The Never-Ending Bloga - The Road Goes Ever On: 3 Weeks in Britain

Well, Finally

There’s a new entry up, at last, under the September archive for the England travel journal. I forgot to set the temporal displacement/flux capacitor thingy but the entry is now in it’s rightful place and time on September 20th. It covers just one day and night spent in Carlisle.

The next entry after that will be the one with all the pictures of walking in Yorkshire, and that means (shudder) lots of Photoshop Elements. Fortunately, not too much fixing, futzing, and cropping, just adding frames. I’m regretting (now) using the rather tacky “photocorners” provided with Elements, and will stick to plain old drop shadows in the future.

I’ve also had some fun in recent days converting some of my favorite “permanent links” over to stickers either swiped from Taylor McKnight’s Steal These Buttons, or creating new ones of my own over at Kalsey Consulting Group’s Button Maker.

Probably one of the first things I noticed when I started looking at other people’s blogs (and while “the blog bug” was still incubating merrily along at the back of my brain) was that many people seemed to have different stickers or buttons or graphical doodads on their index pages. And I wanted me some. So now I’m starting to fool around with putting some up.

It occurs to me that these stickers (or buttons, such as over at ***Dave’s)are like personal totems, charms or heraldic badges – they indicate immediately to a first-time visitor how the blogger feels about things; who they are, what they like, and sometimes what they dislike.

I created a couple of stickers of my own just for fun. I’m not quite ready to start fooling with Elements or Paint and add graphics, although I would love, love, love a Mutts sticker, rather than the graphic the Muttscomics.com provide, because they’re a little fuzzy, and bigger than I’d like.

On the other hand, maybe I’ll have a corral of bigger, more graphical buttons below the stickers.

I tried to get an AIM link working, but nothing happens… possibly because we have a firewall here. However, there’s AIM Express, I suppose. Start things off with a hearty “Land shark!” or I’m likely to assume a strange IM is from a pr0nbot.