I love ’em. What can I say? It reminds me of pouring over printed pages and illustrations from old books that my parents stored away. They were textbooks and pulp novels from the late 19th Century through the early 20th. Even if I did not want to read the book cover to cover, I would scan each page looking at typography, although I didn’t know about the subject, I just loved the form of the letters. And old illustrations. I loved the compounding of message with the use of just the right image. That this could be done with just a few lines of ink amazed me. I loved being amazed.
This widget from Old Book Illustrations is my new favorite find, click on the image to go there.
So instead of an app of the week this is a widget of the week that will give you different images from the site for decoration on your site, if you are in search of such a thing. You can select among various sub-categories of images such as plants, people, buildings.
The site also offers some freebie graphic downloads with no strings attached and some fee for service offerings.
Some Days Nothing Gets Done
This was one of those days when writing just did not get done. What I did do today was focus on graphics for the BoomHer site and the new This Month in BoomHer History feature I am putting together.
Reorganizing Everything
I've been in such a funk lately that I decided to spend the day organizing…
Household Organization
First I bought a new shower curtain
to coordinate with my old brick wall
in the master bath.
This helped me get out of my recent doldrums a bit. This didn't really help me organize anything, but having a room look nice makes me want to work in it, so this will help me organize the master suite that contains my hubby's office, though I may steal it soon, as well as our bedroom, bath, and closet, and laundry. If our suite had a kitchen it could serve as a small studio apartment, which is why we designed it the way we did. We could add a kitchenette and rent it out in our old age. We could also live in it and rent out the rest of the house.
Computer Organization
Then I rewarded myself with a desktop image change on my desktop computer after I organized the 100 plus files that were scattered on the desktop and filed them or threw them out. I have always loved Hopper. I visit Night Hawks every time I visit the AIC, or visit Chicago for that matter. There is something that he captured that reminds me visiting my grandparents' house in the rural remnants of a 19th Century village in the very late 1950s and early 1960s.
This helped me feel like I had accomplished something that will help me get more accomplished and reminded me of all the stuff I've written and created as back-story to the significant amount of stuff I've put on line in the last couple of months. This made me feel less like a slug.
Mental Organization
Then I built a mind map of my current work related projects.
I used Mind Note Lite to create the mind map of my current projects. This serves as my app recommendation of the week. Mind mapping really helps me visualize all the disparate things going on in my mind.
I thought about using project management software, but I find that as an individual who works for herself that project management software isn't as useful to me as is mind mapping software. Since I tend to work by myself unless I outsource a project component, I find that mind-mapping helps me organize the overall structure of what I'm doing better than project management. This more curvilinear representation helps me get a handle on what I'm doing better than a spreadsheet or list would. Once I have a handle on what is actually going on, then I can prioritize. I always have 15 different projects running, I can get so spread out that I become completely dysfunctional. This helps tremendously and doesn't stress me out the way the pointed linear boxes of a spreadsheet would. This last point I made could be a blog post in and of itself so I will save it for later… for now just allow me to say that women and curves go together!
Finally, I put the Holiday Touch on this blog by changing the header. This is a psychological point of seasonal organization.
So I guess I am back at it. And thanks to taking today to organize and review, I know what it is.
Follow Friday: Networked, Tweeted & Pinned
WHAT IS #FF
Two weeks ago, I mentioned the need to use the #ff hashtag on Twitter more effectively. My experimental change to this end has begun.
#ff is a Friday meme on Twitter that is connoted by the #ff hashtag and is used as a way to promote Tweeters you follow and find interesting.
It might look like this this, that just happens to be the people I #ff-ed today, individually:
#ff @mimiavocado @amnichols @Cecilyk @ABattheBurrow
A tweeted list of names, @ signs with a person’s twitter handle after it, without context, does little to inspire other than the most devoted of Twitter followers to check out the list of your followers that you recommend. I have seen the hashtag #ff used as a reward given for new followers, as a shout out to buds met in the physical world may not have a large footprint in the social media world. So, I’m approaching this hash tag a bit differently from now on through the end of the year, at least, to see if it makes a difference for the people I recommend, to my interaction with them, to my overall stats, or if it just gives me a platform from which to examine Twitter activity, and Pinterest activity, from a more informed vantage.
It will take me a while to play catch up with all the folks I should have already #ff-ed. Within a couple of weeks I will be caught up, though. Well, on second thought, give me through the end of the year on that too. It all starts with Pinterest, but I will get to that in a minute.
TWITTER, PINTEREST & INFO THEORY
I’ve been thinking about this whole “social media thing” for years now. I decided long, long ago that I wasn’t as into quantity as quality. That’s the whole “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion,” thing.
Figuring out what constitutes quality in the new world of Twitter and Pinterest is an anything but a concrete or well bounded endeavor. Life has never been simple, and that is infinitely more true now that we are but data bits churning within the swelling mass of everything that resides just before the event horizon of the Technological or Informational Singularity, put forward by Kurzweil. I’ve wanted to reference this fantastically titled article, The Information Singularity Arrives Next Tuesday, Around Lunchtime, for years. I’m sure it at first glance my mixing of the physics of the Cosmos with an explanation of why I think the link-up of Pinterest and Twitter is a good idea will baffle most of my college friends from Purdue who went off to work in Washington, Oregon, and what came to be known as Silicon Valley, in the late 1970s.
An informational change in kind is, and in fact probably already has, transmogrified all we know, and how we know it, and will continue doing so. My friends, “Welcome to the future fair.” As a comedy troop once said, “We’re all Bozos on this bus.”
This following You Tube video clip has nothing to do with Twitter or Pinterest. I recommend just listening to it sometime because… just because.
There is no way you can catch up. Just keep swimming, walking, writing, or thinking. Keep doing what you do. But knowledge, and the data connections that drive it, are so vast, and interacting and changing and creating new relationships at a such a near instantaneous pace (because that is what information does) that the very nature of information has
All of this is what has been bothering me about Twitter’s #ff. The information system has a life of its own. It may not be sentient yet, but it exists and is changing and adapting to what users think it is before anyone can figure out what it is. As amazing cultural and social media influencers, bloggy divas, and women of a certain age, my women friends and I drive the engines of the information economy who are incorporating women’s culture and knowledge into this new cosmic intellectual stew. My compadres and I are significant use innovators and the information we incorporate about women’s culture is essential to driving this new system to an equilibrium level that is more egalitarian, and more equitable, than anything that has previously existed.
PINNING MY #FFs
So, figuring out ways to efficiently maximize social media information and connections is something that we may or may not do “naturally” but it is something that we and new social media seem to be doing well. I love the linkages that develop between new systems. Tweeting my pins is something that seems like a no-brainer now that I am looking at both platforms. What I have decided to do is:
- Figure out which social media dudes and divas I want to feature on any given Friday
- Get the links to the most complete listing of those folks social presence – probably a blog
- Pin those links to my #ff board on Pinterest and choose the image you want associated with the blog among the options presented to you
- In the pinning process SKIP OVER adding the checkmark to the box that says, Twitter
- You will add the #ff before the text of your tweet on the next screen – and though I didn’t do it this week (duh! I forgot the at sign with twitterhandle) the text of the tweet should probably read something like “#ff, @twitterhandle, brief intriguing comment about the person, pinterest-generated url to the pin
Doing it this way, I think, has these advantages:
- highlights the individual
- links blogs with twitter handles
- crosses platforms and thus kills two birds with one stone… Hehehe twitter and birds, get it?
- is more permanent than a simple tweet that gets lost in the Dickensian world of the Tweets of Twitter Past
- allows the visual to accentuate text without detracting from either
So, what do you think? Is this a great idea or what?
Seasonal Headers for My Blog
I love playing around with graphics even if I’m not a Graphic Artist by training. In my soul I am an artist so when I play with images I am a graphic artist, no? So last I was in an artsy mood and got a bug up my butt to do something. I have been a little bit antsy from staying at home with the new puppy so now that I have moved my desktop computer into the family room so I can keep an eye on little Guy and work with a bit more power than my iPad provides, I was absolutely itching to create. I decided this site looked too “Summer.” And Fall is definitely here. We’re supposed to only get up into the 80s today and down into the low 60s at night here in Tucson! Yes!
INFRASTRUCTURE
I use the Feather theme by Elegant Themes which allows me to easily upload header images which are called logo images, for some reason I cannot fathom, by Nick Roach, the guy who creates these WordPress themes that I use on my stand alone WordPress installation through the hosting account I have with Host Gator. It works well through the Firefox browser on the 2009 upgraded large screen iMac that I have.
PREVIOUS IMAGE REUSE
I started out by searching my computer for the layered graphic I created for the header I was using up until last night.
I found the single layer version of the image that was a .png file, but I could not find the layered ArtText file in which I’d created the image. Grrrrr. I hate it when I skip over such a basic step as saving a copy of my creation in the native format of the program I am using. Art Text allows me to export images as various types of files. I chose to export a .png format with an alpha, or transparent, background.
ART TEXT STEPS
So when I am using Art Text I remember to do this:
And not this:
So because I had not done this second action, I could not rework the original image and just replace the dragonfly with the bat. So I had to recreate the image. I can never leave things alone when given a chance to change them, so I altered some elements of the image. I replicated the overall feel of the image but made a few changes. You can see the Art Text tool bar showing some of the layers at the bottom of this image:
As you might have been able to tell, I do the logo image and the text as individual images both of which I export as .png format images.
LAYERING IMAGES AS LAYERS IN GIMP
Once those two images are created using ArtText, saved as an ArtText file .artx and exported as a .png, I open them in GIMP. I create a blank transparent image in the size that I want the new image to be. It looks like this:
Then I insert one of the images as a layer:
Then I add the second image (of the words) and position it to the right of the first layer image and save it with the title I want:
THEME INTERFACE
Then, finally, I save this image in a format that my theme’s GUI (graphic user interface) can recognize and upload it.
MANY WAYS TO CREATE IMAGES
I use ArtText because it a very functional and easy to use logo, icon, and button creator. If your were greatly skilled in GIMP or Adobe Photoshop you could do all this in one graphics program. I had to get something out quickly once and bought ArtText and learned to love it. GIMP is Open Source, which is not the same thing as free, but there is no cost to download the program, and it is available for most platforms. Since I don’t have a lot of money to support the project, I promo it whenever I can, such as in this post to help the project. You can also donate money. If you regularly use an open source product, giving back as much as you can is the proper way to support it.
LESSONS LEARNED
Save or export as many versions as you will want at the end of the process immediately upon creating any sort of file! That is the most important info to take away from this post.
I now have a header image that I can alter for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Winter, Spring and so on. I wanted to alter the header as a way of keeping a site fresh but familiar while reusing elements of pre-existing projects to save time and energy. Wheels are wonderful, but there are no good reasons for reinventing them.