Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Open For Business!

Well not technically since I don't run any business unless it's making mini top hats and sometimes selling Mary Kay. I've officially set up this blog with a pretty customized layout and all. I've just gotta move LJ posts into here, if I feel like it. I may just keep my LJ account open since I still use LJ for a lot of things like finding brushes and textures for photoshop. Plus there's a lot of blogs I read on there.

I worked all day on fiddling with this site, trying to work with someone else's code and adjust things to how I liked them. The only problem with these premade layouts is that they were made for the older version of blogger which I guess didn't have a comment system, so tag board spaces/codes were used. I couldn't figure out how to make my tagboard fit right nor could I figure out how to enable the comments system. And what's a blog without comments? Well, it's still a blog, just it's nice to get feedback, particularly from people who you don't see and talk to on a regular basis.

So finally I found an easy tutorial on customizing your own template; I downloaded Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 (the equivalent of Paint Shop Pro that can work on a Mac); put together an image with some textures; tinkered around and voila! I'm still figuring out all the bells and whistles; this program works and looks really similar to PSP. However, it has one thing that I love that PSP lacked--SELECTIVE COLORING/COLOR VARIATION. It lets me take or add colors like red or blue and lighten or darken the colors of the image without using twenty million different textures.

I like blogger for it's nice drag n' drop template editing features. No need to know anything more than basic HTML. Any extra codes can be copied and pasted. Header pictures are easily uploadable. Much less headache once you figure everything out. So yeah, it's waaay past time for me to go to bed. I have to be at work at 2 PM tomorrow and be up earlier to do laundry--no clean work clothes. It's the day before public school starts, so it's going to be chaos at the Shoe Carnival with parents all coming in desperate to buy their kids new shoes.

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