working on my website with Dreamweaver CS5.5

Image via Wikipedia a little CSS code

earlier this week i downloaded Dreamweaver CS5.5 from Adobe for a 30 day free trial onto my laptop. it has given me a real boost in working on my website: daydreaming arts.

i already own dreamweaver but the now ancient CS3. it’s stuck on my desktop because i lost the product disc. so i’ve been struggling with my aging desktop, which is slow as molasses, and can’t be upgraded (long sad story there), and which, no matter how i situate it, i get i pain in my neck!

so guess what? i haven’t been working on my website!

the situation was getting critical because my pal Heidi Rand has featured me in her new book “Sell Your Artwork & Crafts Online: An Insider’s Guide to the Worldwide Arts Market” telling everyone how great my website is. and then she started promoting it on her popular blog! but of course i knew there were several of bugs. so what to do? get to work!

first i used dropbox to move the site from the desktop to my laptop, fastest way to move files ever! (it too is free.) and downloaded the most recent dreamweaver and got to work cleaning things up.

well i have to say that working on my laptop with my feet up is a pleasure! an even greater pleasure is working on the latest dreamweaver. the program is finally more useful than it is confusing. of course i’m sure it still takes a while to learn it. i’ve been using it since it in it’s infancy under the now defunct Macromedia so i only need to learn the upgrades.

one of the most amazing features of the CS5.5 version is the improved CSS panel and the “Inspect” mode. in my webdesign i make use of freely available code such as CSS styling rules and know enough to write some of my own, but i’m lost if i seriously break something!

the new CSS panel is active while you work in design mode, so you can click on something that doesn’t look right and it will show you all the rules applying to that feature. for example, the hardest thing to format is my long boring list of shows on the about me page. no matter what i did i could not tighten up the paragraphs! i’d been working on this problem for a while but not until the new CSS panel in dreamweaver showed all the rules that were affecting those paragraphs could i stop the madness.

in a similar way, the new “Inspect” mode helps you track down layout problems. but in a very visual way. while in “Inspect” mode the page elements light up, highlighted in different colors to represent all the margins, padding and property sizes you have in play.  something to low down on the page? mouse over that and it’s neighbors and you can see that the problem comes from some extra padding on a nearby element. the page lights up and so does your mind!

it wasn’t apparent to me what was going on when i checked out “Inspect” mode on my own. it all became clear when i watched this free video on Adobe’s help site. BTW the video was developed by my favorite learning site lynda.com! now that i’ve cleared out the competing rules applying to my CV i’m heading back into dreamweaver land to apply my own styles to the page.

new year brings some new projects

last year right about this time i took a class on printmaking. i learned how to make photogravure on polymer plates.  it was a complicated place to start but i had to know if my images would translate to printmaking before it would be worth learning the basics.I was very please with the results, considering it was a 4 day workshop. but i could tell that working with the polymer plates was not going to make me happy. so i starting classes in all sorts of printmaking and fell in love with copperplate. i’ve been madly taking courses and learning so much.

next weekend i have a workshop at Crown Point Press which is the creme de la creme in the bay area. they only give a short workshop in the winter and then a longer one in the summer. unlike Kala Institute where’s i’ve been taking alot of my classes, their mission is not so much to teach as it is to be the master printer for established artists.

but Crown Point Press doesn’t mind spreading the knowledge around. Their companion website Magical Secrets has tons of free content including how to demonstration videos, artists talking about their art and showing their process, videos about the creative process, a blog, and a store.

Corporations Are Not People

at their main site they also have a more text driven knowledge base about printmaking which has a great graphic showing the main different printmaking techniques, and an excellent explanation of Photogravure. unfortunately i have to wait til the summer workshop to try their approach to photogravure.

In the winter workshop i hope to learn their approach to alot of techniques i’ve learned from other artists at Mission Cultural Center and Kala Institute. basics like inking and wiping your plates can radically alter your results in printmaking. they also have incredible facilities for aquatint, spit bite and sugar lifts etc.

i hope to work with some of my more graphical images from the Strike at Occupy Oakland.

Occupy Oakland General Strike: residential tents

Related articles

• printmaking (daydreamingarts.wordpress.com)

latest wordpress learning

today the lesson on Lynda.com is about custom navigation. i’ve learned to make the menu items say what i want. what do you think of the new menus? i made new menus in the header and a really fancy menu in the sidebar. except that only looks like some links at the moment. i also figured out how to put things in order on the side bar! that’s the point of taking the online class. you can use wordpress as is but it’s fun to gain control of the look of it! the Lynda.com lessons get me there faster!

what i really want to know is how to make the whole header smaller! help!!!

cello of a street artist at the general strike in Oakland 2011

learning more wordpress at Lynda.com

daydreaming arts

so i’ve started all over with the wordpress tutorial at Lynda.com. i tried to skip ahead to an advanced course because i had done some of the first one “WordPress3: Essential Training” during the summer. but i saw i’d forgotten more than i’d learned. so far i’ve discovered this niffy full screen mode which provides a distraction free writing environment. from the new post area, while in the “visual mode” (not HTML) there’s one of the symbols that indicates full screen, a box with 4 outward pusing arrows. click it and you have a space for your title and text, essential formatting buttons on top and a save button.

however, as i just discovered the buttons etc can disappear and then re-appear when you mouse over the area. kinda scary! at the bottom there’s a word count and the words Just write.

no more remote posts

I promise, no more remote posts, at least not until i learn how to really use wordpress and it’s features that are important to me! I’m starting some courses at Lynda.com that will hep me build a really nice protfolio here. in the mean time let me just up load some of my favorite images.