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Randsco Worldwide Visitors: Count, Country, Time & What they're reading
There are 39 visitors. Click to see their country & what they're reading.
Randsco Site Map
Site MapAgain, this is something that I've been wanting to do for some time and I believe that a site map is necessary to help those people out that have a hard time figuring out what is what on our site. I'd like to think that our menu system is easy and will work, but some people just require a site map to figure it out. So ... here you go ... a site map. (It currently sucks, which is why it's shown as display:none!)
About the Kimlers
about usThis is where visitors can find out about Randsco and the Kimler family. Who are we? How did we come to be? What motivates us on our adventures. It's kinda like the old "meet scott and rachel" section on our PCT WebPage, but this "about us" section will be a stand-alone page.
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Thank You
FEATURED DONOR: The "Red Dirt Emporium", located in the historic "Bricktown District" of Oklahoma City, made a donation toward - and is using - Photo-caption Zoom Version 3. The Red Dirt Emporium was founded in 2007 and has a goal of introducing visitors and locals to the best that Oklahoma has to offer. They specialize in Oklahoma resources, art, music and other items that celebrate Oklahoma
Since they are largely responsible for the "Thank You" section of our sidebar and this "Shout Outs" blog, it's fitting that one of the first shouts should go to Oklahoma's Red Dirt Emporium.
What's the story?
Simple.
The Red Dirt Emporium was one of the few companies (or people) that made an unsolicited donation for their commercial usage of the Photo-caption Zoom v3 technique.
Not only was their contribution unsolicited, but they didn't require any support to get it deployed.
One day, a donation email arrived and I thought, "Wow. Cool. I really should find a way to say 'Thank You' to them (and others who've helped Randsco) ... I know I've been meaning to ... I just need to DO IT!"
So, I made this section and (slowly) have begun populating it with some of the many people and companies that have - in some way - supported or helped Randsco. It's provides a formal way of saying "Thanks" and helps to promote their website (in a Search-Engine-friendly kind of way).
To learn how Oklahoma's Red Dirt Emporium is using Photo-caption Zoom and about some of their unique products, carry on ...
Kimler Adventure Pages: Journal Entries
Christmas Photo Gallery
Have a look at my first pass attempt to find a pure-CSS photo gallery that be displayed with in-line text. Display as many images as you want to impose on your visitors! Demonstration uses family photos from Christmas photos
First-pass at a Pure-CSS PZ3 Photo Gallery
Around Christmas, I had an idea for a way to display a multitude of images in a pure-CSS photo-zoom gallery, utilizing Photo-caption Zoom v3 (PZ3).
Many people like PZ3, but some try to use it to build a photo gallery. I designed it to add zoomed images (and an optional caption), into XHTML pages. While it works great - is easy to deploy, saves page real-estate, looks nice - it doesn't handle multitudes of images very well (at least, not "out of the box").
Until now.
I've finally taken the time to play with it a bit (it took most of yesterday morning to hack through the details ... and then most of the afternoon and night to put it all together into a demonstration). 
If you're into CSS, like PZ3 ... or want to see 40+ family Christmas photos ... read on! (Dial-up visitors beware ... image data ahead!)
Design, Deployment & De-Photo Gallery
Using the gallery is easy! Just move your mouse over an image and it will zoom (pop, explode, enlarge) above the row your mouse is on. It will be centered on the full page (overlaying the sidebar, if necessary). Move your mouse left, right, up or down to see the photos.
Kimler Kristmas 2006
PZ3 Photo Gallery: Take One
Benefits, Considerations and the Future
Finally, a pure-CSS, XHTML-valid, liquid-designed method of displaying a bunch of images, which doesn't detract from in-line textual data! While I really like Stu Nicholl's work over at CSS Play, especially his superbly styled lightbox, I find his cutting-edge work difficult to deploy and designed for a fixed-width layout.
The first-pass PZ3 gallery has the following features:
- valid CSS and XHTML (standards-compliant)
- pure-CSS (no javascript required)
- one image file (thumb and zoom are same image)
- integrates into existing PZ3 pages (other PZ3 photos still work)
- liquid design (screen resolution independent)
- easy to deploy (no special IE-only style sheets required)
- cross-browser capable (ie6,ie7,FFox1.5,Opera9 - tested)
- multiple aspect ratios (images don't all have to be same size)
- image centering (maximizes viewing for low resolutions)
The code could easily be modified for photo galleries having thumbnails clustered together (left, right, top or bottom), with high-quality zooms that display on top of a background logo, which is placed in the center of a 'viewing area'. An infinite number of galleries could be linked and styled in this manner. If I have time, I'll try to make a demonstration to show the capabilities.
Of course, the big consideration for me, was that the gallery be easy to deploy and integrates with the existing PZ3-HotSpot, PZ3, PZ2 and PZ1 code (I want it to piggy-back off of PZ3 and not break any preceding or derivative works).
While these features are nice, there are some considerations when deploying it. Handling multiple image aspect ratios requires extra CSS selectors, to handle 50px incremental differences in image width and height. I don't like this, but (at present) don't know a way around this requirement. It would be a lot easier to use similarly sized images (and the thumbnails would deploy "nicer" too ... the gallery block would have a clean right edge, rather than the ragged edge you see here). Using only one image file is convenient, but because all image data are loaded with the page, one must balance the quality of the image, zoomed image size and the total number of images, to keep load speeds reasonable. (Another option is to link the thumbnail to a super-high resolution image, which would load in a new page.)
What more do I want? For one, there currently is no caption option (doesn't seem right for a "photo-caption zoom" does it? ... no!). I'll have to add one later, which is why I've left the PZ3 caption code in the XHTML for this demo. In lieu of a caption, this demo makes use of the thumbnail ALT attribute - not perfect, but it's there.
If I had more time to play, I'd test some other alternatives, but alas ... with a 3-year-old, 5 acres of land, wood to chop and other websites to work on ... I'm not sure when I'll get the time. 
When and IF you do check my site, please be patient, full credit will be given when editing time permits. Edited version is clean of credit due to an Op failure ;-)
Just what I was looking for!
I did experiment with a caption version, which provides different styling, in addition to captions.
I came up with a different technique, altogether, by keying off a text-link, rather than an image link. I call it PopInfo.
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I sure am going to use a sligthly changed style of this impressive work on my site (if there's some spare time left 4me).
Thank you !
Any help would be very much appreciated! Thank you!
However, one can just view source on this page to pull the PZ3.css ... and the gallery code. There's also this gallery page, which might help you isolate the CSS and the XHTML you need to duplicate this technique.
Please keep in mind that our copyright rules allow one to use our techniques for free only on personal pages. If you end up using PZ3 or the gallery for your website, you'll need to donate to the cause. (Likewise, if you have difficulty deploying the cutting-edge CSS, you can always hire us to help you.)
Hope this helps.