New Look on RocPic.Com? "Responsive Web Design"
Written by Ron Morales on August 8th, 2014
Rochester, NY
"Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue..." would be a good way to describe the changes happening at RocPic.Com . Still home of the "Good ROC" here in Rochester, NY aka the 585. I have been publishing photos, videos, and webcam images on this website for over 10 years, and it is taking a bit of compromise to marry the old format of web design with the new. While the new design utilizes Responsive Web Design (RWD), allowing the webpage to fit on any device, be it a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer, I had to retain elements of the old format to display the webcams on various pages of this site.
If you are on a desktop computer, you should see the Roc-Media Twitter feed (compiled by Rachel Barnhart) in a column on the right side of this screen, if not, make your web browser wider, you should have a similar view on a tablet. If you are using a smartphone, or if you make the page narrow, every item on this page will line up in a single column for you to scroll through.
I have been plugging along the last few years learning how to code web pages using cascading style sheets (CSS), giving it a lower priority than shooting the pictures and videos of Rochester, NY that make up the majority of the content found on RocPic.Com . Events won't wait, music won't wait, history does not wait, you will find many things under the hood of RocPic.Com that are gone from Rochester forever.
I have published more than 1,000 videos on my YouTube.Com/RocPic and Vimeo.Com/RocPic accounts and if you combine all of my photos from MySpace.Com/RocPic, Facebook.Com/RocPicVid, Flickr.Com/RocPic and photos here on RocPic.Com, the number comes to more than 250,000 pictures.
Most of my videos and photos of Rochester, NY focus on what's good in Rochester. With over 150 festivals per year, there is an endless supply of good times worth capturing.
The local music scene in Rochester, NY is what really caught my attention. Over 20 years ago I walked into a place on Monroe Avenue called the Bug Jar, where I got my first taste of "Acid Jazz". Already familiar with open mic for comedy, I took in my first open mic for music with a band called the Irthlings. I stumbled upon a weekend marathon of local bands early on a Saturday or Sunday, and the excellent quality of the talent at the local level was undeniable.
Inspired by reading about inventors, and amazed at the George Eastman and Rochester, connection, I had my first darkroom in the basement where we lived on Bay Street in Rochester, NY when I was 11 years old. I first started publishing on the web in the late 90's, after becoming a fan of viewing webcams from around the world. As I already had a TV tuner card in my computer, it occurred to me that I could also use the tuner card to publish a webcam. I began with a webcam that showed the lift-bridge in Fairport, NY. Soon I added a view that showed the trains coming and going just East of the railroad crossing on Main Street in Fairport, NY. By the year 2000 I moved back to Monroe Avenue in Rochester, NY where I set up a three camera panoramic view that showed from the Rochester skyline to the Hess gas station on Monroe Ave. Currently the weather webcams are located at East Main Street and North Goodman Street in Rochester, kitty corner to the Hungerford Building, and the CSX Railroad Yard, with a distant view of the CSX and Amtrak trains on webcam number three. This is not a complete history, but enough for now to give an idea of how RocPic.Com came to be, and where this website is headed in the future.
