Some changes!

As many of you may or may not have noticed, I've learned some new things about Blogger.

As you can see on the right, my own links have vanished, and replaced with all the wonderful shops belonging to the fantastic people I have featured here.  Missed their interview? No problem, their shop links are in reverse order, newest first.  The only difference there is with MOMeveryday and KIDeveryday who had a double feature, but don't worry, I've numbered their week so they'll be easy enough to find!

I've also included new Pages, tabbed at the top, with more information about me, how to contact me, and how I got started as a jewelry artist.

I have also found that my ISP offers a bit of webspace, so recently I've been hard at work reconnecting with my old foe "HTML" and learning, slowly and gradually about a new nemesis "CSS".  It's a trip, I tell you.

Back in the early 2000s, personal web pages were everywhere – Geocities, Yahoo, Homesite, Tripod, and many, many others.  These days, sadly, have fallen to the wayside, and it has become difficult to find anywhere that doesn't have more ads than page content.  For someone who wants a site to showcase their work, and has little money (domain hosting can cost up to $30 a year, though most places do have it for around $10 per year or so, and finding a web-host that will allow you to upload your own created pages is becoming few and far-between), it can be difficult to find an option that is a good one.

Some ISPs do offer web-space – usually between 10 and 30 megabytes (MB) of space.  This may not seem like much, but as one of those people who, back in 2000, hosted not one, but four "personal" and "fan" websites, I can say that the limit I had from my old ISP, 20MB, hosted all four, with images and even a little music in MIDI format, which I wrote and sequenced myself.  I even stored some karaoke tracks of me to share with friends in MP3 format, and still had space left over!  I hand-coded all the HTML in notepad, and even back then I saw code in my sleep.

Now that I am learning CSS, it's happening all over again.  I see code when I close my eyes.  I see code when I'm working with wire (for you jewelry artists out there, ever shape a bit of wire into a shape like this: { or } ? This bracket is used in CSS coding), I see it when I sleep, and I see it when I'm not even thinking about code.

My site is still in its infant stages, even though I coded some basic content for GooglePages back when it allowed you to upload your own HTML, and not only use their "page builder".  CSS coding has made my pages more uniform, cleaner, and even though tweaking it every five minutes to include something I didn't think of five minutes before, I'm hoping that the overall effect will be an easy to navigate, clean way to show off some of my more fun things, as well as a color chart of all the colors of crystal I use, the shapes of the crystal, and other things.

This has led to extensive photography.  Did I mention photography? And more photography.  Getting that ONE clear, clean shot of a crystal is not as easy as it sounds, and even when I look at some of the ones I selected out of the hundreds I've taken, they're not QUITE clear enough for me.  This leads to more photography. (Have I mentioned photography?)

The end result I think will be a good one.  I hope.  My ISP doesn't support PHP or ASPX, Java or Flash, but it does allow CSS, thank goodness.  I do have a placeholder up, but won't post the link to the site until I have at least half of the pages ready and uploaded. Phew.

For now, I leave you to explore, if you have not already done so, the new tabs at the top of this page, the new link section, and of course I leave you with the promise that soon, I will even have a shiny website for you to explore.

Until next week's interview, thanks for reading!