Connor has been playing on the net for about 6 months maybe. That’s about 20% of his life, compared to my 16% makes him the veteran of the two of us. Of course Ash with 2 years out of her 8 (25% so you don’t have to think) becomes the guru, but these numbers are all estimates and 93% of all statistics are meaningless anyway.

I made Connor a page of links on the home web server (doesn’t everyone have one? call it a domestic intranet portal if you like :P) so that all he has to do is hit the button with a house on it in whichever browser he’s using and he goes to his launch page. If he hits an unfamiliar browser, like Safari on my Mac, he looks for, and asks “Where is my house?”

Then I thought for whatever the Photoshop version of hack value is, I’d actually make him a house, so without any more ado, here is Connor’s House. It will take a while to load fully, wait till the lights on your modem stop flashing.

Ashleigh’s House/Castle/Something will be next

Boring tech specs follow :

It was designed solely with Connor and Ash in mind, and to be used on the computers we have at home, and on a local network, so it breaks most of my rules : It will take a good two minutes to load on a modem. There’s no tags so screen readers like Jaws that visually impaired people use probably won’t work, likewise text browsers like Lynx will just be mind bogglingly weird. You need a screen resolution of at least 1024×768 for it to work properly, otherwise you’ll have to scroll about. On the upside it works in IE5/6, NS4.x,Mozilla 1.2 on Windows and IE5, Mozilla 1.4 and Safari on Mac, so chances are it’ll work on more or less anything built in the last 5 years.

I used Photoshop 7 to lay out everything, then Image Ready (comes with Photoshop) to do the rollovers and generate the HTML. It’s a table with a small zillion items cos of the way I wanted the house windows to work, but ImageReady’s code is surprisingly clean, and had the brains to make colspanning table elements where possible. All in all it was a damn good effort saver and I’ll be buggered if I ever slice an image by hand again!

I’m sure the character images breach all kinds of copyright, but since they all link back to the official sites I imagine I’ll be ok. The house itself was on sale somewhere in America 2-3 months ago, I stole the pic and posterised it I think was all, put on some extensions to make it symmetrical and stuff. It’s got a slight lean, that’s either due to the original picture or subsidence or something, might need restumping :P