Exhibit tonight at Electric Beanz

Friday night at Electric Beanz at the intersection of hwy 401 and 1010, Susan Jones and Lee Ball unveil our show "Different Perspectives" at 7-8:30pm. It will be fun. Come see us, have a terrific beverage, locally made snack and socialize. Don't forget to honor your veterans too!
Directions and info at: www.electricbeanz.com

Season of Giving

The Carter Building in Glenwood South has had a long relationship with the community, dating back to the 1930s when it was a curtain factory hiring local workers. Since the ‘40s, it has welcomed an array of artists into its three level, rambling floor plan that readily accommodates both large and small studios. This December, the artists of TCB wish to celebrate the Season of Giving by once again highlighting community. At December’s First Friday, they will link with their neighbor in Glenwood South, St. Saviors Center to support a variety of services, reaching families in the neighborhood and Wake County community. 

You have probably passed by the beautiful stone church on Tucker St., known to locals as St. Saviors, without knowing all that goes on behind the front door.  From its outreach to the elderly (Healthy Living, Meals on Wheels) to its service to infants (The Diaper Train), and even its Community Music School for youth, it provides a nurturing, safe place to people of all ages.

Please join the artists of TCB on December 2 for a special holiday tribute to community. Bring canned goods or diapers to win raffle tickets for art. Sip a glass of mulled wine/cider listen to the St. Saviors’ choir, and learn more about the programs available through St. Saviors Center. Participating artists will also donate a percentage of sales to support this critical ministry to Wake County families.

Come for the art. Come for the music. And most of all, come because this is a perfect time to express community. Happy holidays to all!

Dreamweaver to edit Wordpress?

So many things to get done and not near enough time! This past First Friday was quiet, rainy and cold but the folks that came out were art buyers! Such a refreshing change from the wine drinkers and snackers. I enjoy the crowds and lively conversations and it’s nice to see the same faces month to month but we are trying to make our way as artists so selling is important too. With First Friday done, Lee and I are getting ready to hang a show for next weekend. I have a few matts to cut tonight or in the morning, then pop things into frames to hang Monday. After the show is hung, it will be back to Wordpress.

I have been feeling like there must be a way to combine Wordpress and Dreamweaver; it’s all about the code right? At my last MySQL class someone asked which code editor was used in the Wordpress class and the answer was Dreamweaver. I have been searching online for information on how to use Dreamweaver for this and found a tutorial on Adobe that tells how to set up Dreamweaver for a content management system. So far, I have gotten my Wordpress test site set up in Dreamweaver – a very promising start! Last week I took the time to print out all the code from the dashboard of my test site and it’s roughly 400 pages! There is no way that I can fathom writing that much code and I can’t read any of it and make any sense of where the parts are. I can’t find an individual page nor can I find the information that has been entered into the header for example. All I find is ‘Get Header’, the header shows up but I can’t make changes to it. I’m just not seeing the big picture! The miracle of Dreamweaver appears to be the way it calls on the necessary code sections and pulls them out for tweaking; I will find out this week… I don’t like the Wordpress sites that I have created, the theme is not consistent among sites and I can’t find the code to make changes – I do hope that next week I will learn a few surprises! It’s geeky but I can’t wait!

We have spent the weekend cleaning and finally rehanging artwork (from when the floors were done last summer!) to get ready for a Bridal Shower this afternoon for my daughter. The house is no where clean enough but it’s been a full 2 days just on the first floor and the energy is gone! Old houses seem to create dust to replace any dust you remove in a matter of hours! With daylight savings time change today, hopefully it will get dark early enough to hide any errant dust! I have been looking forward to this marriage for a long time, it’s all wonderful, what’s a little dust!

Shop Downtown Raleigh, Kick off Nov 4th

Downtown Raleigh is a culturally exciting, artistic community with a wide variety of appealing places to shop for everyday or specialty items. Whether you’re searching for clothing and accessories, original art, or that one of a kind gift—you’re sure to be inspired.   You can easily navigate on foot or, to travel from one district to the next, try using eco-friendly transportation such as the R-LINE circulator bus or the Raleigh Rickshaw Company.  Ample parking is available both on-street and in decks.  In most cases, you can even park for FREE on nights and weekends.  Shop Downtown for a unique experience where you’ll find a treasure trove of eclectic stores in the vibrant center city.  Be sure to make downtown your next shopping destination. 

For chances to win valuable prize packages, take advantage of the Holiday Shopping Passport available at participating retail locations.  Simply take your Holiday Passport to participating stores and receive a sticker for every $20 spent per venue. Once your passport is filled with five stickers, drop it off at a participating store to be entered to win one of many great prizes.

In the Carter Building, both Tipping Paint Artists and Local Color Gallery are participating in the Shop Downtown HOLIDAY PASSPORT.

October First Friday at the Carter Building

triangle.com through a party at the Carter Building Friday night. The weather was perfect, the place was crowded, and a good majority of the people were new comers to our building! We want to thank triangle.com’s Mike Williams and DRA’s Ellen Fragola for all their help.

Moving on with MySQL

In order to get a better handle on WordPress, I am learning MySQL and PHP. Just like with WordPress, the hardest part seems to be the part where you get connected! After my first class Friday night, my head was swimming…there were 106 powerpoint slides…I was trying to take notes and keep up but he was jumping around the slides so much, it was an impossible task. I got to the point that I was embarrassed to ask questions. When I started on my homework Saturday, I was very surprised to find that getting connected wasn’t that difficult – it was pretty much like downloading and installing any other program and I had it up (not running) in no time.

I started back at the beginning of my Head First PHP MySQL text and everything makes a lot more sense now than on my first reading. I’m beginning to understand some of the magic – at least I now know that I have to study ‘forms’ in HTML to figure out how the information is collected, I skipped that part of the text when I was learning Dreamweaver because it was complicated and I didn’t have any use for stupid old forms! Now I’m going to learn how to create a form and collect email addresses – not so stupid after all I suppose.

My PHP class got canceled so I am going to be on my own learning that one. The Head First book is helping to explain the relationship between PHP and MySQL; I don’t know how PHP alone will be…

Today, my homework looked pretty easy. All I had to do was type in exactly what was on the piece of paper in front of me. Not easy at all. I liked the GUI tool we were introduced to in class but when I opened it and started tying, nothing happened. Every now and then, it would tell me I had an error but the database never had my table in it and I wasn’t allowed to create a new version because “it already exists”. Show commands gave me a blank screen. I can’t wait to get to class Friday and see what step I missed! I resorted back to the DOS input. If you make an error, you get to start over; won’t even tell you how many times I restarted! I finally got the hang of the input and when I asked to see the results, I generally got what I expected. Typing those 3 little assignments took me 2 hours – can’t wait to see how long a big assignment will take.

Coming to terms with WordPress

Here it is September and I’m just now making headway with my summer project – WordPress! WordPress is supposed to be simple to use, or so I thought…I figured it wouldn’t take much effort to figure it out since I know HTML and CSS. Boy was I wrong! I still don’t know where the HTML is hiding which makes it difficult to implement CSS.

I’ve gotten 2 sites set up and I’ve been helping Lee with hers, and it’s taken 3 weeks to do it! The free themes are pretty overwhelming; there are so many and they are set up to show you the blog page. I want to create websites where the blog plays a secondary role. I googled phototgraphy  themes for WordPress and found several good sources for premium themes. Themeforest is my favorite one stop shopping. The thing  I learned quickly about premium themes is that they explain everything the theme has to offer and lets you preview the pages. WordPress shows you a preview of the free theme, but it’s still hard to know what it will look like for images when all you see is the blog page with that boat image or pages of text. I like having things spelled out for me with appropriate samples.

I purchased a theme from Photocrati with 4 different ways to display images. I struggled for a week trying to figure out how the pages were created and how the menu worked…it was driving me crazy! There was a new update a few days after I purchased mine and it wouldn’t upload without making a mess. Photocrati responded to my email within a few hours but their advice didn’t solve my problem. After several attempts to fix things, they asked for my user names and passwords to take a look at the files. Their response was basically the same as the first time, the file was in the wrong folder…they gave me the same steps to try again. Isn’t this a good example of Einstein's  definition of insanity!

Here’s the deal in a nutshell:

Between Lee and I, we have 3 domain names, each one set up with its own hosting package with GoDaddy, and the Photocrati theme. My first install had a glitch that wasn’t apparent to a new WordPress user, I just thought WordPress was extremely difficult. As I noted before, the update completely ruined everything. I uninstalled the theme and re-installed the new version several times, I also uninstalled the WordPress application and re-installed it through GoDaddy. After numerous attempts, a whole day wasted, the thing worked. I don’t know how it happened but it works.

My biggest question for Photocrati is, if it was a simple matter of a file being in the wrong folder and since they had total access to my accounts, why didn’t they just move it for me? The folder was in the same folder as my other themes and the files were in the same configuration, I couldn’t find anything out of place and the solution they sent me failed twice, it would have been so easy for them to fix it, wouldn’t it?

My second site went smoothly. The license allows me to use Photocrati on as many personal websites as I want so I uploaded the same zip file to the new site. Don’t know why this worked the first time, but I’m not complaining!

Now for Lee’s experience…she had a domain name through GoDaddy so she set up her WordPress hosting through them too. Next she purchased the Photocrati theme. Every time she uploaded it, she got lines of text giving various error messages that pushed the dashboard off the screen making it hard to deactivate the theme. We both worked on her site, uninstalling both the theme and the WordPress application to no avail. As a last ditch effort, we uninstalled everything and I tried the installation on my computer. We’d become convinced that her firewall must be interfering some way. We discovered that I had to be an administrator for either of us to access her account from my computer which we can’t understand. So, starting from scratch, we installed the WordPress application again and then installed my copy of the zip file (which now worked on 2 sites) and nothing changed. It’s a mystery! Photocrati blames the way GoDaddy handles WordPress and GoDaddy says that there is a lot of trouble with Photocrati themes…neither attitude helps us! Lee has asked for her money back; we’ll see how that goes.

I downloaded Sandbox yesterday and I’m looking forward to playing with the CSS file so I can get a better understanding of how things work. I also start PHP and MySQL classes this week at Wake Tech, I’ll keep you posted. These are skills that seem very important to landing a job and they should make WordPress easier to understand. I’m also going to sign up for Lynda.com and see how those tutorials are.