Website Confusion

I have been in the throes of making a website for the last year.

It's been an interesting experience. Hmmm... I think I'm using that word as a euphemism's for frustrating. I am a newbie when it comes to this stuff.

I don't have a lot of cash to throw at the problem and don't have any really techie friends so it's just me and the good ol' Google trying to get enough information to put together a decent website.

I thought about getting someone to design my website for me but the friends I have who have done that found that they had a hard time getting updates when the needed to or other problems with designers.

I figured out about getting the domain name and the web hosting. I got a domain name and hosting through godaddy.com.

I choose godaddy because it was the easiest for me to deal with living overseas. I'm sure that somewhere out there a better service is waiting, but I don't want to look forever. The main thing was that it didn't look like a flaky fly-by-night. The last thing I wanted was to chase some company from several time zones away. I looked into local servers in Japan, but got frustrated with the language level required. A friend of a friend is a computer guy and he recommended it so I decided to give godaddy a go.

I got the website tonight program because I didn't have any site builders. It's okay. I am really disappointed with their albums. I asked about editing the backgrounds and got help with that, but the choices are limited and they are all ugly. The Online Photofiler is interesting. There are certainly a lot of templates to choose from, but to be honest, I really hate the layout. It doesn't look professional. It's great for showing family and friends, but I would rather use Flickr than Online Photo Filer. Flickr is much more interesting and easier to embed in blogs.

Finally I figured out how to make a web-gallery from Photoshop Elements. I tried different ways to upload it, only to find out that Website Tonight doesn't allow FTP uploads. Fine. No problem. But after reading and reading and reading the user guides in godaddy.com I never really found that information baldly stated. In fact, I found the help guides to be rather labyrinthine.

I've finally upgraded my computer to an iMac. Another huge learning curve coming up.

I guess rather than spiralling through godaddy's help guide I might as well just mail my questions straight off.

Ah...

Nothing like lots of unclearly defined challenges.

Getting into the Swing

Photography-wise, one of the most frustrating problems I've been having is the lack of RAM. When it takes 20 seconds to open a large file or almost a minute to open a TIFF, editing is not a fun prospect. I tried matching socks and folding towels while waiting for files to open or rotate, but it was just too distracting.

The good news is that I'm finally getting some new computing power and so am looking forward to some quicker processing and better results.

Writing-wise, plotting and planning! Ha. This part goes well, but the BICHOK is a bit lacking. Now here I am with some BICHOK and I'm blogging? Okay, since I'm in the groove, I think I'll get back to writing.

My Website Is Up!

My first real website in it's first incarnation is up for all to see. It doesn't look quite like how I imagined it would, but it will do for a start.

I'm not happy with the way that goddaddy.com makes image albums look in their beginner websites like the one I chose. It actually looks better to embed a slideshow from picasa or flicker. How's that for crazy?

Bit by bit I am picking up some HTML but mostly it's been a trial and error experience. Good thing I'm not afraid to push buttons that I don't know about!

My eventual plan for an online photography gallery is to go to a site like foliolink.com and then have one of the links in my page redirect to the online gallery.

Here's the link: www.loriono.com

Autumn Update

It's crazy that I haven't been updating the blog. With other stuff going on, it seemed more important to get things done and produce than to reflect on what was going on.

Summer was good, but crazy. The Tokaido Road experiment is still unfinished. I enjoyed it but it was both more and less interesting than I expected it to be. I thought I would see more amazing scenery, but I was just starting to move out into a bit more rural areas by the time I got to Totsuka. The funny thing is how I calculated how long it would take me by figuring out how many minutes it takes to do a kilometer and then adding a couple of hours to my travel time so I could take photos. A couple things stood in my way:

1. not starting early enough
2. walking even slower than I thought
3. photos taking longer than I thought
4. HOT weather. It was 38 C the last day I walked on Tokaido.

Then I just ran out of time. With two days left before departing to Canada, I realized I had to pack for my month back home. I planned to continue once the weather had cooled off. It is now mid-October so it's the perfect time weather wise. Now I just need to get out there!

The other thing that was tough was managing all the data. Once I got home, I had to upload the digital photos so I could have a clear card for the next day. The next problem was the writing for that day's journey. Because I was also doing Estello Project I was doing two entries a night. I also tried to process some pictures so that I could post them at the same time to add interest to the blog. Mentally it was pretty challenging. Physically, it was pretty tiring.

My trip to Canada was nice. I got to visit a lot of relatives and go to a conference in Dallas (RWA Nationals). I'd hoped to do more photography but since my license had expired I was dependent on others to drive me around. My brother and I had planned to do some "Gnome and Estello Rocky Mountain Road Trip Photos" but he finished work later than he planned so most of our trip was at night anyway.

Then one month after I got back from Canada, we moved to a new house. So the month before was spent purging the house of accumulated junk and packing. The month after was spent decompressing to fit into the new house.

I've started back at work (part-time) so I am a little busier. Not too bad, just needing to organize my time a bit better.

I feel like I haven't been so productive lately, I haven't even touched my novels. But I've been doing a lot of reading and research for clay animation and quite a bit of work to create a DIY macro studio and refining the off camera flash usage. I've also tried to focus a lot on the stock photo stuff so that's taken up a lot of time. I've also created a new clay character and did a story board for a short movie for him. Lot's of technical problems but I'm researching that too. I guess most of the tech issues could be solved by spending lots of money, but I don't have that option so it's off to research DIY methods. It's times like this that I really miss a good home centre like the big orange place. I've just never found a good home centre in the same scale in Tokyo.


Okay, there's my update and I guess a list of excuses. Now it's time to go and create.

Old Tokaido Road

On Friday I started a project. I am going to walk along the Old Tokaido Road from Nihonbashi to (I hope) Odawara or Hakone.

I am blogging about it at http://traveltokaido.blogspot.com/. I titled the blog "Estello Travels Tokaido" because I created a little character that travels along the road. I just did some massive posting on it, so I will write more about this later.

Rain and Sakura

dango and chicken slide show

Barae Emerging

So it feels like Spring is here. The night air carries the scent of plum blossoms and I don't need a hat and a scarf. To celebrate, I changed the blog colors again to reflect the colors of the plum blossoms.

The latest work in the studio has been with a model named Barae (rose picture in Japanese). She's a dancer and performance artist and has done a lot of modelling for photography. We got to use a very different type of lighting and two set-ups. She used a maiko-style white base for the make-up and Daniel and Maya added stronger colors throughout the shoot.

Barae had hoped to do an antique doll-style but it reminded me a lot of the idea of human dolls as seen in Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. I tried playing with those ideas a bit, but the new album that I am including ended up more like The Juon or The Ring as it seems that Barae is emerging from a screen.

As usual, it was great to work with my fellow shooters Bonnie, Camilla, Mia and Mumi; thanks to Tim and Mumi for organizing us all; Daniel and Maya for their great make-up; and of course Barae.

2007-- emerging from the holiday coccoon.

It's been a long time since I entered anything. Christmas holidays were good, but not so great for writing. I did get a friend to read a draft of my contemporary and got a lot of good feed-back. It seems that I have a lot of stuff to add but I'm pretty happy about it because these additions will likely get me out of the plot holes I was in. I was trying to write my way out of a rut but I just knew that what I was writing wasn't working. It feels good to have a clear path again.

Most of the holiday was spent hanging out with my husband and watching movies and learning how to use photoshop and my digital camera more effectively.

As usual, the challenge for 2007 is discipline. Getting projects done to the nth level and not letting my personal goals slide by.