Red Ball ~ Up and Running!

Now that I had mastered the art of the little red ball, you'd better believe I had Bugbones covered in 'em. (Bugbones, remember? That was my first site. Well, second, if you count that short-lived 'forum' I tried). I had links, and I had red balls up and running. I was up there with the best of them. Here and there in Bugbones, and sometimes on Southern Muse, I still find vestiges of that redball gif.

Placing the Red Ball Gif

Oh, Lord. If making the red ball gif took six months off of my life, I hate to think what placing the red ball gif did to me. Cracking the "img" code was like deciphering the Rosetta Stone, or so I thought. (I hadn't got to tables, yet). "Img align left," "img align center," "img align middle" "text align left"... the answer had to be in there somewhere. Was it image placement and text alignment that forced me to finally give in and order one of those "dummy" books? I don't recall. I did learn that if I didn't want my red balls floating a good two or three inches away from my centered text line, I had to master the art of tables. Tables, just so I could place my little red balls. And mentally butting heads with left brainers who wanted Internet to go back to being just plain text. I sometimes wonder if they weren't right.

Red Ball Gif

Asides aside (why do I feel like Tristram Shandy?) I am trying to get back to my original purpose, which is a history of my interaction with this thing called Internet. I left off about a year ago, in August 2011, just about the time I had documented my long-ago creation of the Southern Muse blue-banner logo. But even before the logo, I left off bemoaning my trials and travails as I begot my red-ball gif. How many hours of my life did I give over to the creation of that redball gif? Two shareware art programs, in addition to the standard Paintbrush that came with Windows... Call me nothing, if not determined. In the end, I had my red ball gif. It wasn't bright, it wasn't garish, it wasn't swiped from another web page. It was a nice, soft red, of my own making. Now came my comical attempts to place the red ball gif. I mean, it wasn't enough to have a red ball. I didn't want them floating around arbitrarily. Red balls had to be out beside the links. That was a law of the 1990s. I think I read that somewhere. Okay, maybe it wasn't a law, per se. But I do recall an article that said that the red ball was to the '90s as the smiley face was to the '70s. All my hard work for a cliché.

Bugbones and LView Pro

Making little red balls was an amusing distraction, but soon the new wore off. Besides, the little red balls looked spiffier than my logo! Surely I must rework my logo, in keeping with the three-dimensional sophistication and fine resolution of little red balls. Regrettably, the freeware wouldn't do my Bugbones. It would only do balls. For my next free trial, I muddled through a sea of convoluted and conflicting advice and settled on LView Pro.

The perils of Bugbones.

Little Red Balls

Little red balls took up several weeks of my life. I kid you not. It wasn't just having to make them. It was having to place them on the page. Placing those red balls took a whole extra line of code and some knowledge of tables. You had to know how to make an image link to make them effective. I had to buy a book for that. But adding red balls to my page was a case of pride, of self-respect, of keeping up with the Joneses. Now, I was flying with the best of them, using freeware to make red balls. Before long, my Bugbones site was covered with them. Surely I was the red-ball queen!

The perils of Bugbones.

Freeware and Red Ball Gifs

Freeware! What a concept! The Artist's Exchange, collectively, was my mentor back then. Artists on the Exchange were free with tips, techniques, and advice, and they were all enthusiastic about freeware. They pointed me toward several good programs. One of them featured Vector resizing. It let you make a big, shiny ball. Everybody who was anybody had a shiny red ball on their site in those days. About.com's ball was very prominent. If your links didn't sport 3-D shiny red balls, you were nobody. Well, they didn't have to be red. They could be blue, green, pink, or ~ if you were very edgy and wild ~ purple. Plain-text links? How dull!