The thing that started all of this was my better half, unbeknownst to me, started trolling the Internet and found a bunch of unique and theme appropriate photos of Old World, antique, and just plain cool looking maps to be possibly used as better background images, and let's face it, the maps are a lot easier on the peepers than the solid brown background and dim map that was originally used at the creation of this blog.
After getting excited about the idea, I quickly joined in the fray and downloaded over 30 photos. I had to stop there as things were getting out of hand, and I needed to start creating the 'short-list' of photos that I wanted to start working with to see which ones produced the best result.
I started going through everything that was downloaded, scrutinizing each photo for content, color schemes, details, etc. Once I had the short-list in my electronic hands, I started inserting them into the blog to see how they looked and interacted with the blog as a whole.
Resizing, color shading, text manipulation, etc., was the next phase of the operation. My apologies to anyone who may have been looking at postings on my blog during this time, as you were seeing all kinds of changes going on with different maps, color configurations and text fonts all jumping on and off every few minutes over the course of several hours. I did not want to shut the blog down during the 'reconstruction project', especially since it was the weekend and many folks use that time for research.
The main hurdle was getting the photos sized correctly and the coloring of the photos to the right shades to be able to get the text fonts, coloring and placements set within the photos. I was using several different programs to get the right marriage of photo colors and text colors that worked together and looked good.
Some of the applications I am more familiar with than others, and the unfamiliar applications took longer for me to get used to their operations in order to get the outcome that I was looking for.
There are many, many different variations of a lot different map photos and text color schemes that were generated, reviewed, set aside, redone, reviewed, set aside or discarded altogether.
I love the Old World maps that contain the drawings of ships and sea monsters. I was striving for the parchment look, but I had to go a little darker so the text wasn't washed out and lost in the photo and background.
With the bulk of the project completed, all that is left is 'sweeping the floors'; I still need to tweak the bar and text colors for the “Tabs” just under the new map photo and above the postings themselves.
Ironically, after all that was done, after all of the time and effort spent working on the photos and text, the objects of the blog revision, the background and text of the actual postings, did not change, which I find kind of funny.
In my own defense, my biggest road block concerning the color scheme for the postings, is that I inadvertently 'backed myself into a corner” by a decision that I made a couple of years ago. In an effort to make things easier for the reader/researcher, I started using bold orange text on the name of the subject of the post contained in longer articles so you can scan the post and catch that persons name quicker and easier.
Consequently, that has limited me immensely on what colors I can now use for the posts. Since they are manually embedded, I would have to look through all 10,000+ posts and change every instance of the bold orange text to either another color or remove the color all together. There is no easy way around it and it would be a very tedious and daunting task.
I'm already going through the posts to add “City, County and State” labels to the posts so that they are added to the “City and/or County & State Entries” totals on the right-hand side of the blog. To go back and restart all over again because of the bold orange will take significant time away from my availability to be posting as much information that I can. I have purchased a significant number of books in 2019 that have tons and tons of valuable information that I want to get posted for researchers and historians to be able to find easier.
Even though the maps have a brown hue to them, the posts still better than just having the original solid brown background.
I have to say a huge “Thank You” to my better half for having me chase that squirrel. If it wasn't for her, these maps would have never made it onto the blog; I'm not that creative.
Let me know what you think of the new look by using the “Contact Form” to the right.
Thank you! and Good Luck in your research!
New Background Photo
New Map for Blog Title
