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I've done a lot of things. It is as if I've been searching for who I really am. I got started in graphics and web design .. this is kind of a funny story in a way, and offers a little peek into my goofy side. I had a bakery, a little catering operation and I did cakes and cookies and other sweet stuff which I delivered locally. Wedding cakes got to be a huge part of my business, and of course they were all on weekends.
It occurred to me that I wanted to change things so that I wasn't working every weekend and so I thought of the idea of putting coffee cakes and brownies on the web. I developed a couple of awesome recipes. Then I ship-tested some on some friends of mine around the country and they shipped/ lasted well. Cool.
So I needed a website. I, of course, running my biz on a shoestring, didn't want to spend any money. <g> So I asked my nephew who was in computer science in college and he said that he'd do it in his spare time. Well, college kids, as you are well aware, have NO spare time, so the site didn't get done. I had a domain and everything just sitting there.
Then I got really sick and had to close down the biz for 4 months. During that time I didn't do much of anything except try to get better, which I ultimately did!
During my convalescence, I had been reading computer mags and such about how easy it is to build your own site with the software that makes it easy. I went to CompUSA and the salesman told me not to get just hokey template software ('Get your site online in less than an hour!') but instead to go a step above that and get MS FrontPage. Ok, so I did.
My first site was my own personal site. I had 5 links off my homepage: Interests, Photos, Writings, Links, and Blackberry Hill, which was the name of my business.
Eventually I made a page for each of my hobbies, which, in those days, did not even include art! Photos became a photo album. I wrote an article and some other stuff and added a Writings page. And so it went. In those days I was just taking graphics from other sites.
Then one day in the fall of '99, a friend of mine told me that I ought to be doing some editing of my photos because they needed editing. I said that I didn't know how to do that at all and she pointed out that MS FrontPage had a program bundled with it called Image Composer, a simple photo-editing package.
I discovered that I could make myself into twins, that I could give my sister green hair, and that I could take paintings of flowers that I'd taken from other sites and make them into "virtual gardens" which I used, that fall, to decorate my site.
For Halloween, I was still using borrowed graphics. For Thanksgiving, I borrowed a turkey from a site and tried to animate it using Image Composer. He was supposed to be dancing, but he was a real klutz. <g>
That November, too, my mother fell ill and died in December, so I was afk (away from the keyboard) for much of those two months.
In January, I made my own snowflakes with Image Composer and used them to decorate my site. The method that I used is the same one, essentially, that is in my snowflake tutorial now. In fact, I wrote up a tutorial for how to do it in Image Composer. That was my first tutorial.
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My husband got me a digital camera, a very nice one, that Christmas of '99 and then in January, we replaced my computer with a fine big new one.
I got MS Photodraw as part of Office 2000 with my new computer and that icon for it with the paintbrush was so .. exciting and .. well I had to try drawing. I painted some flowers, I mutated a picture of peas into sand dunes, and the artist was born!
In April of 2000, I was ready for a new image program and I'd heard about Photoshop. One of my friends said that it was the one that the pros used and so I thought that would be something to check out. I was amazed at the $600 tag on it but intrigued too. You know that effect that a very high price has.
At Staples, I read the box and just had to have it. I ordered it from Adobe the next day and got it on the 20th.
I hated it at the start. Hard to get used to, things didn't work as I thought, and I was thinking that I'd made a terrible mistake. My friend told me about the newsgroup and so I started lurking there.
As I have learned new things in Photoshop, I have written tutorials as a way of documenting and remembering my procedures. As with everything else in my life, I put these on the web.
These have caught on in a big way with Photoshop learners from all over the world. One of these learners began to address me in email as Graphics Goddess, so the nickname was born!
And it was from my tutorials that I got recognized as a technical tutorial writer of high enough calibre to snag a book contract! Books and other publications I have done to date are detailed HERE.
More books followed, and I probably would STILL be writing for Friends of ED, had they not gone belly-up in the spring of 2003.
That's when I got my title of Q&A Goddess for Digital Photography Techniques, a really fine magazine published by Future Publishing in the UK. I'm quite proud to say that I wrote for them for 17 months!
At the end of April, 2004, I became certified as a Goddess. Well, actually, Adobe calls it "Adobe Certified Expert." This involved taking the hardest test of my life... and passing it! Adobe was only too happy to award me my Adobe Certified Instructor after they saw my glowing teaching credentials.
For a history of this site, see below!
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| History of myJanee.com
I began my site with 6 pages in May of 1999. In those days it was just "Hi, I'm Janee, and these are my hobbies." The 6 pages were these: Home, Interests, Photos, Writings, Blackberry Hill (the business I had then) and More Links. The site was on AT&T's personal webpages, with the domain of janeecake. I still maintain janeecake and have my tutorial index there now!
In fact, art was not even among my hobbies then! I didn't have any idea that I had any "talent" or even that being an artist is a matter of progression, something that you can learn . I thought that one either WAS an artist, or WASN'T, and I assumed that I was in the latter category. LiveLight began in the winter of '99, with Eat to Live Light.
I discovered that I like mucking about with art at the beginning of 2000. The catalyst for me, as it is for many, was manipulation of photos. Eventually I got up courage to pick up that paintbrush! At that time, I was working in MS Image Composer, which had come bundled with FrontPage.
I had my first "gallery" page up, I'm thinking, during the spring of 2000. At that time I included Art on my Hobbies page, and linked to my single gallery page.
I got my first Photoshop (version 5.5) in April of that year, and had my first Photoshop tutorial written... mmm .. I wish that I could remember when it was for sure, but it was during that summer of 2000, when I was still QUITE wet behind my ears. That was the transparent capsule.
During that time period, I began organizing the PSRL (Photoshop Resource Links), which is, in itself, an enormous body of work. |
The site took the name myJanee.com on the 2nd of February of 2001. Following closely was my first Art Challenge for Valentine's day in February of 2001. I began it in the Usenet newsgroups with "I've done my Valentine. Let's see yours." People sent me valentines and I posted them on my site. I got about 40 entries for that one. I decided on the spur of the moment to have voting and post the winners.
I began the Message Board in April of 2001 for the Challenge originally, and still use it for that, though for other things too.
The Ask the Goddess column began at the first of 2002, as did my About Janee Journal. I have all of the entries for both in the archives, linked from those pages.
Just about all of my site is diagrammed in my Site Map. I finally did this in the early in 2001. A new site navigation system was put into effect in June of 2002 and I did a new set of interfaces for it. In August of 2002, I registered psgoddess.com as a new domain for this site. It is a pointer for now.
In the summer of 2003, I began the Courthouse project. Michael and I are traveling the state of Indiana, photographing the courthouses and streets of the county seats. You can find these pages from the Who is Janee > Travel index.
My site is over 25,000 files and nearly 500 pages as of Fall of 2003. I am adding and changing things nearly daily as things in my life are added or changed!
I hope you enjoy your stay and that you return often!
Always me,
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JaneeFacts