Stuffed Baby Cheetah - Finally Online

I spent a chunk of the afternoon putting this little guy online in the gift shop. It all takes awhile, but I have finally had time and resources to get back to it. It's fun. I've loved web work since the day back in 1996 when Andy told me you can turn text into bold with a simple code (that I can't seem to render on the blog without it activating). That one spark of info really lit the fire. There's still so much to do here to get organized and things cleaned up and filed, but (Yay!) I am again having the time and energy for it. The cleared out space and ease of finding things is such a pleasure. Getting the stuff online in the gift shop that I've had around for awhile but have not put up yet is only part of it, and I'm on a roll. Over the past few days I've also put up the new cuttlefish and changed out the photo of the earthworm (do not ask me why they painted stupid white bands on it; it was nice when it was all one color with the bands being formed only by the change in texture). Before that, I put up the new larger plastic ammonite.

This blog is sponsored by Tapir and Friends Animal Store.

I've finished blogging the move from Colorado to Oregon

It starts here, and there are links at the bottom of each entry to get to the next post. I also started an alphabet series (letter A and letter B) on the gift shop blog and I added a poll, which I hope a few people will take. I thought the alphabet thing would be boring when the idea first came up, but it was fun. I also added a bunch of stuff to the sidebar on this blog, and I linked from my Facebook to Twitter (which I'm just discovering), but I think there's a better way to do Facebook. I bookmarked some instructions. Lee worked on the gift shop pages today from Bend. Time for bed, and I never got around to watching a movie.

What do you get when you cross an artist and a geek?

I don't know, but I've spent some time writing about it on the gift shop blog tonight. I had fun working on the site and trying to improve it. Working with Les's beautiful pins didn't hurt, either. I love looking at them. I get a lot of creative pleasure from working on the site, solving various issues, making it more usable, nicer looking, easier to use. But I can also feel the call to paper and paint yelling at me. Paper, paint, pencils, whatever. I've been away from it for awhile. Also, in all the time I've been working on the web I have, for the most part, either "not found the time" or not been brave enough to post my own personal art (much). I think that's changing. Maybe I'll do some this weekend.

As with my photos, I'll probably pre-date any early art I post. I like chronology, and I wish Blogger would let you date a post earlier than 1970 - but it's not really Blogger's fault, it seems to be something built into the web. When they built the Internet's guts, they were projecting forward in time, not back. But the goal is to actually make some new art, too. I don't know why I fight it. It's easier to make blogs and web pages, probably because there's less of myself in them. I've put up a few "safe" things over the years. At the moment I'm thinking of a drawing of a goose, and there's some stuff in the Journey section. That being what it is (link to link to link), it's easier to get a look at the artwork here. Some of it I like a lot and some is just off balance. I'm not sure why I used it. These pages were fun - working with the colors and text. I think this one is nice. It even attempts to explain why I like making collages.

Bike ride in the sunset, work on the web

It hasn't rained for the past two days, and I took my bike out just before sundown and rode the River Walk past Safeway to the East Mooring Basin and onto the paved jetty, a great place to get some extra distance. The River Walk is beautiful, but seems so short on a bike. In the next couple of years, so I've heard, the city will extend it to Tongue Point. I hope so. There were six or seven ships just lolling about on the river today. They don't usually move much on Sundays. Here is one silhouhetted against the Astoria-Megler bridge, our 4-mile connection to Washington state.

I spent most of the day working on my web site - on the parts I don't have time for during the week, when web work is really about work. I added the rest of my blog links to the Tapirback main page, and I tried to address the sea lion issue in my photo section. I've had the page up since last October, but I could never find the pix on Google's image search. I thought, "Well, there are just that many sea lion pictures online (and there are), but exact quotes didn't bring up the page, so I checked and it wasn't indexed, I don't know why. I took out some code that may have been a problem on two of my non-indexed pages, but that same code didn't appear on a third non-indexed page. I don't know what the deal is, since the site has about 1,400 indexed pages, or if taking out that code will make a difference. Other pages in the same section are in Google's index. Besides the sea lions, the other two that weren't were pictures of the Arc de Triomphe and a page called Paris, Here and There. I redesigned the tops of the pages and made better navigation. Now time and the Googlebot will tell if it helped. I have so many pictures I want to put up that every bit I do on the basic structure will make it easier to be productive in the future. I started the section in about 1996, and several incarnations of the format and structure are still apparent. I guess that's the nature of an organic web site. Building one (and rebuilding and rebuilding it) is interesting (and fun), not the least of the reasons being the organizational challenge. I took a few minutes to dramatize the lead-in page from the Journey of Wandering Paths, which was pale and boring. Originally this section was supposed to be huge, but it fizzled out at 48 pages and now many of them look outdated to me. I still love the idea of combining art (mainly collage) and words into a bigger digital collage all linked together like a snarl of wires. Each page became a design project back in the 1990s, and it was fun. Maybe someday I'll get back to it. One of the next rehabs has got to be The Tapir Gallery (online since March 15, 1996, partly revised and partly original). And, I'll continue working on the photo section of the site. It's one of my dreams to expand the photo segment to HUGE. On a daily basis, Tapir and Friends Wildlife World Gift Shop gets a lot of attention, but it, too, can use some design and clean-up. Lee has been a tremendous help on the gift shop site the past six months.

New picture links - yeah!

Was it only last weekend, or the weekend before? I spent a few hours upgrading the picture links on the personal part of my tapirback.com web site. I'd been wanting to turn the text links into picture links, re-think some categories, and reorganize folders. I finally found a format I liked, changed some color backgrounds, and . . . I like it!

That was a big improvement, and it was also groundwork for the hundreds of photos, drawings, and other bits and pieces I'd like to put together on the site, like a travelogue, scrapbook, etc., all in one. I don't know when I'll find the time, but since summer has been just a bit slower in my online store, I thought I'd take the opportunity. It was fun. Usually when I get a break from that, I work on The Tapir Gallery (which by the way, still needs major remodeling). I've been building tapirback's various locales since 1996. It feels like a house that you keep improving - only maybe better. You don't need a dumpster to make the changes.

Hmmm. Next time I'll find out more about blog formatting. I would have liked to have all of the pictures on the left with the text wrapping automatically as it did around the first picture.

I've spent a lot of time coding very basic html. There are a number of formatting types I haven't used at all, some rarely, and some I learned recently and promptly forgot. If you don't use it, you definitely lose it with the new things. But web coding is one of the coolest things I've ever learned. What else combines art, logic, writing, presentation, preservation, and costs almost nothing in and of itself?

Add instant gratification, and it is not only addicting, it's SUCH an amazing technology. . . . Links? So simple! I once wrote an entire book wishing I could use something like LINKS from point to point in the explanations. But that was before links and web pages had been invented. More on the book some other time. That's one more project I'd like to resurrect and re-invent for the web site. Oh well, many thoughts, many projects, and it's later than I meant to stay up.