I love Christmas Break!  It has been nice to relax a little and see family and friends but I’ve been keeping myself busy.  Before my wife and I traveled up to Michigan for Christmas I did a little updating on my site.  I updated the footer of my pages, added some more photos to the Photography gallery and added or subtracted a few words here or there throughout the site.  I’ve also learned some more advanced features of CSS and how it actually works.  Stay tuned to see how I might put it into action!  I also rearranged the sidebar of the blog (to the left) to make it a little more user friendly.

In other news, I’m working on a little spot to take photos of my clay items once they are finished.  And I pulled another load out of the kiln after it had cooled from the glaze fire.  I got some cash for Christmas and my birthday so I think I’m going to order a decent tripod.  I hope to put up some pictures soon of the new ceramic stuff and whatever else I can finish before break is over…  I’m also about to start a big project in the clay studio.  In fact, I better get to work!

Christmas comes early.  The new and improved version of my site is now online.  If you’re reading this blog I assume you know how to get there….  Go check it out.  New features include valid code, updated image galleries, improved non-table layout, and some new images and information.  I’ve been redesigning it for most of the summer and I think it’s finally ready to go.  I uploaded it last night and then had to fix the navigation menu a few minutes ago.  It seems to work as it should in ie7 and firefox3.  I haven’t checked the update on any other web browsers.  So if it looks funny….  update your browser.  (I recommend Firefox 3.)

Let me know what you think.  Leave me a comment or email me and tell me if anything looks funny or doesn’t seem to be working right.  Or if viewing the site is a life changing experience you can tell me that too.  I’ll continue to iron out the wrinkles as I find them.

I’m a couple weeks deep in summer break and I feel like I’ve been working 8 hour days.  At least I’m having a good time doing (most of) this stuff…  I’ve been working on wedding pictures from the Hoffman wedding a couple weeks ago.  My wife and I have also shot a couple family portraits so I’ve been working on those pictures too.  Whenever I need a break from Photoshop I open up Dreamweaver and work on my website.  I want to update some of the image galleries and I have to finish a couple pages.  Unfortunately the state of Indiana doesn’t think that I know enough about reading after being trained in Reading Recovery all of last year so I started earning a Reading Certificate to add to my license.  I go to IUSB every Tuesday and Thursday for 3 hours to learn about tradebooks.  And of course I should probably mow the grass pretty soon.  Or maybe I’ll wait until August…

Well, here it is. My blog got a facelift.  Consider this a free preview to the new site that I hope to have in place very soon.  I still have a few small details to fine-tune but this is the basic idea.  It’s a lot more impressive when you see how it started (right).  Now it has more of the Art by Fuzzy feel.  I downloaded the atmosphere 10 theme, created by Dagon Design and played with the CSS file for a while until I finally got it pretty close to the way I want it.  I think I’m actually starting to understand all this Cascading Style Sheet stuff. 

Some fantastic news!  This very site will soon be newer, faster, and more exciting than ever.  I am currently hard at work on a CSS layout which should make the main part of the site lighter and faster.  I also plan to update the galleries if I have time and add some other small features.  I’ve got the layout pretty well set and I think I figured out the menu.  Now I’m testing and adding content.  It’s going to be sweet!  I also updated Wordpress and added a couple plugins.  Maybe some day I’ll have time to activate them and try some of the cool stuff I see that’s possible with this Wordpress contraption.

Summer break is almost over… I made a few more changes since the last update. I changed the look of the news section (you are here) so it would look a little more like my main site. I also updated the links page so my links actually link. Now you can visit some of the sites that I find useful/entertaining. There are many more, I’ll have to add them when I find some time. Maybe next summer?

Last weekend I spent about 3 solid days working on and updating my site. My wife left me at home while she went to visit some friends in Lexington so I sat at my computer all day Friday and Saturday putting together galleries and tweaking a few pages. I was up in Michigan the rest of the weekend where I used my dad’s high speed connection to upload everything, check a few of the pages, and update my wordpress software. The few pages and galleries that I checked seemed to work okay but I’m sure there are still a few bugs to work out. Some of the links on the links page don’t actually take you anywhere. I also still have to finish the labels for all my work (title, dimensions, date, etc.) which could take a while. If you find something that doesn’t look quite right or there seems to be a page missing or a broken link or something let me know. You can either email me or post a reply on the blog here. I’m also working on setting up a new wordpress plugin that will email you each time I post something new. Anything to make life easier!

Though you can’t really tell, I’ve been working on my site a little bit at a time.  I’m completely restructuring the galleries to make them easier to navigate and easier to update.  I want to wait and update everything at once though so you might not see any improvement for a few days or a few months, depending on my priorities.  I’ve got 2 gallery styles picked out but I want to tweak them a little bit.  I re-shot some of my pit fired ceramic pieces and I have some other older work that I need to shoot and add.  So expect something new in the future…  but don’t hold your breath…

Here is a preview of one of the galleries:

So check back again.

I finally got my Flickr account started.  I’ve posted a few pictures that I’ve taken.  Most of them show the trip that my wife and I took to Texas.  I haven’t had time to look at all the options and features but I hope to do that sometime soon.  I know there are a number of ways to incorporate my Flickr pictures with this blog.  Stay tuned for my adventures in photoblogging (and other short stories).  For now you can go see my account here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuzzy247/

It’s that special time of year again.  We get to celebrate the birth of a very special person…  My wife!!!

But more importantly, I have made a small addition to my growing website.  The first gallery is up!  The clay dinnerware set that I created in college is featured on the Clay page of artbyfuzzy.com.  (Of course you should check out the actual gallery but just in case it doesn’t work there is a screenshot to the left.)  I still have some tweaking to do but I’m happy with the basic design.  Some day I’d like to get information for each piece added and maybe change a few small details.  Let me know what you think.  And of course I’ll be working all of Christmas vacation to get the rest of the galleries up….

I also had to manually fix the links to the News page (you are here) because I somehow screwed that up again.  But now everything seems to be working okay.  The other good news is that I got an FTP program to work from my flash drive so I didn’t have to manually upload the files to the server.  I used WS FTP LE which was created by Ipswitch.  I think they have a newer version out now… Since we’re talking about software I should mention that the web gallery was created using Jalbum and the Fotoplayer2 skin.  Both a great holiday bargain at $0.

 Well, I’m on Christmas break so this could be my last post of the year.  Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and check back next year for some more spectacular updates.  I’ve got big plans for 2007…