Tag: 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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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

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

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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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

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.

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My Day

Seeing the “long” in “long run”

I’m actually learning new things, among my frustrations. Photoshop isn’t frustrating; it’s WordPress. It seems that, in order to do any of the things that were easy-peasy with my FrontPage, GoLive, or Dreamweaver, I’m expected to download (or usually buy) a plug-in. I realize that this flexibility is supposed to make things better, and, I suppose that it will in the long run. But for now, all I can see is the “long” in “long run.”

For today’s art project, I’m working on a new and improved version of this graphic that I made for my Home Page. This version to the left, uses my old-style icons for all of the where-to-go items.

My new one is going to have actual things you’d expect to see on an old scratched piece of metal. I’m thinking industrial!

Then, of course, I’ll get to write tutorials, detailing how I created each of these! I think that my Torn Paper tutorial was my most popular of my Archive Tutorials.

I’m feeling a little Rip-Van-Winklish, coming back to this world, after so long away. The truth is that, in actuality, so much has changed — even the styles of graphics that are popular now.

I wasn’t really locked in the basement for all of those 12 years. I was doing creative things — like designing interiors for homes! While it wasn’t ever a paid job, and my training has been OTJ plus a couple of classes, I’ve done some neat work over the years. Maybe I’ll make a webpage and post some pics.

Yesterday, I did some file work, finding the files for my old wp part of my site. I made this so that it opens into a new window. I still haven’t worked out how to make those pages part of this new site. … or how to make my Archive pages part of the new site, really. Challenges abound! Good thing I’m young.

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My Day Photoshop Tutorial Announcement

Amazing Gradients New Tutorial!

I’m working on some fun things — Photoshop art and writing! I have posted my third tutorial re-do. I did a little remake of my Amazing Gradients ideas.

Diamond Trail

If this looks like something fun, you’d be right! The tutorial for making this is here.

I continue to learn little bits about WordPress. I have a feeling that, once I get it, I’ll be unstoppable, but for now, LOL, I’m feeling quite stoppable!

I’ve joined a WordPress group on Facebook, and they seem to have answers, as well as many, many members, so we’ll see how that goes. Ok now I’m going to set out to learn some new Photoshop technique so I can write a new tutorial. 🙂