Poppies and Web Pages

Red Poppies
Pastel on ColourFix
copyright
Jan Gibson

It occured to me that I've never done a complete pastel painting of a flower and I set off to rectify this oversight. However, it's not going that well and I just can't seem to get as excited about it as I should be. The subject is fine, my composition isn't and I just can't seem to finish it.

The problem is that I've gotten back into redoing my website, petstoposies.com and I just can't concentrate on painting right now. I want to change my website to reflect the traditional painting media I now use instead of the digital medium I used when the site was first built. A lot has changed in the years since I first got a website and I've been hard-pressed to update my knowledge of web building technology in order to update my site.

I built my first website from scratch, hand-coding everything. Then I tried to give it a fresh look and revamped it again a year or so after it was built. Now it's been the same ole thing for several years but I'd lost interest in it as I became more involved in painting away from the computer.

But technology calls to me again and I don't think I'm doing too badly with it for an old lady who doesn't have any kind of computer training! The computers available during my college days were huge mainframes that took up whole rooms in large buildings and were used for business only. My first home computer was a little Tandy used for writing letters and playing games and we didn't even get dial-up internet out here in the boonies until after the year 2000 and have only recently gotten dsl!

But once we did get even dial-up internet service, I wanted to know all I could learn about web designing, web graphics and as much about the internet as I could possibly cram into this old head. It's been fun and I hope I'm keeping my mind "exercised" by learning all these new things.

I won't say I'm good at all of this; I have to admit that it's all a huge challenge and that's why it's taking me so long to get it all done. I'm still doing a lot of hand coding (and it's a real trip figuring out how to do some things) but I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel and hope to have the site up in the next couple of weeks!

Maybe then I can get back to painting with a fresh mind uncluttered by html, xhtml, css, php and all those other letters that, like me, most folks don't understand! I just hope they don't add any more before I finish with what I have!