I think the Flash blocker may be a good place to start.

Bob

Hi Bob, nice site  compliments.

I have viewed the video in Opera with no problems. Fast loading.

• No problems with the vid
• No problems with the bottom panel breaking loose

Browsers: Chrome | FF | IE | Opera

 

Hello Bob,

No problems with the video
No problems with the bottom panel breaking loose

Browsers: Chrome and FF