Refreshing the Astros Fan in Exile Website

After the long winter hiatus, I've returned to Astros Fan in Exile Website, only to discover that I never actually got around to updating the player pages of the Photo Album after Spring Training. I did post several pages of Spring Training photos, but I guess the season started and I got distracted with real games. Knowing that I'm likely to return from Spring Training with a few thousand new pictures, I decided to try to get my website fixed up before I go.

Of course, I immediately concluded that the site needed a new design. I did jiggle around a few things on the home page, but it was the Photo Album that needed to be redesigned entirely. Those slide show gadgets loaded really slowly and made the pages ugly. Instead I decided to just post pages of thumbnails that could be enlarged to full size by clicking. I started last night and worked on it most of the day - made some progress but there 's still a lot to do. I want to have at least one page of photos for each player on the 25-man roster, coming out of Spring Training. And I'd like to have a page of pictures for many of my old favorites, who've left the team by retirement, trade, or free agency.

So far, it's coming along - I have updated the existing "current roster" player pages, and added a few new ones - Matsui and Tejada, who were not previously on the team, Backe who I'd never actually seen pitch until last year. I updated a few of the old friends pages, and one of the event pages - the Nats game from July.

I'm not totally thrilled with the results, though: The software I use to create the pages arbitrarily crops the thumbnails into square formats, brutally decapitating many of the player photos. They look fine when you click on them, but given how carefully I crop them, it's annoying to see a page of headless or handless players. It's also annoying that once you do click on a picture, bringing up the fullsized photo, there is no "slide show" option, just a "Next" button that's invisible until you mouse over it - if you know to do that. The pictures do look nice blown up though - in the old slide viewer, I had to shring them down to about 300 pixels in the longest direction. I wish that I could load the full-sized high res photos, but they are large files, and my web hosting arrangement is pretty limited.

It's not clear to me why I go to all this trouble to make the website nice, or for that matter, why I update bother to this blog. I never do anything to advertise the website or the blog, so there are only sporadic hits. I don't get any comments on the blog entries, which I interpret to mean that I am the only one who reads them. I'm not complaining - I'm not sure that I really want to have any readers. And I am sure that I don't want to have to monitor annoying comments. If people did comment, I'd probably have turned that feature off by now. I haven't yet decided whether I am going to write up every game of the season, as I did in 2005, 2006, and 2008. It's a lot of work, and as noted, I'm the only known reader.

I guess that I'll go to Spring Training, see what the team looks like, and then decide. Meanwhile, I have a few thousand more pictures to post.