Overdue Updates

The previously referred to "Drastic Decision"
My ex who had been struggling for over a year with a similar job (or jobless) situation before I got laid off, found a job he couldn't refuse finally but it involved him moving to Utah. He made the tough decision to take it and move. Meanwhile in the months that followed, my fiance and I were struggling with the exorbitant living expenses of California. Applying to any and every job without so much as a "Thank you for applying, but...". My growing annoyance with California coupled with my fiance's flat out hatred of it, quickly approached a fever pitch of frustration and desperation. That combined with the increasingly hard time the kids and my ex were having not being able to see each other, made for a huge decision I NEVER thought I'd actually make let alone consider as a possibility. We picked up and moved to Utah as well. With no jobs lined up and no family out here in case we failed miserably. Yikes.

If it's not THE scariest thing I've ever done, then it's an extremely close second. And I could list all the reasons I'm glad we did this (as well as a couple reasons I couldn't have predicted would make me regret it in a way), but that's a post for another day. For now, we're here, we're happy with it, and we're managing for the moment on a day by day basis.

On to newer better things
My involvement with GoDaddy is now over and GlassSlipperCreatons.com is no more. I did do some homework before trying them out, and I saw the good and the bad but the price seemed so good, I guess it was just something I had to learn the hard way. I'm now completely convinced that the good reviews I saw and heard, were fake or paid for. How a company can get good reviews when they reel you in with one price, end up charging you a little more, spam you to death weekly for the 3 whole months preceding your renewal date, and then double your original price to renew is beyond me. And all that was just with a simple domain registration package, I have no idea what their hosting is like but I shudder to think. And I've always found the Danica Patrick marketing campaign, unfunny, unimaginative, and even though I'm FAR from being a feminist(they helped kill chivalry dontcha know), cliche in a totally sexist way. I've been kinda hating myself for rewarding such tripe with my business lol. Anyway, it's done and I'll never be tempted with bogus promotions to stray again.

Though the temporary construction page hasn't been changed, I'm now the owner of GlassSlipperDigital.com. I went back to my broker of choice, InterXstream, and they took care of everything for me for half the price that GoDaddy wanted to renew me for. I decided to dump the original name rather than go through the whole transfer process because I decided to make the switch at the last minute, literally. I canceled the day it was scheduled to automatically charge my credit card and placed the order with IXS in the same breath. I don't regret it, I was never completely happy with the "creations" part of the name and I hadn't done a damned thing with the site yet so it ended up being the perfect time to make the change. It'll still probably be a while before I do anything with it but at least it's there when I'm ready for it and I feel MUCH better about whom I'm paying for it.

Projects
I've decided to use my fiance's music blog as my first guinea pig on my quest to become a self taught web designer. I started last year by giving him a new logo for the page. He wanted a crest for his name Lunar Storm so I made him one with a stained glass window feel to it. It came out pretty cool but I will have to post pictures later because we have places to go today and I think everyone's waiting on me at this point lol. I've taken the original crest logo that I created and added scrolls and swords to it, making it probably the biggest craziest masthead I've ever created. Even though I'm extremely proud of the fact that I created every piece from scratch, the layout as a whole is proving to be kind of an ambitious undertaking that's going to take a lot longer than I anticipated to finish.

The graphics are the easy part. The challenge it seems, is the rest. Things have changed A LOT since the days when I designed layouts for my old and EXTREMELY outdated LiveJournal. That was actually really easy once I knew what I needed to put and where, from their style system. But you have to pay to have as much control over your blog layout as I did, AND I want to learn how to do this on my own sites, not a commercial one. I figured all this out when I got to the point in my designing, when I wanted to see how all the different slices were going to fit together on a live web page. I figured out some design changes I needed to make for the better, and that I have A LOT to learn outside of HTML and CSS. I looked very briefly into WordPress and that's where the feeling of being in over my head crept in. It's time to learn some new shit. Unfortunately, time hasn't been on my side lately since I just recently started working full time again. After 16 months, I think my body is taking it's sweet time in getting back into the habit. I'm hoping to adjust again soon because I haven't had the energy to do anything after work since I started. And it's not even a hard back breaking job lol. Maybe I'm just getting old?

And the obvious
I changed the name of this blog...because I felt like it and it was just time.

I think that's enough for now and it's time to go anyways. So as my 10 year old would say, late.

A little facelift for my neglected domain...

I've had my domain for years though I've never done a thing with it. Well nothing outside of temporary storage and a little image hosting for a LiveJournal blog I haven't touched in years that is.  I had meant to just buy a domain name but didn't realize at the time that buying a hosting package with it, was not a requirement.  I found out otherwise not long after but since I wasn't doing anything with it, I never bothered to shop around for a better deal.  Until last Friday.

After 5 or so odd years of overpaying for a tiny amount of space, I've finally moved my site.    I decided to try out HostGator.com.  They charge about the same as I was paying before but now I have unlimited space as opposed to slightly under 1GB.  And the CPanel has a lot more noob friendly tools in it.  I'm sure it was only because I really didn't have a website to speak of that the move happened lighting fast.  They said it would take 24-48 hours but the switch was immediate as soon as I updated the nameservers and uploaded my sad little "under construction" index file haha.  I can't believe I neglected it so long...couldn't even bother to put up a proper temporary page, bad bad Mars.

Anyways, it was such a smooth and satisfying experience, I went ahead and registered another domain for my future (hopefully not fantasy) career in web/graphic design and/or animation production company.  I figured it would keep me motivated to keep practicing on my own till I can afford to go back to school, during this crappy time of rejection and let downs.  I guess it worked at least a little because as soon as the sites were up and running, I started creating a temporary page for both.

I found this pretty cool tutorial on PSD Tuts+ for a road cone.  It can be found at Illustrate a Traffic Cone Icon in Photoshop.  Apparently it was originally published in Czech so the translation is a tiny bit shaky at times but still pretty understandable.  And beginners beware...you definitely have to fill in a few blanks yourself to achieve some of the differences you'll notice in the screen caps between one step and the next that are not explained or even referred to at all.  But that turned out to be a good thing because it challenged me and I ended up learning some badass tricks I've never heard of before.

This is what I came up with...

And then here are screencaps of  the two SUPER quick temporary pages I literally threw together yesterday, showcasing my shiny new road cone...

 I was kind of in a hurry because it was getting close to the time I usually pick up my kids, so I just did some simple text with a drop shadow.  Then I did a basic gradient to chop and repeat vertically with CSS, and added a blueish back light that matched the text and background palette. It didn't make sense to me to use purple (or any other color that had nothing to do with the general design) like the tutorial had suggested, hence the blue.  Then I uploaded the separate parts, and coded them all back together again.  The screencaps are a bit on the wide side because I have a wide screen monitor and I prefer a maximized window for my browser.  I set the body's background color to match the light blue in the gradient so there would be a seamless background fill on maximized setups like mine... I hate empty whitespace around sites.

It's been a REALLY long time so I had to refer back to W3Schools for a couple syntax brain farts hehe ;).  And in retrospect, I probably should have reversed the gradient...at least I think so but only because of the gloss on the cone, but I just didn't like the way it looked that way when I tried it.  This is all temporary anyway, and MOST importantly, a learning experience.  I will get around to finding a comprehensive light source tutorial eventually, right now it's all about honing what I already know and challenging myself to take on the tools I have struggled with in the past, like the pen tool...you've bested me before punk, but it's on now ;).

That's all for now, the dishes and laundry await...oh joy of joys.