Wrenaissance Art » I am my own IT http://wrenaissance-art.com Botanical illustration & graphic design by Wren M. Allen Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:00:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Wrestling with WordPress on my mobile http://wrenaissance-art.com/2011/01/21/wrestling-with-wordpress-on-my-mobile/ http://wrenaissance-art.com/2011/01/21/wrestling-with-wordpress-on-my-mobile/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2011 22:39:19 +0000 Admin http://wrenaissance-art.com/?p=980 Continue reading →]]> I made a couple of goofy posts this week testing out my new copy of the WordPress mobile app on my iPhone. I deleted them a little while ago, because they were wasting electrons. Posting text was pretty simple, but I couldn’t transfer photos taken by the iPhone onto the blog.

Hmmm.

Gotta do some more research on this one, as I’d love to be able to blog coolio photos while travelling to coolio places.

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]]> http://wrenaissance-art.com/2011/01/21/wrestling-with-wordpress-on-my-mobile/feed/ 0 Site design changes at Wrenaissance Art http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/11/04/site-design-changes-at-wrenaissance-art/ http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/11/04/site-design-changes-at-wrenaissance-art/#comments Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:13:37 +0000 Admin http://wrenaissance-art.com/?p=860 Continue reading →]]> It’s time to start rebuilding this site to function as a portfolio site. To that end, I am testing out different WordPress themes. Bear with me while construction is under way!

As always when a new theme is installed, then deactivated, the old theme exhibits odd changes in appearance. How frustrating.

Right now, I’m trying out the Twenty Ten theme.

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]]> http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/11/04/site-design-changes-at-wrenaissance-art/feed/ 0 Tale of woe: My site name has been hijacked http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/10/25/tale-of-woe-my-site-name-has-been-hijacked/ http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/10/25/tale-of-woe-my-site-name-has-been-hijacked/#comments Tue, 26 Oct 2010 03:14:18 +0000 Admin http://wrenaissance-art.com/?p=788 Continue reading →]]> The name of my site has been hijacked to form part of the file name of a bogus page on a spam site.
Since I’ve discovered this, I’ve contacted my hosting provider and tracked down and contacted the host providers of both the IP of the main spam site’s URL and the IP of the specific URL of the offending page. I’ve also banned the IPs, installed Akismet and banned image hotlinking.
The bogus page is not your typical plagiarized-content spam blog. Instead, my blog images were uploaded to the page with a hotlink, along with their file directory path, info about the file and upload/download times for each file. My hosting company thinks it’s some kind of test page. InterNIC shows the spammer’s main site to be hosted in the Czech Republic, while the bogus page is hosted in the Netherlands.
If you have a WordPress blog, you might want to examine your spam comments carefully when they arrive in the moderation queue. In this case, the spammer was using my site’s name as his/her commenter name. The URL listed incorporated the name of my site as the file name of a sub-page of the spammer’s site, but with some alterations by adding extra hyphens, digits and forward slashes. The ARIN whois IP search info in the WordPress notification email led to a dead end, as the bogus page IP is not in the US.
I’m very reluctant to contact the probable spammer directly. If he has my website name and personal name, all he needs to commit fraud or identity theft is a live email address.

I’m anxious and saddened about the loss of my good name. :-(

]]> http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/10/25/tale-of-woe-my-site-name-has-been-hijacked/feed/ 0 My new toy http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/10/20/my-new-toy/ http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/10/20/my-new-toy/#comments Wed, 20 Oct 2010 19:09:21 +0000 Admin http://wrenaissance-art.com/?p=743 Continue reading →]]> My new Wacom Intuos 4 Bluetooth tablet

Sleek, stylish, a little bit dangerous: My new Wacom tablet.

I’m slowly updating my graphics kit, so a new Wacom was definitely on the list for this year. Before moving to Rio, I sold my trusty old Intuos 3, and bought a Graphire Bluetooth for use with the laptop. To make weight for the move to Houston, I sold the Graphire.

The difference between the 3-series and the 4-series was apparent right out of the box. The old Intuos 3 was mid-gray, higher profile and the function buttons were in a little row on top of the drawing area. It was also much more compact than the new 4-series. The Intuos 4, by contrast, is sleek, black, almost Darth-Vader in appearance. It takes up a lot more desk space than the same size 3-series. The 3-series’ drawing surface used to lift up so the user could insert a drawing underneath to trace the lines, while the new Intuos 4 has the drawing surface stuck down tight to the board.

I definitely like the scroll wheel, but am still coming to grips with the new function buttons. They seem to be integrated with Photoshop? I’m probably being a mechano-numpty, but the function buttons don’t seem to be active in Illustrator, where I primarily use the tablet. The pen is very responsive to delicate motions and picks up vector points easily, even when you’re zoomed way out. I was very impressed when the tablet and pen just automatically mapped to the laptop screen—in my old Intuos 3, that had to be done with a set-up dialog in the System Preferences, and was kind of a pain.

The Bluetooth function is much more immediate than it was with the Graphire, and the battery life has been great (one charge has been holding for a couple of days now.) I’m not too fond of the fact that you need to plug into your laptop/desktop to charge it, though, as it means you need to keep your laptop on and active during the charging period. With the Graphire, you could just plug it into the wall and come back when it was done.

So all in all, I’d say the Wacom Intuos 4 Bluetooth is a sexy little beast for the illustration/design studio!

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]]> http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/10/20/my-new-toy/feed/ 0 Today’s web-site progress http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/07/29/todays-web-site-progress/ http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/07/29/todays-web-site-progress/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:51:35 +0000 Admin http://wrenaissance-art.com/?p=559 Continue reading →]]> Went through the site laboriously by hand yesterday and updated all the images, as suggested by the Host Gator help desk. The banner image of my watercolor palette is back, along with the use of Garamond and Optima as the primary type faces.
Check out my about page: I’ve added an old snapshot of me at work during the Amazon cruise and workshop I took in 2008.

Email is still spotty, so next step will be asking friends and family to use the address as a test. And, of course, now I need to retrieve all the groovy links of real-life friends and online resources.

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]]> http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/07/29/todays-web-site-progress/feed/ 0 Back in the saddle again http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/07/28/back-in-the-saddle-again/ http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/07/28/back-in-the-saddle-again/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:06:26 +0000 Admin http://wrenaissance-art.com/?p=499 I am in the process of moving to a new webhost and updating the blog to the new servers. Will be working on getting my old images online, as well as my personal banner.

Wish me luck! :-)

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]]> http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/07/28/back-in-the-saddle-again/feed/ 0 All change http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/04/05/all-change/ http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/04/05/all-change/#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 10:50:28 +0000 Admin http://blog.wrenaissance-art.com/?p=457 Continue reading →]]> More changes afoot here at Wrenaissance Art and A Bird’s Eye View.

My web-hosting company is changing its service packages and will no longer be providing a blog with the basic web-hosting package. The changeover date is 31 May, so I have 6 or 7 weeks to find a good solution.

It seems computer systems always want to be changed when you move your household!

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]]> http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/04/05/all-change/feed/ 0 Changes to A Bird's Eye View and Wrenaissance Art http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/02/22/changes-to-a-birds-eye-view-and-wrenaissance-ar/ http://wrenaissance-art.com/2010/02/22/changes-to-a-birds-eye-view-and-wrenaissance-ar/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:49:29 +0000 Admin http://blog.wrenaissance-art.com/?p=272 Continue reading →]]> This weekend I spent quite a bit of time making cosmetic changes on the blog and website.

I’ve updated my WordPress and changed to the Subtle Flux theme. I customized the theme by adding a photo of my traveling watercolor paintbox for the blog banner, instead of the forest and river photo that was included in the theme.

Wrenaissance Art is still being laid out in iWeb and uploaded to my web host’s outside servers. I changed the background colors to white and major font family to Garamond (Helvetica is still used for the slideshow captions and the seemingly unchangeable page links). I also switched the banners from my colored pencils to my paintbox.

Expect more harmonization between the appearances of the blog and the website in weeks to come!

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