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My Day Travel Tales WordPress

Making a mailto link… and other amazing things

Jack and I have discovered that it takes as much work to get going on and re-enter from a small trip as it does for a very long one. The small trip in question is the Show Low jaunt from which we just returned.

We had left to escape the simmering summer heat here, and we were mostly successful. While it was 116 here a couple of the days, it was “only” 95 there, and that’s a 24 degree difference! But it still felt hot.

We had lots of fun, mostly with Jodie at the Dog Park at Venture Inn, the RV Resort. She behaved very nicely with all of the other dogs, and they all seemed to like her. There was a big cottonwood tree right in the middle of the park and everyone sat in chairs and talked, as we watched the dogs play.

We learned some things, as one hopes to do, when one is on one’s maiden voyage in a new RV. We learned that we are happiest when we have a spatula and a serving spoon, but that we won’t die without them.

Even with both of us showering twice and doing dishes daily and no bathhouse available, we still only used 1/3 of the graywater tank and 2/3 of the black water in a full week. We have both gotten pretty good at conserving water!

And the recliners that are standard with the Winnebago View V are really not good. The springs are not adequate to hold the position when you try to actually recline. Buzz. We may be seeking new recliners. Jack got us new springs, but they are not easy to install, so we will wait till it’s less than 400 degrees to try the project again.

We made Reflectix covers for all of the windows. That stuff, which looks like shiny silver bubble wrap, is great for keeping the heat outdoors and the cool indoors. Except when it’s cold! Then they keep the cold out very well.

Today I did a little more touching up on my site. I updated my Contact Janee page, and figured out how to do a mailto link in WordPress:

  • Highlight the part that you want to be hyperlinked.
  • Click the link button at the top.
  • In the URL section type Mailto:?Subject=Tutorial Question (or whatever you want the Subject line to read.)
  • Click Enter.

I did a few cosmetic changes to my Dog Portrait tutorial.

And I looked at some long-forgotten, long-hidden, probably for the best, pages on my site. I wonder, really, how many pages and how many files I do have. At one time, I had over 25,000 files. I’m quite sure I have many more than that now.

Here’s one of the pictures I found, for example. This was one of my early site interfaces. I always thought it was kinda pretty, although, looking at it now, the lighting on me should have been different.

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My Day Travel Tales

Who was that unmasked man?

Today was a mellow and relaxing day for us. We love that our site here at Venture Inn is so close to the dog walk and the dog park! We took Jodie to the dog park and she played with a tiny feisty dog named Ralph. He kept barking at her and trying to get her to run and play and it was so cute.

We went to Walmart and Safeway this afternoon, and, if I should come down with Covid, and they’re trying to do contact tracing on me, I’d have to say I got it today. The number of loud unmasked undistanced people was disturbing. We wore our masks and tried to steer clear of everyone. And we got slippers. And milk. And forgot to get water.

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My Day

They kiss and ride off into the sunset

Today we awoke in Sun Lakes where there high was expected to be 116. We loaded up the RV and drove the beautiful road for 3 hours to Show Low, where we have the windows open, a light rain is misting down, and we almost need a light jacket!

Jodie did great on our drive and she’s relaxing with us now as the couple kisses, ending a Hallmark movie. Life is good!

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Create a Zoom Trail in Photoshop

I have just posted another NEW Tutorial! This one is on creating a Zoom Trail in Photoshop. This is a modern improvement on a piece I wrote for a book I co-authored in 2002.

https://myjanee.com/new/photoshop_tutorials/sigbrush/This was a book that had barely made its first run off the press when the publisher went out of business. I got paid, but, other than the author copies and a few others, I don’t think that it ever saw the light of day. Shame, because there’s some good stuff in there. I have reproduced some of my other effects from the book in my tutorials like Burned Paper, Hot Hammered Text, Swoosh Text, and Wood.

I’m also working laboriously on updating my extensive Photoshop Resource Links. At one time, this was an invaluable source of Photoshop information, but people move on, give up their sites, new sites come online, new media appear out of nowhere, and pages like mine go out of date. But I’m fixing it.

If you’re reading this and you have a *relevant* site that you’d like for me to consider adding to my listing, please email me. I do not do reciprocal links, but rather curate my list so that the links are of interest to my readers.

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My Day

New Art Galleries Posted! Crowds amazed!

Today I’m working on more site updates. And I’ve made some art! I created a new Gallery page yesterday, and today, the Gradations link is no longer “in progress.” It’s posted! I have some beautiful things up there for your viewing pleasure. Here are but a few:

I’ve also been working at tidying up more of my thousands of untidy HTML pages. I’m working. It’s working. I’m bringing my site up to where it needs to be!

I’m frankly amazing myself with how well I can actually fix HTML. Sometimes I’ll have to repost a page several times, before it works, but usually I get it on the first try!

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My Day

Hidden Zodiac Page is found

Not really! But here’s how to do a redirect page in HTML: Paste this onto the page:

<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”0; url=’https://www.whereyouwantittogo.com'” />

The 0 is how many seconds you want the viewer’s browser to wait before redirecting.


I’ve also done a bunch of site upgrading. I redid my Galleries index!

I now have different categories set out for my artwork and photography to make it all easier to find. And I dug through some art and found some new things to post. And I updated some pages with my new top banner.

I found my hidden Zodiac page. I remembered I had hidden it because people were hotlinking the images.

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Animation in Photoshop: a NEW Tutorial

Yes! I’ve posted a new tutorial on creating an animation in Photoshop. It’s all of the fun you have come to expect from a Janee-tutorial .. and more! Have a look at what you can make:

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My Day

Photoshop Fun: a Pause Button

Today I did some fun little Photoshop foolery — nothing worth publishing, but fun nevertheless. Ok, if you insist, here’s what I made: It’s a Pause button. I copied one I found, but all these pixels are mine. I may write a tutorial for the process. It was fun to do.

Then, this afternoon, I worked on getting my Archive tutorials set up and ready to be archived. I’m not really sure how exactly I’m going to DO that, or what it means, how accessible they will be, etc.. What I did do was to improve the navigability in those pages and got rid of some obsolete stuff. Like my Bloomington address, for example.

Because this part of my site is in HTML and not in WordPress, I have to do some coding to update and change stuff. So .. ewww. I never learned html very well, so it intimidates me.

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My Day

Amazing Gradient Maps

I’m just doing some horsing around today and learning some new (to me) techniques. Also playing with old stuff I know and love.

Ok, can you tell which was the before and which the after? Pretty fair job, I say. And this led directly, of course, to these:

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My Day

I love these new icons!

Jack is working through my Elements class from way back when it was version 3. And this has me thinking about what I will need to do to get them into shape to have a new batch of students working on them. I’ll just say right now that I’m not ready to give myself a deadline.

First off, I wrote them all in WYSIWYG HTML, back when that was a thing. And I don’t know HTML much, except to copy/paste and just be a bit dangerous. I was a maniac with GoLive, which they discontinued back in the early aughts.

So I am thinking that, while my ideas are still very useful, relevant, novel, and fun, the screenshots need a bit of touch-up, which essentially means my redoing and reshooting all of the projects. And, since the formatting is html and not WordPress, … yeah. I’m going to be retyping everything.

Today I looked through my wealth of files, including my image files. I was looking for my raw work on my little Tip, Project, Question, and Digital Digression icons. I wanted to take the paths that I KNOW I made and recreate these images a bit bigger.

I couldn’t find them anywhere short of digging into my old hard drive and.. I don’t have that one anymore, since it was like 4 computers ago. I just made new ones, but I made the same as my original designs. I just love these:

Tip
Project
Question
Digital Digression
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My Day

Adulting… and making red balls

Yeah! This is something I didn’t even know I had, let alone needed to upgrade! I got an email from Bluehost, telling me I needed to upgrade my php, which was seriously outdated. And it said I needed to backup my site first.

Well, I had thought all along that my site was somehow backing itself up, so, for the last 13 years, I was going without any backups!

On advice from my WPBeginners people, I uploaded Updraft, a free backup utility plugin for WordPress and it worked right away. Woo hoo! I feel like such an adult.

Then I followed Bluehost’s clear instructive tutorial and upgraded my php. I felt like I’d done enough for the day, so I’ve been just arguing in Facebook comments. LOL. I did a small amount of Photoshop play and came up with these red balls.

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Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Two New Photoshop Tutorials!!

I just posted two all-new Photoshop Tutorials! I did another photo retouching tutorial, the one linked from the picture at the right. I’m calling it (oh-so-clever!) Photo Fixing 2.

Photo Fixing 2

In the other tutorial, I go through 5 ways to remove a subject from its background. It’s called Remove Any Background.

We go through removing all sorts of objects from all sorts of backgrounds. Below are some examples:

And the AC is still working!

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My Day

Pulling your hair out because you can’t take out that background?

Today I worked hard, but I don’t have much to show for it. We started the day by having the AC service guy out to fix our broken capacitor. It was 86 when we got up this morning. Ugh. But it’s nice and cool now!

I spent much of the day working on a 5-part tutorial on removing backgrounds. It seems that that’s what 90% of the questions are about on the ps groups.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Stunning Colored Pencil Effect in Photoshop

I know! You were wondering if you could use Photoshop (or Elements) to make a photo look like it was drawn with colored pencil, right? Well, have I got a tutorial for you!

Before

It’s HERE and it’s for beginners and YOU, if you want to have some fun playing with photos.

After

Today is supposed to be the hottest day of the year. In PHX, they are expecting 117. Here in Sun Lakes, it’s usually substantially cooler, more like Tucson, or even a degree or two less. I don’t know what the official temp is now, but this morning at 5 am, when we left for our walk, it was already 89.

I came up with another idea for a shirt:

Better a quarantine coif
than a Covid cough!
Stay HOME!

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My Day

I’ll tell you a story

Today I wrote out my story about how I got to be a Photoshop artist, educator, and author. Here’s the page! You can come back here with a click on the Blog in the top menu. Heyyy, I’m navigable and stuff! Working more on navigability every day!

I also made myself a redirect. I did an online search for myjanee.com and discovered that many sites (old ones, sure) are still linking to my site… but to a no-longer used link! So I reopened that page and put in a redirect. I learned this from my buddies at W3docs.

I used this for an article in Photoshop Fix.

Creative stuff? I’ve started a composition project using the pics of Jodie on the rock. And that’s about it.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Photos into Art

Today was fun! I finished two tutorials and did some other art along the way. I know that it’s vain to think that this is cool, but.. Ok, I’ve never been accused of being not vain. This is my Porcelain Effect which I developed back in .. well, the beginning of this millennium, anyway.

Before

And I posted this tutorial I’m calling, optimistically, Photo Fixing 1.

After

This is a bit of Photos > Art I did today. I was sort of going to try the Porcelain Effect on these Coneflowers, but came across this instead. Do click the photo to see it bigger. I used Find Edges and Divide mode on the duplicated layer. I think it looks like a colored pencil drawing. I should now try doing this in actual colored pencil and see if I can make it look like Photoshop! LOL

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

A Transparent Capsule Tutorial and other Wowza Effects

I’m learning all manner of new things today! I wrote some custom CSS to enlarge the area of my page that’s being used. Thank you WordPress for Beginners! Seriously, if you’re struggling to learn WordPress, I urge you to go right there and search around. Their Facebook group is great, too. These guys have given me back my life, and I’m not exaggerating at all.

I did an upgrade to my first tutorial — not its first upgrade, but the biggest! That tutorial is my Transparent Capsule. Friends, I’m back in it!

I’m starting to think about goals beyond just “get myself up-to-date with the software” and “upgrade my tutorials.” I’m starting to think again about my Community– getting it going, having Challenges, and upgrading my class materials. I’m not so hopelessly far off.

This is a little effect I was playing with yesterday. It’s done with iterative transformations, a topic that has enchanted me since long before it was cool. I wrote about this in a magazine in 2002 and I will teach it again in my Starting With a Blank Canvas class.

I’m wondering if this would be a good tutorial for the “go search youtube” people.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

New Sticky Note (Post It) Tutorial!

I am off to a roaring start today, having gotten one of my tutorials completely rewritten and published! It’s my Sticky Note tutorial. I also made a Shading Brush tut which is linked from there and from my ever-growing Tutorial Index.

It’s so hot today that it feels like you’re just going to catch on fire. It was 90 already when we left to go walking at 5:30. We are nearly always very gone at this time of year, though, and I pray that this is the last summer we don’t have any choice in the matter.

Ok off to lunch! Jodie’s getting restless. Here’s a pic of her just the other day, as she turned 8 months! She climbs this rock every morning. It used to be a big deal — like a real climb. But now it’s nothing for her.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Custom Shapes Tutorial: Brand New!

Yup! We’re actually going to have tacos today!

I worked hard today for several hours and got exactly ONE tutorial rewritten. It’s far better than its predecessor and it’s here. In it, I create a butterfly shape from a photo, make it into a Vector Mask, and save it as a Custom Shape.

I am really enjoying exploring this stuff, learning more, and getting creative with my writing. I do hope that someone someday reads it.

I’ve been pondering the question of my own relevance. I’ve decided that I’m relevant as long as I’m still alive and creating. All I have to do is to pinpoint and reach my audience. I’ve done that before; I’ll do it again. But, this time, it must be different, because the communication media are so different.

In 2007, I didn’t even have a smartphone. I don’t think that e-books were even a thing. There was no such thing as “social media,” except for ICQ, IRC, and Usenet groups. I did most of my communication in those days through Usenet and my own bulletin board hosted on my site. I know that I will be handling my website communication through a Facebook group and email, of course. I hardly ever even look at email anymore, though, because it’s gotten so taken over by garbage.

I’m thinking about other concepts. I’m 63. The majority of my audience before was people at least as old as me, though I had some 30-somethings and even people in their 20’s. Would “Photoshop for Geezers” be a catchy thing? How about “Photoshop for Grown-ups?”

Or maybe age isn’t that big a deal. I just know that I’m not going to try to compete with the “look what I can do” YouTube videos. Ugh. I just can’t imagine anyone learns well from that kind of thing.

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My Day

Archived Tutorials and a New Index

I guess I’m not feeling the urgency to write new posts, since literally NOBODY is reading these. What I’ve been working on the last few days is getting a new Tutorial Index built. I have been working on deciding which of my old tutorials aren’t worth keeping active, which ones are fine as they are, which ones are good but need a complete rewrite, and which ones are good but just need some tweaking.

I’ve decided to have an Archive Vault where I’ll store the ones which I’m retiring. Twenty-one of my originals are going straight into said Vault, once I get it set up.

Today I learned how to get files from my HTML side of things into my WP side. It involved getting a plugin to handle my media files (Filebird) and then downloading the files from my c-panel to my computer and then dragging them into my new media folders. It’s not hard; it just took me a long time to figure out how to do it.

I’m categorizing my tutorials a little differently, according to what the results are. I’m using my titles from my Photoshop classes for categories. Yanno, next, after I’m all done with this, and I have my following built up a bit, I’m going to rewrite (as necessary) my class materials and get going with that. I wish I were close enough to set myself a date. I do well with deadlines.

I have found that I love writing. Well, I knew that right along, but I really have missed it. And now I’m thinking about the magazine and book gigs that I used to have. Sigh. I wonder if there even ARE magazines and books now.

All of the Photoshop groups that I’ve found that have “tutorials” are just people showcasing their showoff Photoshop videos. So they’re about “look what I can do,” rather than my approach: Look what YOU can do. One thing that really surprises me is how little the effects have changed — the artwork that people are doing now is really not that different from 2000. And the special effects that people want to know how to do are things that I wrote about in 2002.

Maybe my way is outmoded, but I just don’t think so. What I think is that these “tutorial” video people are just more adept at making videos than they are about writing or teaching, for that matter.

One thing I need to work on is my resumé for when I finally get ready to get out there for real. I feel a need to explain to this newer generation who I am and why I am relevant.