Thank goodness for Wordpress and Wordpress plug-ins.  I was able to put together a couple of small quilt galleries and post them on a new page without much fuss.  The most time consuming portion of the exercise was locating all the photos, and preparing a formatted for the web copy of each in Photoshop.  There is even a cute widget for the right column that displays three random pics every time the page is refreshed.  Fun.

Currently I am designing a portfolio website for an artist friend, and I spent the weekend playing with the various web photo gallery tools out there right now.  Lots of great stuff, but none of it seems to work with Adobe Dreamweaver very well.  It’s especially distressing to own all the latestCS4 tools and learn from the Adobe forums that Bridge generated photo galleries can not be “easily” incorporated into Dreamweaver pages.  Nor, according to the forums, is the “Create Web Photo Album” feature of Dreamweaver recommended by the Adobe Dreamweaver engineering team since apparently it has been many years since this feature has seen any “love”.  Importing any of the cool Fireworks Galleries also appears to be a non-starter. So I’m on to third-party tools or coding up something myself.  Flash is a non-starter for this particular website. Web design should not be so hard in 2009.

Meet Bette.  Bette Bernina.  Otherwise known as my brand new Bernina 820 sewing machine computer.  I don’t usually name inanimate objects.  But this one seems to have a Bette Davis, take no prisoners sort of way about her.  Plus I watch a lot of old movies on TCM while sewing.

Did I mention I’m in love?   And that my dear spouse is off the hook for birthday and anniversary presents for quite some time? I met her at the California State Fair in Sacramento.  It was love at first sight. That long, lovely 12″ arm, that industrial hook, the super sized bobbin, the dual feed…..  How could I resist?

We are still getting to know each other, Bette and I.  But now that I have the threading/tension issues in check thanks to this helpful post, things are going very well.  It’s a fast machine, and I like that.  I’ve been doing a little piecing and experimenting with decorative stitches that I am unlikely to ever use again. Thought I would start slow. Next chance I get I plan to layer up one of the many finished quilt tops that I have hanging around the studio, and put some pedal to the metal.  Vroom.

Despite my long-held belief that NO software program works really well prior to version 4.0, I rather brazenly went ahead and upgraded to WordPress version 2.7 only a few days following its release. For some reason I expected the upgrade to be a snap, but between me not seeing the instructions where you are told to disable all plug-ins in advance of this upgrade, inadvertently blowing away my old server files without a complete back-up, and making lots of changes to my child theme. Well. I’ve managed to hose the visual editor, the media library, and broken all my photo links. Prowling around the web, I see that I am not alone in some cases, and there may be bugs, plug-in conflicts, etc. not just pilot error. My current theory is that because I did not disable WP-SuperCache prior to install, I have got something stuck in database pergatory.

Anyhow, I’m going to let a bit of time pass before I try to sort out the photo/plug-in/visual editor issues and hope that some solution emerges on the WordPress forums.

Eventually this will be a visual blog. Really!

I also want to give a nod to Ian Stewart and his “Thematic” theme framework. Such a beautiful job of separating form from content. Almost thrilling to use after slogging through the creation of HTML sites in Dreamweaver. I easily built my old child theme called “Derivamatic” for this blog. I wanted a clean, minimal design that still reflects my color sensibility.

The state of web typography is still rather woeful. It makes me sad to not be able to use all the wonderful typefaces in my library. Access to type libraries seems to be the technology/legal gatekeeper. I know the folks at the W3C CSS committee are trying to work on this topic. I also found a fledgling effort called typeface.js but I haven’t had the bandwidth to play with it yet. I believe the folks at WordPress have a shot at solving the web typography problem, should they choose to work on the font licensing/embedding issue. Clearly they could perpetuate a core set of typefaces fairly easily via their platform. And that would be very nice. Remember the Postscript “core 35″?

Anyway, it’s been fun to play with this, and now that I have my own blog, I suppose I will have a good excuse for learning more.