Midi Music is by Jean Michel Jarre from his album Oxygene c.1977

I have been doing some videos for Mz. Mugzzi’s You Tube channel and needed video for the backgrounds.  This short loop (sound replaced) may be in the next show’s video.

I couldn’t have done all of this without the great teachers I had, Harriett Pollock for Photoshop and Dave West for xhtml, css and php web design classes. A big “Thank You” to both of them for teaching me the skills I needed to achieve my goals.

]]> http://bluefire6.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=115 0 http://bluefire6.com/blog/?p=99 http://bluefire6.com/blog/?p=99#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 16:48:47 +0000 WebGodess http://bluefire6.com/blog/?p=99 Continue reading →]]> Someone in NASCAR needs to stop Kyle Busch before he kills another driver. His temper tantrums are entirely out of control. I’ve had toddlers with better impulse control than he shows! His actions last night went well beyond “Boys Have At It” and I’m glad he won’t be on the track for the rest of this weekend.

I was on twitter and NASCAR voicing my opinion of that little creep right after. I hope they park him for the rest of races this season, levy a BIG fine and make anger management classes mandatory for him, at the very least. His attitude after was bulls**t, if anyone should have backed off on 3 wide it should have been him, he wasn’t racing for the Championship, Hornaday was. It’s time someone at NASCAR bringit to his attention that he needs to grow up and have some respect for other drivers. It’s not all about CryBaby Busch, no matter what “HE” thinks!

He shouldn’t be allowed to race even a remote controlled car until he has his temper under control!

I lost 2 of my cats to flea medications this past Saturday, August 27th and Monday August 29th. If you can help with a donation for thier cremation it would be greatly appreciated.

R.I.P. Skittles August 27, 2011

Skittles

Tinkerbelle

   

I’m still an emotional wreak and cannot even think, so if this makes no sense please forgive me.

I think all NASCAR junkies are in severe withdrawl mode at this time of the year. I know I’m more than ready for the season to start.

How is this season going to play out? Will Jimmie Johnson get another Cup Championship? Is this the year Mark Martin finally get the Championship? I’m a big Mark Martin fan, he’s one of the classiest drivers still active. Or maybe Tony Stewart? I love to watch Smoke race! Is there anything he can’t drive to a win? Or is it finally the year Joey Logano? Does he have a chance this year? With his strong finish in 2010 he looks to have a good start this year. How about Brad Keselowski? Where is the year going to end for him? I follow him on twitter and facebook!

Here is an article on NASCAR.com The top-five drivers with something to prove in 2011. They are Matt Crafton, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Joey Logano, Brian Vickers and Steve Wallace. Check out the related links about the drivers to watch in 2011.

I’m sure the 2011 NASCAR season won’t be dull. I’m on the NASCAR Fan Council and I like how they are impleementing the feedback into the actual racing. I don’t know about you but I like when the drivers are allowed to show their emotions. The most popular NASCAR drivers have always been the most colorful personalities on and off the track, before, during and after the races.

I told you I would be blogging about all of these subjects, just didn’t know they would all be in one post.

See how I have managed to tie blogging, Physics, NASCAR, affiliate marketing and social media into one post?

A friend just arrived from out of state so this is The End for now. Time for visiting!

Wow, what a busy end of the year. So much to learn! I bought the CloudLivingHQ course from Glen Allsopp at ViperChill.com and have been very busy implementing some of his statagies into exiting websites.

If you are into bodybuilding and bodybuilding supplements online check out this ecommerce site,  VitaBuilding.com, I’m working on.  Just keeping up with the new products being added to the inventory is a full time job. I’m trying to get as much of the SEO built in as possible, I hate having to redo things!

The site is going to grow larger this year when I get the forum and profiles up.
I’m trying to get more articles posted, they have moved to the lowest priority as of now.

A big thanks to Glen and his team for all of the help, the more I read the posts at ViperChill.com the more I realize how much I don’t know about SEO and marketing.

Thank You, Larry Ullman

I just received my copy, I had to buy this book! To get your copy, click on the book and it will take you to my Amazon affiliate store, 8CrazyCats.com

On the Personal Side

My personal life has been very hectic also. My mother-in-law was just diagosed with alzheimers, my husband fell coming off the roof the same day my client’s mother fell and broke her arm and nose. She has other health problems and is still in the hospital. His father was diagnosed with cancer 2 days later, so it has been nuts at home and work for us all. My husband is just bruised and sore, nothing broken!

Christmas was great even with everything else happening, my husband and I got to see 4 out of 5 grandchildren, the oldest one was out of town. We had a wonderful Christmas dinner at my daughter’s home. It was an interesting mix of family, ex-husband(mine), my present husband, oldest grandaughter’s boyfriend and his brother and my daughter’s significant other, what a house full!

What changed overnight? Anyone know? Please post if you have any ideas!

When I started checking other sites I found many other sites with the same problem.

I found a solution, and what a lot of work it was. For the background gradients I just opened the .gif files in Fireworks and saved them as .png files. For multiple layer files, I had to take the gradient layers of my PSD files and turn them into Fireworks .png files, then layer them back in to my PSD files. Then re-animated the ones with animation. I have most of the sites fixed now, still have some files to do.

I hope that this post is of use to other web designers. My goal is to be of help to our community!

Tinkerbell, found her on The 4th of July, and she is a little firecracker!

When I found her, she had no fur, covered in fleas and weighed less than a half an ounce! She still only weighs about 3 lbs. Her daughter KK weighs in at about 19 lbs, the same as the big boys Skittles and Butter.

Keeper Kitty, Tinkerbell's baby

KK is also on LOLCats.com and she knows she is a Star!

Skittles

He is a gentle giant so full of love! Keeps me warm in the winter.

Butterscotch, pulled his brother out of the neighbor

Still afraid of the world, takes a long time to let strangers near, and when he does trust you he becomes a big lovey baby.

Sparkle, Our Miniature Cat, she is sitting on the remote for the TV

Baby, Sparkle's sister, another Miniature

SnowBall, Our latest addition, he looks exactly like Skittle's brother who was stolen several years ago!

Bikini at age 17

There are 2 chihuahuas, that belong to my husband, Sarge and Louie that the cats allow to live with us also.

Sarge

Louie

As you can see we do have a full house!! Add in 4 computers and it does get crowded at times.  I wouldn’t trade them in for twice the space! Although at times the cats do try to help me work, so if you find a mistake somewhere in my work, “It’s the cats fault!” covers it all.

Check out my store named for the cats 8CrazyCats.com

Today I’m putting together a small list of web sites and free tools that I use for web design.

Free Software

The best free text editor I have found is Notepad++ from sourceforge.net This program is so small it will run on a flash drive and has support for all programmin laguages.

Need just a quick resize of an image or a screenshot? Try XnView, it loads fast and does jpeg lossless tranformations, batch conversions, other neat features for slide shows, screenshot feature gives you options for the whole page or to draw a rectangle to capture just the area you need.

The other software I use for screen shots is ScreenRip32. Unfortunately it will not work on anything newer than Windows XP, not even XP Pro, but it works great running from my flash drive! I used it extensively to build my first website to aquire the product images from the manufacturers’ websites when they didn’t have product image downloads available.

Web Sites

My favorite color wheel site www.ficml.org You can choose up to 7 colors and have them show in a column. That’s a very useful feature when choosing colors for a web page. You will see instantly if the colors work together. It also shows if it is a web safe color, web smart or an unsafe color which will not show correctly.

COLOR TIPS:
True silver color #c0c0c0, for a a bronze look try #bc4300

Codes not working right? Can’t find the error? No matter how long you stare at the code you just can’t see it? Try validating at www.w3.org

I still use sitepoint Check out some of the really cool things you can do with latest in CSS3.

Work with PHP and MySQL? My all time favorite PHP forum is atCode Walkers. Very helpful community.

One more for PHP is phpfreaks. Just reading the post and answers can sometimes solve your problem!

For MIDI and mp3 files I use ez-tracks for general tunes and rats2u.com for Holiday music. Be sure to use a disposable email to register as they do sell email addresses.

Best Tool of All

My Firefox browser! Loaded with all of the toolbars for web developement. I design and check my work with the tools in Firefox, then check the look of the pages in IE, Chrome and Safari. It saves a lot of time for me.

That’s all I can come up with for now. Until next time, see you later!

Web Design

I’ve been building an ecommerce website using the Interspire Shopping Cart software, the website is live at www.vitabuilding.com. The store frontend is done, now it is just tweaks to the backend. Getting the invoices and packing slips templates to my client’s preferred format is my next challenge.

I’ll be adding an about us page this week. The company founder was a professional motorcycle racer when he was younger. He sent me some great photos that I will be adding to the page with his bio.

I have the facebook and twitter pages up, head on over and take a look. Vitabuilding could use more likes on facebook and more followers on Twitter. Any help or feedback would be greatly appreciated!

I started my education in webdesign when I was 56 years old. I think I had been waiting for the internet to reach the complexity it has now, support for the Rich Internet Applications. When I first started using computers in 1972 there was no real internet, it was just a means to pass data between computers with a black/gray screen and a white/yellow/green blinking cursor for entering data via the keyboard. No color, no mouse, no images. Boring, boring, boring comapared to todays internet. I read too much Science Fiction as a child, I still want the computers and data storage of the future.

Social Media

I’m learning the social media world as I go along, with all of the other SEO I have learned I hope to get more pages listed in Google than it is now. Luckily the site already had some back links and page rank at the time of launch.

The blog I read most often is ViperChill it has great marketing information. What a inspiration Glen is.

If he can achieve what he has at his age it gives me hope that I can succeed even at my age!! 3 times older, but not as savvy when it comes to the new social media game. I’m learning, slowly, but learning none the less.

Science

I took a couple of hours the other day to catch up on the posts from my favorite blog Cocktail Party Physics Cocktail Party Physics is a group science blog that aims to create a salon-like virtual space where contributors and readers alike can chat about the latest news and ideas in science — with a twist. If we can make it fun, funky, unconventional, and blur the lines between traditional disciplines — both within the sciences themselves, and science and the arts, literature, pop culture, history, and every other aspect of our culture — so much the better. We need fewer barriers and more bridges in this world.

Faux-French avatar Jen-Luc Piquant is the tres chic hostess who presides over the festivities with a suitably jaundiced eye and cool panache. Her “guest list” of regular contributors consists of Allyson Beatrice, Calla Cofield, Lee Kottner, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, M.G. Lord, and Jennifer Ouellette.

It’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s educational, it’s for women by women, and you might just learn that science isn’t just a subject you hated in school.

Flex Development

I’m so excited, I received my signed copy of Larry Ullman’s book, Effortless Flex 4 Development, I have just started reading it so I’ll keep everyone posted on how I manage learning a new skill. I still need Flex Builder 4 software, should have it in a few days. Then the fun begins, I get to play!!!

Without Larry’s PHP books I don’t know if I could have made it through my advanced PHP class, what easy to use, reader friendly books. He has a style of writing that makes you want to learn more. As Abbey on NCIS says, They are like Pistashios, you can’t eat (read) just one! Started with PHP, onward to Flex.

Web Design

I’ve been building an ecommerce website using the Interspire Shopping Cart software, the website is live at www.vitabuilding.com. The store frontend is done, now it is just tweaks to the backend. Getting the invoices and packing slips templates to my client’s preferred format is my next challenge.

I’ll be adding an about us page this week. The company founder was a professional motorcycle racer when he was younger. He sent me some great photos that I will be adding to the page with his bio.

I have the facebook and twitter pages up, head on over and take a look. Vitabuilding could use more likes on facebook and more followers on Twitter. Any help or feedback would be greatly appreciated!

I started my education in webdesign when I was 56 years old. I think I had been waiting for the internet to reach the complexity it has now, support for the Rich Internet Applications. When I first started using computers in 1972 there was no real internet, it was just a means to pass data between computers with a black/gray screen and a white/yellow/green blinking cursor for entering data via the keyboard. No color, no mouse, no images. Boring, boring, boring comapared to todays internet. I read too much Science Fiction as a child, I still want the computers and data storage of the future.

Social Media

I’m learning the social media world as I go along, with all of the other SEO I have learned I hope to get more pages listed in Google than it is now. Luckily the site already had some back links and page rank at the time of launch.

The blog I read most often is ViperChill it has great marketing information. What a inspiration Glen is.

If he can achieve what he has at his age it gives me hope that I can succeed even at my age!! 3 times older, but not as savvy when it comes to the new social media game. I’m learning, slowly, but learning none the less.

Science

I took a couple of hours the other day to catch up on the posts from my favorite blog Cocktail Party Physics Cocktail Party Physics is a group science blog that aims to create a salon-like virtual space where contributors and readers alike can chat about the latest news and ideas in science — with a twist. If we can make it fun, funky, unconventional, and blur the lines between traditional disciplines — both within the sciences themselves, and science and the arts, literature, pop culture, history, and every other aspect of our culture — so much the better. We need fewer barriers and more bridges in this world.

Faux-French avatar Jen-Luc Piquant is the tres chic hostess who presides over the festivities with a suitably jaundiced eye and cool panache. Her “guest list” of regular contributors consists of Allyson Beatrice, Calla Cofield, Lee Kottner, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, M.G. Lord, and Jennifer Ouellette.

It’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s educational, it’s for women by women, and you might just learn that science isn’t just a subject you hated in school.

Flex Development

I’m so excited, I received my signed copy of Larry Ullman’s book, Effortless Flex 4 Development, I have just started reading it so I’ll keep everyone posted on how I manage learning a new skill. I still need Flex Builder 4 software, should have it in a few days. Then the fun begins, I get to play!!!

Without Larry’s PHP books I don’t know if I could have made it through my advanced PHP class, what easy to use, reader friendly books. He has a style of writing that makes you want to learn more. As Abbey on NCIS says, They are like Pistashios, you can’t eat (read) just one! Started with PHP, onward to Flex.