Purple People Eater

Purple People Eater

For my artwork I didn't take inspiration from the monsters of legend nor from dungeons and dragons. Instead I chose a real high-tech monster - a Cray 3. That was one of the first supercomputers. Massively stylish it was cylindrical in shape with a seat round the bottom and orange backrests. A simply gorgeous piece of technology in both form and function - but a true monster in terns of it's computing power (for it's day, of course). So my Purple People Eater is a tribute to the Cray - with the organge backrests of course!

Over my time on Squidoo I have learned not to follow a template too closely. It's tempting to look in the style sheet and work out the precise colors used, or the font sizes specified. Joshua Brown and the rest of the Squidoo time evolve the stylesheets overtime and following them slavishly tends to cause massive work when a new version of a stylesheet is updated. I therefore now prefer to go with the feel of a template which is why I have put this lens together as a showcase of the Squidoo Purple People Eater template.

It's a much more restrained template than you may imagine. There are blocks of purple at the top and foot of the lens, but in-between it's not too vibrant. Headings are in purple, but it's quite a mooted hue and blends well with grey or black text. It's a template I like for moderate funkiness, or initial impact in the Introduction where the purple header block is very visible.

The one major difficulty is shown by this lens: Blackbox modules are hard to use as there is no purple option. I opted for green but for some lenses vibrant red may be an option. I could code my own alternative in HTML/CSS but I like Blackbox modules as they index into the Table of Contents automatically. I could, of course, hand code that as well but for all but the most special of my lenses I have learned to think about maintaining a lens over the long term with the minimum effort. Hand-codes HTML and CCS is great but it will need to be adjusted every now and again if the template changes, or if I make substantial changes to the content of the lens.