Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Weaving my website..

I finally, finally got my first few website pages up. Doing html and cascading style sheets is much harder than it looks. Dreamweaver is great but there is all is code stuff that is very unforgiving, only one capital letter in a file name can cause something not to load. Yikes. And don't get me started on "AP div tags."

I wish they would make a web program where an illustrator
can just use a stylus pen and draw what they want and presto, you have a website. It could be called "DrawWeaver!"

But I did it and I did it my way with lots of emails back and forth to my web host. I'll be adding more content and more portfolio pictures and debugging (can't I just spray some Raid?)  but if you are curious about my home grown website check out my progress at "www.cedarmoonstudio.com" and tell me what you think. Don't worry, I belong to a critique group and am married to an editor...I can take the criticism.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Appreciating Summer...

I just read Arthur A. Levine's new blog at http://arthuralevine.wordpress.com, he's fairly new the blogging world but not to the children's publishing world (he's the American editor of the Harry Potter books). His own picture book is coming out soon, I can't wait to see it.

His long nostalgic blog made me realize that I have slumped in my blogging. There are too many excuses as to why but I am inspired. Arthur's blog is about appreciating summer so I thought about it and decided to share my appreciation with you.

I’m appreciating the anticipation of summer. The deck of our 65 year old cottage sits eighty feet above the Puget Sound near Seattle and it’s been raining and raining and raining. The slugs are conferencing in my garden and every seed we planted has molded.

But when the sun comes out, everything looks new and dressed in a thousand shades of green and I go out on the deck and fill my lungs with warm sea air and my mind with sunny thoughts and I remember that without the rain, you can’t have a rain forest. It might even get up to 60 degrees today – time to put away the fleece vest! Yeah summer!

What do you appreciate about the summer?