2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 58,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 21 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Masha and Her New Red Toy

I was laughing so hard I could barely take this photo. Masha’s friends gave her a red handset for her iPhone as a birthday present.

Note to My Email Subscribers

Hi, friends. I just noticed that videos do not show up in the emails of blog updates. My last two postings (Rob Ryan and Murat Germen) were accompanied by videos. They really are worth checking out. In the meantime, I’ll try to think of some kind of workaround!

Better Colour Palette for Flash

Coming out of hibernation to say that I just found this great colour palette here. If you work in Flash, you probably don’t find the default colour palette all that user friendly. I was watching a video by Dermot O’ Connor (Animation Tips and Tricks with Flash Professional) on Lynda.com. Lynda.com is a fabulous site if you ever need to pick up new software skills in a hurry. Basic subscription is $25/month and it has lots of fun stuff, including tons of courses on aspects of photography, Photoshop, various programming languages, marketing your business on Facebook and with Twitter.

Since I don’t have the premium subscription I couldn’t download the palette in O’Conner’s exercise files, but I managed to find it via a Google search. Just download the zip file, extract the *.clr file. In Flash, open the Swatches panel and click Replace Colors on the dropdown menu. Click Save as Default. If you ever want to go back to the old palette, click Web 216.

Thing-a-Day, 2011

(This mosaic is actually from my Project365, but there’s so much overlap that it seemed appropriate. Also, the posting looked a little bare without a single photo.)

I managed to post every day of February for Thing-a-Day, 2011. It is definitely easier to produce something every day if one of your hobbies is photography. If your only hobby is miniature needlepoint rugs, then you have to post a daily stitch count or some such thing. I tried not to turn this project into a duplicate of my Project365 but there is some overlap, especially on days when I was too tired to do anything else.

Here’s the rundown:

1. Photo: Forgotten Fruit, selective colouring with Photoshop
2. Flash: spider animation (link goes to TAD site because I don’t have enough room on a free blog to start uploading my animations). Exercise done for a class
3. Puncetto Valsesiano tutorial: Web motif
4. Black lentil soup. Sorry, didn’t bother writing the recipe. Part of my Shabbat cooking
5. Photo: Playground at night. Went out after Shabbat and took pictures of the neighbourhood after the rain
6. Photo: Honeysuckle buds
7. Photoshop: Photographed a manager at work and put him into our corporate template
8. Photo: Fire near Al Zaim. They’re still burning stuff there at night, but on a much smaller scale. No idea what’s going on there.
9. Photo: Rosemary, That’s for Remembrance. Quick shot taken while walking to minibus that takes me to work
10. Photo: Sunset Reflections. Was sitting at my desk and saw the setting sun reflected on the windows of the building on the other side of the field.
11. Photo essay: Walk around the block. Camels, goat, hyraxes. “Life in Israel” shots. Walked around the block after the Shabbat cooking on Friday and got lucky with the wildlife
12. Photo: Weeds at night. Another post-shabbat evening, not knowing what to photograph. Went outside and shot a few frames
13. Photo: Tefillin stand. Another “life in Israel” shot
14. Photo: Sign of spring. Yup, another retread of the honeysuckle bush. I rely an awful lot on my neighbour’s garden near the bus stop.
15. Photo: Geranium. Same neighbour, same garden. Planter box on the wall. Can you tell I wasn’t feeling very inspired that week?
16. Photo: Tecoma Stans (Yellow Bells). No prizes for guessing whose garden again….
17. Puncetto Valsesiano tutorial: Diamond. YES! Something that isn’t growing in Nachum’s garden! Adding Flash animations to my tutorials has removed a lot of the border and pressure. When I’m tired I don’t do needle lace very well. With Flash I don’t have to worry about messy stitches.
18. Sourdough bread. My starter was starting to look like a swamp. Seemed like a good idea to make some bread. Pre-shabbat baking
19. Photo: Cloudy Moon. Another one of those “it’s dark out what the heck am I gonna photograph but it’s better than doing dishes” moments.
20. Photo essays: Rainy Day. OK, this was actually interesting. I discovered that if you focus midway between the rain running down a window and the trees blowing around outside, you can get some interesting abstract effects. The streams of water distort the image.
21. Lace mapping: Used Photoshop to map the motifs in the Italian bobbin lace Torah binder. One of these days I’m going to post about it. Just not sure what to write but it’s an interesting piece.
22. Photo essay: Sewing Buttons. Yinnon sewing buttons on his coat.
23. Photo essay: Imploding Almond Flowers. What a difference a lens can make. I found it impossible to do these zoom effects with the 18-55mm kit lens, even with a tripod. It’s much easier with the 18-135mm lens. These photos were taken in the parking lot at work. Handheld camera.
24. Photoshop: Me and my new tripod. A “mini me” composition. I’ve been watching video tutorials on Photoshop comping and am getting a lot better with the masks and shadows. Still more to learn but I’ve come a long way from my first attempts!
25. Knitting: Grey leg warmers. Wearing them right now. Bit slouchier than the old ones but they’ll be useful on cold days. I never knitted much winter gear until I took up photography as a hobby. It can get very cold, taking outdoor shots. Saw 11 gazelles in the wadi when I went for a walk but didn’t have a camera with me! Argh.
26. Embroidery: Lady with Unicorn: Sense of Hearing. Almost finished the second page of the chart! Also passed the 10% milestone.
27. Photo: Fox trot. Hoped to see at least a couple gazelles but they weren’t around. I managed to grab this shot of a startled fox. Beautiful tail!
28. Illustrator: Fruit basket. My first drawing in Adobe Illustrator. It’s not perfect (is there such a thing?) but I was pleased with how it turned out. Got a lot of practice with the pen tool and the gradient annotator!

Thing-a-Day was fun but I’m not sure if I’ll do it again. It’s almost become a victim of its own popularity. This time round, I discovered that I couldn’t keep up with the postings or the comments. According to my Gmail labels, I have 5192 unread TAD postings and 1741 unread TAD comments (not on my work, on the site in general).

I couldn’t figure out how to get notifications of comments on my own work (even from within my profile), so I couldn’t reciprocate with comments, which meant that most of the time I just posted and never followed up.  Maybe Posterous has a way of accessing these features.  I couldn’t find it. So I didn’t take full advantage of the social networking aspect of TAD.

I wish that I could have tried more projects but I didn’t have the energy and wasn’t feeling very inspired. You can see how lazy I got by the second week (“OK, gotta post something. Let’s point the camera at one of Nachum’s flowers….”)! Part of it is that photos (snapshots, really) are instant gratification and part of it is that I’ve reached a stage in most of my arts/crafts where I spend a lot more time thinking and planning. I’m not a beginner in most of my hobbies, so I’m less likely to choose quick projects that can be finished in a day. If I had more courage, I might have tried something where I really need to improve (drawing a day?) but I’m not sure I’d have the guts to post the results for the whole world to see!

Unrelated note: Now that it’s March, I’m fairly certain that my photos will not be used by the food magazine for their article on Jerusalem. That doesn’t bother me. Since it was Food & Wine magazine, I’m flattered to have been approached in the first place!

2010 WordPress Summary

This summary is sent automatically by WordPress and you can choose to post it to the blog. So here it is!

Hope to post some real content soon, folks!  I’ve been busy since I returned to work.

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 40,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 153 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 271 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 258kb.

The busiest day of the year was February 1st with 627 views. The most popular post that day was Locked Out & Modeling the Orenburg Shawl.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were flickr.com, gingerbreadsnowflakes.com, mail.yahoo.com, allthingspaper-annmartin.blogspot.com, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for puncetto valsesiano, free lensing, freelensing, puncetto, and bobbin lace.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Locked Out & Modeling the Orenburg Shawl February 2010
15 comments

2

Periodic Table Sweater August 2009
39 comments

3

Irish Crochet Leaf – We Got Ridges! October 2009
4 comments

4

Puncetto Valsesiano, Part 1 – Introduction July 2010
13 comments

5

Miniature Bobbin Lace Tablecloth and Pattern January 2010
5 comments

First Year of Blogging

June 28 marked the first full year of this blog. I had hoped to mark the day with an interesting post but I was much too preoccupied with problems at work to think about my blog. So here it is, better late than never (and a less interesting posting is better than not writing at all because inspiration hasn’t struck). I took this photo after I got off the minibus this evening. There are several bulletin boards in my neighbourhood and they accumulate a fascinating assortment of layers, bits of papers, pictures, apartments for sale, camp announcements, dress sales, and so on. I never noticed before that the board underneath is wood!

My very first posting called Video 1: How to Make Boiled Kubbeh, a cooking video that I recorded in my office. Yinnon, whose pre-wedding photos were presented in my last blog posting (June 25) starred in that video. Interesting that we’re still the same basic group, me, Masha, and Yinnon, but now in a different room, on a different floor, and with a fourth officemate, Chaim.

Stats for year 1 of this blog:

• 208 postings
• 40,914 hits total
• Busiest day: Aug. 14, 2009 (3,963 hits)
• Top posts: Periodic Table Sweater (18,941), Irish Crochet Leaf (777), Miniature Bobbin Lace Tablecloth and Pattern (593), and Sunrise over Amman, 2010 (470)

I write about photography, food, crafts, and Israel, but photography seems to have taken over by a margin, according to my category totals:

• Photography (106)
• Israel (68)
• Crafts (36)
• Food (33)

I should note that some of these categories overlap, that is, a posting might be tagged with two categories.

And I’ve received 464 comments. Thank-you! I appreciate the comments and links that you’ve left on my blog and I’ve tried to comment as well. I realise that this blog is a bit quirky — not quite a photography blog or a craft blog or a food blog and not quite political enough to be included in lists of Israeli blogs. Hmmm. A bit like me…

Russian Keyboard for Blonds

This is Masha’s new toy, a present from a visitor. Actually, she does use it for work. It’s the Russian version of the popular Keyboard for Blonds.

I want one, too! I would even be willing to bleach my hair.

Quick and Dirty Blog Backup

I just read Sister Diane’s Archive-Along posting about blog backup. And, yes, I don’t do it as often as I should, so I exported my blog, saved it to my hard drive and mailed it to a couple email accounts as well.

I have another method for backing up individual postings. I don’t recommend this as your only backup method because it has major limitations:

• It can’t be used for actually reconstructing your whole blog unless you are prepared to do a lot of cutting and pasting. However, it will save your text and photos. (Don’t forget to back up your Flickr account if you’re linking to photos there.)
• It saves your posts when they are published, not when they are updated.

It’s major advantage is that it is pretty brainless and, once in place, requires zero effort. The instructions that follow are for WordPress users.

1. Go to My Dashboard.
2. Click the Widgets link on the Appearance menu.



3. Drag the “Blog Subscriptions: Email Subscriptions” widget to the sidebar of your layout.



4. Go to your site and click “Sign me up!”



5. Set up a filter in your email account to save these postings automatically to their own folder (or, for Gmail users, to label and archive them).

One word of warning: this works even for postings that you delete. So if you use your blog to rant about your boss or your spouse and then delete the posting in the morning, your email subscribers will have already received it.

OK, It’s Official and NaBloPoMo Is Over

I’m not eligible for any prizes because I actually missed the first two days. But I have blogged ever since Nov. 3, when I discovered the NaBloPoMo site and have posted more than a couple extra entries, so I feel that I’ve earned it.