Terrific & Terrible: Technical Tidbits

IT Guys

In reviewing this month of posting daily, one thing that looms large is the technical train that runs this blogging adventure. I have experienced both the terrific and the terrible with daily posting, and here are some of the events that have colored my month.

Technology Terrific.

One awesome thing was being street juried into the new and very high quality site, art *setter. I was asked to present an essay for their premier, and provided Artist, Know Thyself. I am noodling the idea of writing a SP book about the Artist's Traits series, and this was my opportunity to begin the final write of these essays.

Twitter. Now it seems that artist bloggers are getting the idea that Twitter can be a useful tool and is low impact on one's time if you do it right.

There has been increased readership here and at Twitter. I have met a number of new people, including many artists. New commentors have "de-lurked" to add their two cents here.

My sometimes poor citizenship around my artbog chums' blogs has been better during this month of posting. Recent sytem problems have curtailed that, unfortunately. Sorry to all of you who I usually visit more.

I discovered, by accident of course, how to biggie size the photos in my posts. That was a goal of my template switch, which has only been realized with the added power of big images. This blog is image centric, but not that busy compared to many websites. These bigger images should still load reasonably quickly, and I think they are batter at representing what I'm posting. I haven't tried them on artwork, yet, so we'll see how that goes.

Photobucket has been a peach of a tool. I can get animated gifs, and use them for free and on their server, too. My favorite is the axe smack down with the *pro* wrestlers. Also, some videos are available to post, which is where I found the street chalkers in Florence about a month ago.

Terrible Techno Gaffs.

I have discovered some chinks in the home system. My router is seeing it's final days of service. It works intermitantly and that means that I can't get on the internet when I want. The worst symptom, so far, has been the inability to get Twitter searches to work, and I often lose connectivity at Twitter altogether.

I have begun the De Kooning book club with Alyson Stanfield, et al., at Twitter. I couldn't get on the club page (which is accessed by doing a search query at Twitter) for about 3 days. No search query worked, although I did get on there once the other day. My router? My PC? The server at Twitter?

After downloading the Tweetdeck utility, and a day of fretting and cleaning up my PC, I am finally hooked up with my book club. Woo Hoo!

The Washington State Art Bloggers post has been updated to include new or omitted bloggers. Also access that information via a button on the right hand margin of this blog.

In Brief

Untitled,
6.5" x 4"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn

Brevity is the soul of Twit.

My Twitter page.

Twitter-Pation. Social Networking and an Online Poll

Pastels in a Box
Photo: Casey Klahn

In a surprise to myself, I have to say that I am really liking Twitter. Social networking sights are low on my radar, but I got talked into following Twitter and the pool of acquaintances one makes there is bigger than at Blogger. It must be because the commitment required for art blogging is significant, but Twit-ting is easy as pie.

Here are some great artists and others whom I have "met" on Twitter.

Diego Sierro at Diego Sierro.
Liz Massey at Write Livelihood.
Alissa Fereday at Fearlessartz.
Jennifer Robin at Robin's Woods.

Not to be left behind, Twitter has a blog.

To follow me on Twitter, go here. CUL8R.

Online Poll. Did you notice that I am trying a stretch template for The Colorist? I am evaluating whether stretch makes text more readable, but don't want to diminish the graphic content of my artist blog. Turns out that the images are the same physical size, but relationships of text, negative space and images are different. Please take the poll at the top right, and choose "New Stretch is Better," "Old Style with Neg. Space Much Better," "Unsure" or "Whatever! Blog On!" A quick look at my peerage shows that most artist bloggers are using the basic layout template, which provides healthy negative space at the left and right margins of the page.

Administrative Artist. My administrative tail is getting too long, and so I will need some time at the desk soon. To complicate matters, two articles will need to be written for purposes other than The Colorist. For you writers out there, look at it this way: go draw two illustrations for your next articles. Now you know how I feel. I should have listened to the Art Business Coach, Alyson Stanfield, and had these ready and on file for when the opportunity arose. Live and learn. Maybe I'd better write four, so I have two to spare! On the bright side, I can write one article as a presentation for a gallery talk - two birds with one stone.

AFN (That is all for now).