I went scavenging at Pixabay.com for images to use on this blog this month, October, and quickly became bored with orange pumpkins, cutout silhouettes of cats, and depictions of ugly crone witches.
So I found some images that are not unique or totally original, but that have a truth of season in them.
Foggy field. With orange, but not smothering. I cropped.
A bench in golden light. It captures the lonely, sadness that visits so many people in the fall.
Cat eyes. Black cats get such a bad rap.
A room that just calls out for a seance.
Another dark foggy path through wooded land.
Too much orange sky but adding an alpha channel, and cutting most of the sky, makes the church silhouette all the more ominous.
Now please do not get me wrong, I loved making spooky Halloween cakes for my daughter’s class parties when she was little. And expected was good for seasonal Girl Scout crafts when I was a leader.
One of the plus sides of being done nesting, I do not like the word empty or the phrase empty nester, is that I can observe the seasons as I like. Art and photography for my blog is a great way to do it. And with high quality public domain images readily available at Pixabay.com I, and other bloggers, do not need to spend tons on images for sites that do not make much if any income, and neither do we have to settle for tacky or low resolution clip art to stay within the law. I am also uploading some images to the site for others to use. And the folks that run the site actually have found a few of my photos of high enough quality to accept for use on the site. I love cooperative, sharing economies.
Wordless Wednesday – Art Nouveau Graphics from 1917
Graphics from an Out of Copyright Source
Sunday evening I was perusing the Internet Archive at Archive.org while watching the new Cosmos series on the National Geographic Channel. These are images I captured from a not in copyright work: Strong’s Book of Designs, 1917.
I am sharing some of the general and seasonal images, that could be used as the basis of graphic art projects such as labels, web badges, and widget backgrounds. Interested in using any of these images in your projects? I recommend downloading them from the archive directly. Go to the title by clicking on the Strong’s… link, above.
The Art Nouveau styling in many of these is delightful, if you, like me, like that sort of thing.
Styles of Images Vary
Please check out the digitized book to get a more complete idea of what the book contains.
If you do not own Adobe Photoshop® to manipulate these images, an open source alternative is GIMP. GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. You may download the software for free, although donating to open source projects that you find useful is heartily encouraged.
Enjoy the graphics!
Reference:
Strong, Charles Jay and Lawrence Stewart Strong. 1917. Strong’s Book of Designs: a masterpiece of modern ornamental art. Chicago: F. J. Drake & Company
retrieved: 10 March 2014 https://archive.org/details/strongsbookofdes00stro
Resolution Reboot and Spring Cleaning
Has your resolve to keep your New Year Resolutions dissolved?
Missed out on re-energizing your will power at the Lunar New Year?
No worries. In the next few weeks we have several opportunities to recharge and revamp resolutions that have gone the way of dissolution. These opportunities might even stand a better chance of success from the get go than a Lunar New Year reboot would have.
I find that self-betterment projects work best for me during Spring. Maybe it comes from loving the anticipation of my late Spring birthday as a child. The fresh growth, the energy of birth and blooms, birds and bunnies nesting, it all just makes me believe in possibilities, fresh starts, and goodness.
I am not Catholic and do not come from a Catholic tradition. But I have always viewed Lent as an opportunity to do some some Spring house cleaning on myself. So I give up something for the relatively short time period of the Lenten Season. If what I give up is not a really bad vice, then I can then reintroduce the item given up in moderation, if desired.
In Christianity the 40 days of Lent, which do not include Sundays for some reason, starts with Ash Wednesday and continues over the next six weeks through Easter Eve, except that for Catholics Lent ends with Sundown on Holy Thursday prior to the Lords Supper Mass.
No matter how you interpret the religious observances of Spring there are several dates coming up in the next few weeks that can give you some ritual “oomph” in recharging your resolutions.
Spring Dates Appropriate for Ritual Renewal
- LENT: begins Wednesday, March 5th and ends on Thursday, April 17
- INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY: March 8
- EASTER: Sunday April 20th
- EQUINOX: March 20th (16:57 GMT)
- NEW YEAR (Persian and Baha’i): March 21st
- EARTH DAY: April 22nd
Traditions such as Spring Cleaning are found the world around. After being closed in for the winter months the idea of throwing open the doors and windows and airing living quarters out, emptying rooms and cleaning our homes top to bottom still makes sense. The agrarian motivation of having the time before planting when intense field work begins, be for annual household tasks and maintenance made very good sense. We are no longer a primarily agricultural people, but what was once logic has become luck. In some cultures is is very important that your home be completely cleaned before the New Year for luck to visit the house in the coming year.
Not being a terribly superstitious person, I cannot motivate myself with stories of bad luck. So I try on different rituals to see if they fit with my lifestyle and needs. If the match is a good one, then I can call up tradition in the future to repeat a past success. Can you tell I am steeped in anthropology?
This year I did not make any resolutions. I did purchase a plaque that emphasizes partnership in a feng shui sort of way for the part of the house where my husband and I spend most our waking time together. I also chose a word for the year: infrastructure.
So what I will be reaffirming, resolving, and rebooting will be my attempt to impose order built on a sound structure into my life. I have made headway on several house projects, but come a week from tomorrow, I’m giving up soda for Lent and I am imposing order on my office that has degenerated into a storage room over the last couple of years. By the beginning of Spring my house, both literal and metaphorical, will be in order.
I will be doing weekly before and after pictures of the office and storage area and maybe a few other areas each week starting next Monday and continuing through Easter.
Anyone care to join me?
5 Twitter Marketing Tactics Guaranteed to Annoy
Today I began checking out a new social media marketing dashboard. I entered the hashtag #midlife and I saw posts from two of my most savvy blogging tribe compadres doing everything right, I note what they are doing right and move on, and then I see it. The twitter post went something like this (oh and all the links have been changed, unlinked, and changed to a pretty light blue that means “there was once a real link here”):
Get your FREE Midlife Manifesto e-book buff.ly/1cmUVEm #midlife #women #wisdom http://t.co/xyz773pic.twitter.com/xyz77
This tweet seems promising, I love the concept of issuing a manifesto, so I click to find out more about the book. A Mailchimp sign-up box appears. This makes me think of rule No. 1 in “How to Alienate Potential Customers, clients, and readers.” In a word, phrase with image actually:
Please do not do any of the following if you want to attract my demographic group, that has both money and power btw, to your site or product.
1. Engage in a one-sided sales pitch
Per the Tweet listed above: Who in their right mind will sign up for email from a site they haven’t even seen?
This shows that the person or company behind this tweet or site knows nothing about marketing. It certainly means that the poster places no value on me and hasn’t taken my experience into account. Maybe the content is good, maybe it isn’t. But I now have negative confidence when a few seconds ago I was neutral. Don’t do this. The subject may be great but you didn’t put any effort into finding out how to get me to want to see what you have to offer and download it. That shows me that you don’t really value me.
Or this one that will set many if not most women into a frothing tizzy.
2. Insult me
Yeah, sure. Put me down, call me old, and say that you, a man, can change me and teach me how to act like something I am not, a giddy 20-something babe. What your message really sends out to me: You are really telling me I’m old, have lost my zing, and that you can save me. I’m in the prime of my life, Mr. Creep. Go back to the 1950s and help some TV Mom. You want me to click on you. No way.
3. Appear Desperate, Un-savvy, or Rude
You can do this by tweeting what is essentially the same post, slightly altered in no way that counts several times in a row. I found what I saw as essentially the same tweet appear concurrently in my search feed at 10:43 AM, 10:36 AM, 10:31 AM, and 10:29 AM from the same account @shewhoshallremainnameless
Obviously I’ve changed the account name because I am a nice person. Only the links have been changed to protect the innocent in these actual tweets:
She’s Got A Ticket To Ride, But She Don’t Care: Paula in #Vegas E-bk A #BLANKETY BLANK ATE MY #MIDLIFE thisismywebsite.com
Jan 14, 2014 10:31 AM
Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone: Wendy in #Vegas E-bk A #BLANKETY BLANK ATE MY #MIDLIFE thisismywebsite.com
Jan 14, 2014 10:31 AM
Posting essentially the same post several times in a row definitely shows that the poster either does not understand the etiquette of non-sequential posting, or does not know about the scheduling of posts. Either way there is a lack of professional knowledge about how to use social media to promote a publication. The last option is that the poster is just rude and does not care enough to take the user of the social media channel into consideration and that is simply rude.
4. Post a Professional Retweet Without a Disclaimer
5. Be Blah and Use Empty Words
The tweet discussed above in number 4:
RT @PenelopesAgent: “titleofmemoir” by @PenelopeBoredom is “Truly inspirational!” viewtitle.at/titleofmemoir #sequel #memoir #midlife #depression http://t.pseudonymauthor.co.uk
uses the word inspirational which is a ho-hum word. No one can know what inspires me. It is presumptuous to use the word inspirational. If I have been inspired by something I can say it inspired me to do something or be something but that is the extent of how it should be used unless you want to make people like me yawn. The hashtags #memoir #midlife #depression signals a real sleeper to me. #memoir should never be the first tag. Personal exploration would be better, it uses more of your 140 characters, but it says volumes. Similarly, the hashtag #depression does not exactly provide motivation to click through. Cure depression, survive depression, stop depression; these are phrases that could be turned into hashtags that convey much more. And the contextual association of midlife, depression, and memoir sort of create a “downer nexus,” no?
I know coaches tell us all to get out there and just do it and you will learn, gain experience, and become better or even expert, but it really is just fine to research best practices early on in your Twitter career.
Friday Finds! Infographics, Tools, and Experience
The following two graphics are my seminal finds for the week. I hate using that word, seminal, but sometimes it is the correct one to use. Unfortunately the word oval has another meaning or I would be promoting that as a better word to describe items or ideas that are seeds for novel conceptualizations.
The first one, the conversation prism, may look like a color wheel at first glance, but it is much more layered and contextually rich with information about relationships between elements of common digital communication tools. Look at it, download it, study it. Most infographics do not actually add value or information to the subjects they depict. This one does. The linked site is well worth bookmarking and then checking out for updates every once in a while.
Malcolm Gladwell irritates some with the cultural condensations from which he spins off his books, but I adore ideas, patterns, and playing with explanations for correlations between the two. Thought is good. Observation is good. Reasonable conjecture is exercise for the mind. So I like Gladwell. His Tipping Point was best, in my opinion, but Outliers points out some generalizations worthy of note as well.
To become an expert takes lots of work. Success is more fickle.
Tech, Tweets, and the TARDIS: How to Embed a Tweet
Did you know you can embed tweets? You can!
Fifty years ago at 5.15pm on Nov 23rd 1963, a mysterious exile from another world appeared on @BBCOne in #DoctorWho. pic.twitter.com/XUmYQZn9QZ
— BBC One (@BBCOne) November 23, 2013
In the following image I have cropped part of a screen capture of a tweet by the Twitter Account @BBCOne to show you how to get the Embed Tweet button from a drop-down menu.
To get to the white text on blue background button that says, “Embed Tweet” just click under the ***More option that is the fourth of four actions always offered under the body of the tweet.
Once you click Embed Tweet you will see something very much like the following:
There will be a pop-up window that includes a text box with some code to cut and paste. Do that and voilà embedded tweet.
—
Note: I wrote up this little tutorial while awaiting the 50th Anniversary Special Episode showing of a new multi-Doctor episode.