The judging guidelines provided by the PWA state that they’re mere suggestions and are not exhaustive. So basically, as before, I can judge however the hell I want.

However, judging for the Blogs category will involve wading through a whole lot of crap, I’m going to say that upfront. To prepare myself for the inevitable shitcluster, I’ve come up with my own personal judging guidelines so I may stand firm on my scores. The scores I’m gonna be giving out are gonna be harsh, but it will be my only shield when charging head-first into this ugly, semi-pretentious collection of melodrama.

I’ve written them in the form of questions I would ask myself during my evaluations. Hopefully some of you readers (there’s like 1 of you out there) share my views.

Content

• First and foremost, is this person writing coherent entries?
• Do the entries seem sincere, or is this person sugar-coating the mundane? While sugar-coating isn’t bad, it requires skill to pull off effectively.
• How is this person’s spelling and grammar? By default, this person is subject to the holy tenets of the grammar nazi in you.
• Do you get the feeling this person’s entries exist for the sole purpose of getting site hits?
• When was the last time this person wrote a non-filler entry?
• Would I willingly subject myself to this experience a second time?

Design

• This is extremely important, how far did this person deviate from the default theme of his chosen CMS/blogging software/blogging service? If this person fails here, give him a score ranging from 0 to 2, forego the following guidelines and skip to the next criteria.
• If the design did not make you cringe or did not blind you, how purrrdy is it?
• Does the site look like shite in popular alternative browsers like Firefox and Opera?

Usability

• Is any of this person’s content readable by any discernable standard?
• How long did it take for you to realize that that blob over there is this person’s site navigation?
• Were you attacked by unnecessary Javascript alerts, prompts, or any other unnecessary steps to access this person’s content?
• Does the site transform into total shite when you disable the stylesheets?
• Has the site in any way, shape or form disabled or crippled your beloved keyboard shortcuts and normal browser functions?
• Does anything at all in this person’s site cause your browser to crash or respond slowly like that fucking Reuters video feed at the bottom of the layout?

Functionality

• Is the site even up?
• Is anything broken?
• Did you doze off while it was loading?
• Does looking at the source code give you a warm fuzzy feeling deep inside?

Now I realize my own blog may not pass my own standards, but I’m not entered in any sort of awards, so there. Bah, I’m going to continue judging later. That is, if the judging page cooperates and stops giving me that goddamn database error.

Apophysis is a free open source fractal flame editor for the Windows platform. I recently found out that GIMP actually has this functionality (in a more basic form, apparently) buried somewhere in the Nature submenu and I’ll be testing it out the next time I get the urge to boot into Linux.

While I don’t fully understand what fractals or fractal flames are, the images it output give off a very surreal and ethereal look depending on how much you tweak the options and parameters. After some tinkering and running of a handful of bundled scripts, it’s only a matter of time before you end up with very striking visuals that will leave you staring and examining the finer details.

Like most applications that use math to generate images, there is a drawback for the impatient: rendering time. A 1600×1200 image at with the quality set at 600 rendered in a little over an hour. The images won’t be perfect. You’ll notice little unwanted specks that you didn’t see in the tiny preview window (the larger you resize the application window, the slower previews will be generated), but it’s nothing a little run-through in Photoshop won’t fix. You should retouch it in the first place before using it anywhere, don’t be a lazy ass. Also, sometimes the final render will have some parts look a tad blurry. One side would look brilliant, while the other would look like you’ve been tripping on household cleaning liquids. I’m not sure what causes it, perhaps certain combinations of parameters just give you half-crap renders.

All in all, this is a useful application for coming up with patterns to fill in spots in your designs that might need a little spicing up.

Download Apophysis 2.02 (2.6MB)
Apophysis website
Apophysis tutorials

As you may already know (there’s 1 other person who actually comes to this blog), I was invited to judge again at the Philippine Web Awards this year. Anyway, so I login to the judge’s page –which by the way has a very classic feel (hover over dashed phrase) to it– and the list is quite long.

I wanted to test their web application out so I picked out a site from the list and visited it. The site was amusing in a very bad way, but that story is for another day. I enter my chosen scores, click the “Update Scores” button, then lo and behold:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ‘80040e14′

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Incorrect syntax near the keyword ‘AND’.

/elimination_save.asp, line 20

I guess I won’t be judging anything today. I miss having this much held-back criticism for a higher pseudo-authority.

If you use Linux, you’ll understand.