At the beginning of every month I now put an article on this site’s home or landing page, that is also a blog post, that is intended to give readers ideas for creating content related to women’s history, the historic events of the month, and historic and archaeological events involving women. There are supposed to be 30 to 40 prompts or spin off points in each of these “month of…” posts. I enjoy the exercise of putting these together whenever I do them. I really, really like this month’s post of prompts, if I do say so myself. Do check it out.
Did you see the Presidential Proclamation on Women’s History Month, 2016? You can find it here. In it the President encourages us to observe International Women’s Day on March 8th. He also suggests going to WomensHistoryMonth.gov for information about “the generations of women who,” as he says, “left enduring imprints on our history.” He also mentions the upcoming summit the White House will host on “The United State of Women,” in May. It will both highlight advances in and efforts to help women confront the challenges while aspiring to greatness.
Of course, as this month is Women’s History Month, I am learning more about being an editor and publisher via the Her Story series I am publishing on this site. So far we have had a story about a Persian grandmother’s hand-crafted textile and all it conveys to a granddaughter. Next up will be a story from a teacher about a teacher. Actually we have two of those. Another will be about a single mom. There will be a step-mother tribute, and another will pay homage to a very special mother in law. And aunts and grandmothers and great aunts will be covered too. I hope to receive a story about a WWII female pilot within a day or two. And there are more! Stories of regular women who were significant – we all have such stories and I am so happy to be able to bring some of them to you.
Last year in April, as this site was just a wet and screaming neonate, the A to Z Challenge helped us plant 26 basic articles about Women’s Legacy. Come this April, in a very few weeks, we will be doing another series of 26 posts with an A to Z coverage of a Legacy Tools theme. It is a busy Spring. Hope you will continue to enjoy it with us.
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.
Fragmented Friday, June 15th
If it is Friday, it must be F…
Fractured Fridays, Fragmented Fridays, Forlorn Topic Fridays, Frittered Away Inspiration Fridays…. all these and more… Freakishly Funny Fridays for example… could be the hook phrase for my irregularly published Friday posts about all the things I did not get written this week and that hung out on my computer as open tabs, folders, drafts and such because I truly intended to write about them, incorporate them as a reference in a post, share the brilliance of a passing thought of mine… with world, and so on…. but that I did not manage to actually write about… until now… Ta-dah!!! And yes, these random musings, listings and posts may contain grammatically improper use of exclamation points, ellipsis, and other explicit use of frowned upon techniques and language. Deal with it!
***
- I really should have given the post from 6/12 a different title. Maybe I will slightly amend its title to include a subtitle such as “A Truly Special Election Day for the Tucson Community” that more accurately captures the sentiment within the post. It is a much better reflective post than the nondescript title implies, reflects, or whatever. My take on what was going through my mind as I watched the election results roll in on Tuesday is undoubtedly similar to what many, many others in my community think and feel. It was not a live blog, but it is a slice of life from an important day in Tucson and AZ District 8. I did go ahead and change the title but left the permalink the same so that previous links to the post will still work.
- I really ought to write something about visiting Gabby’s office in Washington just after her 2008 election and just before the 2011 assassination attempt.
- I really like the USPS business page. It is friendly, just like the great folks at the USPS Tucson Sun Station.
- Russell Pearce had a hard time finding a place to have a meeting. I just had to share this, somehow! 3, count ’em, 3, boots from venues in one day!
- There are some words with which I think people should acquaint or reacquaint themselves. It is impossible to understand intentions and trends if understanding of the these terms is lacking: Fascism, Feudalism / Neo Feudalism, Corporatism, Oligarchy, Plutocracy,
- Was The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy really the first documented use in popular culture of the phrase, “the whole enchilada?”
- I just realized that I haven’t completed any, none, zilch, zero, nada of the great ideas that I thought I would write about this month and that most embarrassing of all, I listed in a post last month : a) Rhetorical Tactics of the Right and how they are used in broadcast media, print media, social networking, and yes, even on wonderful sites like BlogHer, b) Why the Original Gen Xers, the Late Boomers, Could Change Everything This November, c) Framing Political Differences in Meaningful, non-hateful, ways, d )The Last Time the Fascists Planned a Coup d’ Etat, e) Disenfranchisement is Unconstitutional, f) Voter Registration: Where are the unregistered women? We need to be where they are, g) Less than Monkey-wrenching but More than Passive-resistance,h) Book review of Beautiful Trouble, i) Writing Desk (program), Logitech Accessories, and My iPad, j) Build your own Vector Graphics with inexpensive drawing/illustration programs, k) The #&@! litter box, l) More on BlogHer ’12
- How do you feel about Meet-Ups that charge a small fee to attend? How much would be okay? What would you need to get out of it? What would you expect to receive in order to get “your money’s worth?”
Well I guess that is it for today. I am starting to think about all the things I have to get done today, so I should probably go do them.
Do let me know what you thought of these bits and pieces, and whether or not you would like to see any of them expanded into actual posts. 🙂
Working on My Empty Nester Site
I spent the last couple of days working on Done Nesting. I purchase reliable and flexible themes that I can customize without doing any alterations of code. I buy themes to be certain they work and will continue to do so. It isn’t that there aren’t good free themes out there. There are. Free themes are a great way to assess different designers work. I find the securrity considerations to be more thoroughly addressed in the commercial themes. I use themes on my own blogs that I may also use on client site. Should I have a problem, I like to be able to access support that will respond quickly so that I may respond quickly. My clients deserve that.
I decided to install BuddyPress on my Done Nesting site so that I can have blogging challenges, groups, events, and I will be adding group tweeting capabilities soon.
I did a bit of graphic design for a possible logo, banner, and icon to use for an icon set for the site. This may change. Hubby says the flower looks too mean and pointy. I will probably soften the colors a bit too. Let me know what you think of my design work. I love the process of honing something into a viable, aesthetically pleasing construct.
Most of the day was spent on setting up the theme I finally purchased, after wrapping up the research I had done on themes that integrate with the BuddyPress plugin on the WordPress platform.
I decided to go with the Custom Community theme by ThemeKraft. ThemeKraft provides support at the Pro level, over the free, and there is more flexibility in style and color options. This is the first time I have bought a license to for just one theme. I usually go with packages such as the one offered by Elegant Themes in which I have access to all of the themes offered by them, and there are tons! But not all WordPress themes work with BuddyPress.
Intensive research over the last few days added to the preliminary information gathered on community blogging over the last few months. There was one theme I really liked from Theme Loom, but the company was just too small for me to be comfortable relying on it for software for a group site. Maybe if the company owner had been a woman, then I might have been more disposed to accepting the risk/investment ratio.
Theme Forest had some beautiful themes, but they sell derivative work from individuals and small companies under a standardized umbrella of terms, services, and licenses. One use on one site per purchase. I do a handful of sites for friends and small businesses and sometimes I will want to use the same theme for more than one site. Multiple use licenses at Theme Forest start at well over a $1000.00. It is not clear that I could purchase multiples at the single price for every new site without violating the terms. I steer clear of any gray areas when it comes to business law.
There were also some great individual designers and coders who were very clear and almost threatening in their one use theme terms and who sounded like negotiation would be needed and with an individual who cannot be contacted easilly, that can be risky too.
Themekraft had good reviews, a tiered customer support system, a freebie basic version that can be used as a limited, but non-demo version, and a clearly written, logically structured, helpful, detailed website. I took advantage of playing around with that free version, before I made my final decision to purchase the Pro version this afternoon.
I still have to set up the membership side of the site. I hope to have the unofficial or semi-official site launch on the Solstice later this month.
If you are interested in being a beta tester for Done Nesting let me know and I will contact you and get you set up with a login and the level of access you will need… just as soon as I figure all that out!
W is for WordPress (continued) Widgets and for Weekday Blogging in May
I had intended this “W” post to be about weekday blogging as a variant of the daily blogging challenges that are popular with the more vociferous of bloggers. I started a series of articles on WordPress security and easy fixes with updates to various parts of blogs that use this publishing platform that is overlapping with my intention to write about the frequency of posting I will be doing May. I will just, for now, say that I will not be doing NaBloPoMo on BlogHer in May. Writing every single day is not a problem for me, but writing a publishable blog post every single day of the month can be problematic. I do like the structure and camaraderie that group writing challenges provide to me. I will be writing about the quandary in which this places me within a couple of days….
…so now for WordPress Security, part tres..
The basic and relatively easy security fixes for WordPress blogs covered so far have been version updates to the WordPress itself. Plug-in updates have also been covered. Themes should also be updated as new releases are made. If the creator of the theme you are using does not release updates, you need to find a new theme provider.
Software evolves over time to include new features and fixes. Themes that were created using prior versions of HTML to that of HTML 5 for example have to have API or plug-ins to adapt websites to mobile devices while HTML 5 has divided object tags to define various specific type of media that may be included such as video. If these things are not done then the them that defines how your website elements appear and mesh will show up as garbled mumbo jumbo on phones and other portable devices. Themes also have to co-evolve with the new versions of WordPress. The WordPress dashboard should let you know when a new version of your theme is available.
As promised, I am including links to other sites on some other security topics. These cover some of the other easy fixes for common security mistakes made by lots of people and exploited by lots of bad guys.
Passwords
This Mashable article lists the most commonly used passwords from 2011 as determined by hacker compromised accounts. Don’t use any of these or anything like them. It also suggests methods you can use to create secure passwords. User names are a lot like passwords. Don’t use “admin.”
Site Scans
Sucuri provides a free scan of your sites to let you know if you have been infected by malware. It also has a good blog that talks about current threats to WordPress from malware. This blog also posted a video of a security webinar that occured yesterday and that lasts for about an hour and a half if you have the time and interest. It is informative if you are new to WordPress, and maybe if you aren’t. I learned a few new things when I watched it.
Widgets
Prepackaged widgets can contain code that links to malware. Use widgets with caution and read about what can happen with javascript links in widgets in a Sucuri post from last year.
There are a ton of other things you can do to secure your self-hosted site, but I am not a security expert, at least not when it comes to WordPress, but as I learn more I will share. I do use noscript for my Firefox browser and I recommend it for folks who are not put off by having a few steps extra when you want to load a flash or javascript bit of code when you are on a site you trust and automatically block it on other sites. It stops a lot of malware.
Other Platforms
I don’t know a tremendous amount about other platforms, but I can share why I decided to move my blog from Blogger at blogspot.com to a self-hosted WordPress blog. And I will do so in another post; I will link it back here when I write it. In the meanwhile, here is a link to a Google post on security on blogger blogs for those readers who asked about their blogs on this other platform.
Gathering Up My Content
As you may have noticed, I’ve been re-designing this site. I have several objectives I want to achieve with these changes.
First
I write, create, and publish something every day, yet any one of my individuals blogs is ineligible for many of the blogging community activities in which I would like to participate because if I submit any one of my blogs, I am not thought to not write enough. Double Bind. So I have decided to take a risk and put it all out in the public and bring all my blogs together here together here on N. F. Hill, my business site, as a portfolio of sorts.
Second
I really wanted to move up into the world of professional template use. Free themes are great, there are some wonderful ones, but I want to be able to offer clients a bit more. So, to showcase these additional offerings, for this site I purchased the pack of themes offered by Elegant Themes. I tried many of them out and decided that I liked the Magnificent theme offered by Elegant Themes. I’m fine-tuning all the options within this theme and will probably remain busy with customizations for a week or so.
Third
I needed to test out an aggregator to collect and republish posts from other sites in the legal way such plugins were intended to function, even though these plugins also are the bad boys used to scrape sites. For some reason, it was difficult to find the correct plugin but the one that does, just what I needed it to do is WP-o-Matic. The indexed keyword I initially omitted using was the term autoblogging.
The term autoblogging sends shivers up my spine as the unsuspecting might not know that you can grab content from all over the web and claim it for your own blog. You can stop this particular plugin from being able to hijack your full content articles by making sure that when you set up an RSS feed that you do not set it to full content. Make sure you only provide excerpts of your blog posts when you set up Atom or RSS feeds for your site. There is usually a simple yes or no type question in your main set up panel for your blog that allows you to choose whether you want full or excerpted content distributed via RSS feeds.
The only changes I had to make to this site to get these incoming feeds to work were to add two plugins: SimplePie Core, and WP-o-Matic. I also had to make sure full content feeds were enabled for the sites from which I wanted to port content.