Webster Art

After about 10 hours of work and studying at http://www.lynda.com/tutorial/71212 I now have my new improved blog up and running.

I’ve not had a public blog since I started teaching. But after seeing several of my graduated students build wordpress websites, I realized it was something I needed to learn if I wanted to stay current in the industry.

I don’t have the time or inclination to re-learn what little I used to know about PHP and MySQL, but this tutorial: http://www.lynda.com/tutorial/71212 made it super easy and fun…if you like messing around with computers, and building the internet.

Me in 1968

You only have to edit about 10 lines of php code, and he explains every step. You can also simply host your wordpress blog on the wordpress servers. This is much easier, and but he (the lynda guy) explains it all. This might be best if you have never managed a self hosted website.

I highly recommend the www.lynda.com website. It’s only around $35 a month, and they have video tutorials on everything you can imagine related to computers. They look like they are expanding to photography as well.

But now I’m done with this thing for a while. 10 hours of computer time is enough for now. It seemed like a good idea, I learned it, but now it’s time to move on. I have real life things to do like:

• change the oil and sparkplugs on my truck
• pack my rock climbing pack
• work on my latest self portrait at my easel
• do something other than sit at this laptop

Whenever I finish a quarter I’m always stoked to study the latest work related software like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, wordpress, etc. But as soon as a few days go by, I start to recover, and look around. There is more to life than working on computers….but you knew that right?

I’ve been watching some lynda.com videos on how to start a wordpress account, and install it on your own domain name. A bunch of my graduated students have done this, and use wordpress commercially in their work as freelance web designers. From talking with them, it appears they use wordpress commercially because it simplifies the MySQL database work. MySQL databases are what makes a webpage interactive, as in:

• blog posts
• comments to blog posts
• slideshows built by non-web designers
• page up updates and configurations, again, done by non-web designers, etc.

MySQL is also used for ecommerce, but I don’t think wordpress goes that far, though I’m not sure. The beauty of hosting your own wordpress site on your domain, is that you have total control of the appearance of your wordpress site. When you host your site on wordpress directly, your address is http://johnsmith.wordpress.com, instead of http://www.johnsmith.com.

The latter is preferable, because it looks better, shows you know what you are doing, and you have more control, from a web designers perspective, that is. This has nothing to do with the quality of the content. Good content can be anywhere from a wordpress hosted site to facebook and myspace…or stapled to a telephone pole.

Good content lives on it’s own merits.

This is graffiti in a Tacoma parking garage down by old city hall.

Sidewalk paintings in chalk are a great example of content living on it’s own merits. A great chalk painting will last until it rains because people love it and avoid walking on it.

This photo is graffiti in a Tacoma parking garage. One of my student created a short film about these artists. He told me it was accepted into a film festival, might have been in Tacoma.  He also produced this cool movie with local talent in Tacoma. He spent months editing this as a school project.

The quarter is almost over. This is the last day. Only two of my students are here, but the room is full. The Pharmacy program shares our building, and sometimes uses our lab for taking tests. They are all here, in their green scrubs, taking an online test in Angel. My students are either done with their final projects, in which case they don’t need to be here on this last day, or they are coming in later.

The Pharmacy students are different than our students. They seem so much more serious, but that is probably because they are going to be handling medicine, which is far different than pixels. We get the creative types, and we like it that way.

Both my kids got into medicine, and I watched them study. They worked super hard to get into their field. And now they have good jobs, but I don’t know how much fun they are having, or, I should say, artistic fun. Media is a better fit for someone who is creative, I think. As compared to the medical field, I mean. I could be wrong though. Maybe coming up with medical treatments is very creative.

But it can’t be creative in an artistic expression kind of way, like media can. James S. drew this figure in my Illustrator 1 class. He got a lot of satisfaction out of that drawing. And it is a skill that has some value in the marketplace. Not everyone can draw like that, no matter how long they practice. It requires a bit of a gift to see light as well as James saw it. The ability to see light and shadow is the cornerstone of visual art.

One of my students (James S.) drew this in Illustrator

I need to buckle down on my grading but for some reason I’m avoiding it. Grading is like a snowball rolling down hill. The longer I avoid it the more time it has to snowball up on me.

I also need to update my curriculum for next quarter. I’m going to drop pop up windows in favor of an animated jQuery slideshow. Pop up windows are old school, very confusing for the students, and more trouble than they are worth.

Both pop-up windows and the jQuery slide show use pre-built JavaScript, but jQuery uses less of it, so I think the students will find it easier to process.

I’m looking forward to vacation. I’m going to do some climbing and some painting. I enjoy this teaching job, and helping the students who want to learn is awesome work, but it’s nice to have these breaks between quarters.

If and when I ever retire from teaching, my backup plan is to be a full-time landscape painter. It may just be a pipe dream…but I’ve always been a dreamer.