I took this photo on July 23, although I'll use it for today's post. It's a nice one! I didn't mess with the color or any of the settings in photoshop. All I did was re-size it. It's been a cool year at the beach - cool as in almost cold. My Astoria dress code this year is a jacket and shorts.I've been working a lot on our new web site. It has the awkward name of TPF's Animal Jewelry ~ Hand-Painted Animal Pins, at least for now. I launched it last week and I'm trying to raise its rank in the searches. Actually, for certain targeted searches, it's already coming up very well. It's been fun to do. It's a new format for me, with a data-driven system which makes uploading products a lot faster than in the existing gift shop. We have so many of these beautiful pins that I wanted to get them ALL online, not just a fraction of the inventory, and this is working. I still have a couple hundred (?) to do, and it's going well. I bought the site from myself in my new Market America venture, so it was also inexpensive - a big plus!
It seems there's been a lot of time spent on the phone with technical support and big companies for various reasons lately, and it's eaten up the time that I usually spend working on the web sites and blogs. I've been taking a lot of photos, as always, but not posting them. The great thing about digital photos is, I can store them on my hard drive and go back and find the date of the ones I want to post. I still intend to keep this particular blog as my journal, and I'll continue to update and back date as I can. Along with my my web site, it's becoming my home on the web. The blog is faster and more spontaneous. I still love the web site and feel that I have about the right balance between that and the blogs. Of course, I have the tapirs and gift shop on the web site, but I'll keep developing pages such as my photos section. Regarding blogs, I started too many of them when I was getting started, and pared them down in number with experience. I think it's about right now.
Yesterday I started something new. I had not wanted to take the time to get into social networking, although I knew it would be fun, but when my friend and tapir colleague, Sergio, invited me into Facebook, I got hooked. I found more tapir friends and colleagues there, and a few of non-tapir friends. I can see where this could take up a lot of time, but it's fun. I just took a movie quiz. Wish they would list more that I was interested in!
And one more thing. Soon the Transitions class that Sue and I are teaching will be completed. It's our first and we're looking forward to starting our next. We're just getting the flyers together and will start planning the class. It's been rewarding for sure, both taking and teaching, watching ourselves and other people begin to feel better than we have in years! I'll try to keep updating here!
One MORE thing. I finally downloaded IE 7 and am getting used to it. So, why am I not using Firefox? I can't seem to integrate Notepad for editing HTML for one thing, and for another thing, QuickBooks has to have IE in order to work. Who knew??? So that's more of my techno-time taken up this week. IE 6 finally crashed and I couldn't bring it all the way back up to speed. The blog spacing works differently in IE7, so let's see what I have to do to fix it.
