Hello. Introducing myself

Hello folks. I see a lot of familiar names here so figured I’d introduce myself.

For those who don’t know me, my Name is Steve, I build websites and maintain them, mainly for bike shops, but I have the odd non-bike client, although the bike ones tend to be the oddest. The website thing started as a sideline (I used to own a bike shop and couldn’t afford a “proper” website, so I learnt to build them. Switched to RW when iWeb died. Presently build most stuff with Foundation and a lot of BWD stacks, although I am now giving Foundry a go.

I’m not a coder, I hate the stuff, it gets everywhere and when you drop it you can never find it all again. I’m not really a designer either, I just kinda know what works for bike shops when it comes to websites and online marketing, I closed my own shop last year to focus on my Caffeine Injection project, which is the name of my “agency”, for want of a better phrase. I do have some other business interests (own a bike workshop, etc) but I spend less time in those and more time doing webby stuff.

As well as that I do beta testing for a few devs, as I have a habit of breaking stuff.

I swear a lot and take very little seriously.

I ride bikes a lot. (Proper bikes, pedal powered, not those lazy motorised things)

This feels like an AA meeting!

Anyway. hello.

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Hi @SteveB I’m happy to see you here, you will love it also :slight_smile: welcome!

Welcome. You’ll love Foundry i’m sure.

A good selection of foundry sites can be found in the site showcase.

Besides that @webdeersign’s pre-built projects show what Foundry is capable of. As does @egomade’s project site.

Foundry will be your salvation. But seriously, you will not look back.

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Great to see you here :slight_smile: Have fun with Foundry! Tell us what you think about it…

Glad to have you here! Great to know where to direct bike shop clients if ever cross one. As a begginner I find it easier to stick first in few areas. Also, believe co-working generates more opportunities than a blind competition. :slight_smile:

Morning all. Finally coming to the end of a mammoth task this week (processing and uploading into RCP complete 2018 bike ranges, hundreds, if not thousands of the damn things!)

I’ve picked up Foundry this morning and hope to start getting a play with it tonight.

I’m planning to use Foundry to take me in a new direction with web design: Simple. Over the last year, as my skillset and understanding has increased I’ve fallen into the trap of doing stuff simply because I can. I knew this was happening but wanted to venture down that road for a while. It’s resulted in some nice fancy effects and stuff in my client sites, which look great (IMO) but which add zero to the job of the site: To sell stuff (bikes, services, etc.).

And in most cases, the client never notices it anyway. I’m convinced most fancy stuff is nothing more than willy waving by the designer, and my flies are staying zipped from now on :wink:

The time has now come to get back to basics, strip out all the fancy stuff and focus on speed and simplicity. So the slow process of first learning Foundry and then rebuilding the client sites I manage has started.

Welcome. I think you’ll enjoy Foundry. Adam has put together a nicely integrated set of stacks that are a joy to use.

@SteveB You will be able to get familiar with Foundry pretty darn quickly since you have a background with Foundation.

One of the components I would suggest first learning is how typography works in Foundry. Adam has done a marvelous job of creating a system whereby it’s super simple to include multiple fonts, each of which are then easy to access in the various stacks. It’s really brilliant. I’d check out his one or two videos about this: it’s that important.

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Will watch them soon, thanks.

I’m now settling down with a nice Chianti and Foundry (no Fava beans or human liver) and starting to have a proper play, so questions galore. (I learn best by doing (not watching or reading) and deconstructing. I’ve got the freebie templates, so expect a lot of questions…

1st Question…

I’m used to firing a column stack on the page, setting the max width in the column stack, and adding top and bottom padding, again all within the column stack. Am I right in thinking the planned procedure in Foundry is to add a container, using this to set max width. Then adding a margin stack for setting the margin, then the content within it?

Oh, kudos to Adam for the column stack. That’s a lovely bit of lateral thinking.

Correct. The Container sets the width and many stacks have bottom padding which spaces stuff out nicely.

Cool, ta.

Q2… So far, the image stacks I’ve looked at don’t seem to support warehoused images. Is this the case or am I missing a setting?

Unfortunately Adam is not “into” warehousing. So you either need to use other stacks that like warehousing. Or adapt to Adam’s drag/drop approach.

To be fair, to someone like you this should not be a problem. I love warehousing my images (and other stuff) but when I do a gallery of images I’m typically using another product (Gallery 3). But for simple images I already know about optimizing images and resizing them (so do you). The advantage of Adam’s drag/drop approach is several of the image stacks (e.g. the basic one) also provide some nice options for further styling the images (monochrome, various Instagram-y effects, etc.).

This is the one big adaptation I had to make. But I’ve gotten over my reluctance and finally enjoy it just fine.

That surprises me. Other than making life a bit easier for, dare I say, novice users, I’ve never understood the logic to not warehousing. The idea of embedding images, that load individually for every instance on the site, always seemed alien to me, and very inefficient.

I would tend to use the same, often very large image, multiple times on a page, let alone across the entire site. And I often change images on a site en-mass, by simply dropping new images to the warehouse folders on the server.

I understand the need to include the drag and drop feature for some users, but to not include a warehouse facility surprises me.

I need to consider this carefully, as I fear this might be a deal breaker for me, as I can’t see myself changing my entire image warehousing system.

Steve: I understand. I felt the same at first. But, in practice, I don’t use drag/drop that many times. But I do use lots of images! And not many galleries. So what’s the deal?

I simply put in the html code. I use it so often that I have it as a text shortcut in Typinator (great software by the way).

So I’ll simply use this shortcut “,img”:

<img src="fullURLhere" alt="text description here" width="100%" />

or use this with shortcut of “,fig”

<figure>
<img src="fullURLhere" alt="text description here" width="100%" />
<figcaption>text description here</figcaption>
</figure>

I can put this in most stacks. I use the markdown one a lot. So I’m still warehousing most of my images (probably about 90%), but I use drag/drop when there’s a specific effect I want to achieve that I can only get from one of Adam’s image stacks.

Let’s say I want a hero header on the hompage, and a banner header on all the other pages, using the same image. If I’ve got ten pages, that’s ten times the image is downloaded.

If I also want the same image as a background in the footer, on all pages, that’s the same image now downloaded 2o times.

Now let’s say the same image used a third time on all pages, perhaps at 1/5th the original size, as a highlight image or summit. That’s now thirty times the same image is downloaded. If this image is 100kb, that’s 3mg* of download, for a 100kb image. That’s a hard sell in anyone’s book.

Perhaps I’m just missing the obvious, but I can’t understand how warehousing images isn’t the right approach. Happy to be enlightened.

  • Ya, OK, if I wasn’t warehousing and so using the same, already downloaded image, I’d make the highlight images 1/5th the size, so the total download wouldn’t be 3mg, perhaps closer to 2.2.

Here is a detailed explanation from Adam about this subject and other thoughts on why Foundry is developed the way it is.

Good thread. I agree wholeheartedly agree that those of us using RW for client sites are a tiny tiny minority. But, two points…

  1. It was over a year ago. Things that were considered the realm of the “power user” a year ago are now the norm for the mainstream.

  2. I don’t know of a single stack that uses images that ONLY uses warehoused images. I can’t even think of any that have the warehouse option as the default. They all (to my knowledge) use drag and drop as default, to use a warehouse image you normally have to click a box, which opens up the URL box. I can’t see how this puts off novice users.

I dunno. I’ve spent an hour or more looking at this; my sites are very image heavy, I build mostly sites for bike shops. I’m just not willing to change my warehousing system, to do so to my mind is going backwards, this renders all the Foundry image related stacks more or less redundant. Which is disappointing, to say the least.

I don’t know that I have any more to say today than I did in any of my previous posts regarding the topic of Remote Images. It isn’t a feature in Foundry or Potion Pack, and I have no current plans for such a feature. If and when RapidWeaver adds in support for Remote Images in the app itself, then I will approach adding them to Foundry and Potion Pack as well in whatever way Realmac implements them.

With that said, it looks like this thread has deviated from its original topic. I’m going to close it as it looks like it has run its course. If you all would like to continue discussing the Remote Images though, hit up that thread that @Steve_J linked to above since it will be on topic there.

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