Category: WordPress

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales WordPress

Playing Catch-up

Christmas. Yeah, I’ll blame Christmas for my not posting on here for 2 weeks! I’ve been engaged in other pursuits including puzzles, cleaning a bit, carving wood, Christmas cookie baking and delivering to neighbors, picking up and parking our RV, going for our daily walks, and just getting up in the morning. Yeah, it’s a depression thing.

Re: Relevance. Still searching. I’m beginning to think that the Photoshop tutorial realm is so oversaturated, that there just isn’t room for me to squeeze back in. I’m still investigating and searching my own soul at the same time.

I was reading a post of mine from 2013 where I was talking about wanting to make a password-protected arm of my site where people could upload their own photos anonymously and thus have a new Art Challenge.

Still haven’t found out how to do that. At that time, I was feeling frustrated with the mountain of work that was ahead of me in “converting” my site to WordPress. I didn’t know that the easiest way to do this was not to do it, but to start all over.

The RV!! It’s indeed back in our custody and it’s beautiful! We were concerned that, with its extra length, our storage spot wouldn’t be big enough, but they said, “No problem,” with regards to our extra length. Woot!

Jack’s been busily making new doors for the space under the dinette. It had cheesy panels that snapped on and off with difficulty. We will now have smoothly operating doors with hinges. He’s also making drawers for his closet.

We still have a few items on our punch list to complete before we can go on a trip: chassis air conditioning, TV functions, and …mmm… thought that there was another thing, but maybe that’s it.

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General myJanee.com News My Day Travel Tales WordPress

Another ALL NEW Post type!

The excitement never stops over here at myJanee.com! Pixels are a-flyin’ and I’m getting things done. Today I added another new post type to my site — States. I’m doing this with the Custom Post Type plugin, which has been handy for me.

This is where my state pages are housed. That’s right: I made new pages, one for each of the 50. They are all blocked and ready to be filled with wonderful pictures of all of our adventures. Well, those and the state capitol pix, too! The pages are not posted yet.

Other than arguing on the Photoshop Beginners group that one actually CAN do vector artwork in Photoshop, slowly recovering from this shingles shot, and grieving over the passing of one of our more esteemed Supreme Court Justices, life has been pretty quiet. I did edit some of my Washington State photos and posted them. Maybe it’s time for more art.

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My Day WordPress

Some amazing tutorials found!

Not that they were lost, but I’ve been working on updating my Archive Tutorials so that their links all work. It’s a bigger job than it sounds like, because I have many, many tutorial pages and the ones of which I speak are all in HTML. Soooo bleah. HTML coding, copy-pasting, over and over.

I’m within spitting distance of finishing this project, though, so I can once again be proud of this amazing body of work — my Archive Tutorials! While these are not linked directly to this blog, you can get back here from the main header menu — any of those links — and then the menu at the upper right. I’m still working on navigation.

And, in other adulting news, Jack and I went to get our flu shots and shingles: part II shots today. Woo hoo! I was so happy to get that done that I came home and had two of Jack’s chocolate chip, coconut cookies with peanut butter spread on them, and a big glass of milk. So much for adulting, then, right?

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement WordPress

All New Tutorial on Vector and Raster Files

I have just posted a much-improved redo of my “What’s the Vector, Victor?” Tutorial. This one goes into much more depth with file types and how to save each type of file. There have actually been new developments while I was away, so I got to learn new things. I went down many different rabbit holes! The tutorial is here!

Everything is coming along on my website. I continue to be amazed at how far I’ve come in such a short time. In recent days, I’ve done more work on my Photoshop Resource Links adding more links as I discover them. Today and yesterday, I found six new links to great sites which taught me about file types!

I have learned, at last, how to actually use a reusable block in WordPress! You convert it to a regular block. That’s done by clicking the thing next to the block at the top.

I learned about groups of blocks. And I now have a template of a group of blocks that I can summon up for new tutorials!

WordPress still remains a pretty complicated and fiddly thing. And the page size seems enormous. But it’s what all the cool people are doing now, so here we are!

I’m exploring the notion of teaching at one of the many online schools that have cropped up while I was sleeping. I surely wish that I could be part of a school that, if not accredited, was at least known to be good. I do know that there are many out there who are professing to be good teachers who just are not.

And I just found another rabbit hole — LinkedIn. This is all stuff that wasn’t even a thing when I went away.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement WordPress

New Head-Swapping Tutorial Announced

Yes! I’ve written a new tutorial! This one is on head-swapping, but it really involves more than just a head. It’s quite a piece of work, if I do say so myself. In this tutorial, I take parts out of four photos, each of which has a problem, and I make one decent portrait of the whole family. This tutorial can be found at this link.

One thing that’s different about this one is that it’s more of a show-off tutorial, because the student’s photos will almost certainly have issues that are different from those in my photo.

A couple of resources that helped me today:

Web Page Word Counter

View Post

Creating and using a Reusable Block in WordPress

In other news, damage of our RV is still being estimated. This doesn’t excite me much.

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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 WordPress

My New Interface is Working!

So, yeah! Go to myJanee.com and ta-da! It not only shows up, but it shows up without gaps and the links work! I figured all of this out with some discouragement from my WP FB group, and a great site that helped me with the Image Mapping – Free Online Image Map Generator.

My FB group members told me that this sort of interface is just not done anymore, nobody does it, the coding is stupid, and anyone who uses this kind of code doesn’t deserve the air they breathe. Well, ok, they didn’t exactly say it like that.

My thinking, in going ahead with creating this interface, is that this is my site, dammit, and I’ll do what I want. I also am doing this site for MY people, MY students, and I hope you all like what I’ve done. And I love the art that I did. So there!

So that was my whole day yesterday, and about an hour of this morning. But it works and I’m happy!

Next thing .. well, I’ll tell you when I get it underway. For one thing, I’m getting itchy feet and want to travel! So I want to plan a little trip. With temps around here in the 100’s, I am thinking “mountains.”