Category Archives: Site News

Information from or about Cyberward.net.

Jellyka font for my signature

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I have decided that my signature is crap. I tried to make a nice signature, scan it, and use it to sign my photos, but it wasn’t working. Also, when I post images online, I have used different fonts to add my name to the image, usually on the bottom. I haven’t been terribly happy with any of the fonts I have tried so far. Until now.

I think I like Jellyka – Estrya’s Handwritting. Jellyka Nerevan seems to be giving away the font for personal use. I wasn’t sure what exactly other uses would be, but I sent a donation via pay pal for the font. She has other fonts on dafont too, or you can see her website at CuttyFruty.

I have used this font with the last few sets of images I have placed online. I am not sure if I am going to keep the drop shadow or not, but it looks good on plain white!

Full Frame Photography Portfolio Launched

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A week or so ago, I saw that Scott Kelby had launched a new portfolio with a full screen flash gallery. I thought it looked pretty sweet, but I wanted to have a go at getting a similar, but not the same look using Javascript, not Flash. I think it turned out pretty well. You can see the portfolio here. The Javascript works pretty well. You can’t however take over the entire screen, but the images will fill the browser.

I intend to detail how it works, and provide something for you to download if you want to use it, but that will have to wait a day or two. Check back, I will share.

Upgrading WordPress and MySql on 1and1

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Upgrading WordPress is trivial now. I wanted to upgrade from 2.8 to 2.9, so I went to my dashboard and pressed the “Please update now” link. I got a few warnings, a message to make sure I did a backup first, and then finally a button I could press to do the upgrade.

Only it didn’t work. WordPress 2.9 needs MySql 5.0 or higher. Crap. I had a 4.something MySql version. I went to the 1and1 control panel. No way to upgrade. No way migrate. S.O.L. When I had created my blog and the database for it, which didn’t seem like all that long ago, the default on 1and1 was to create a 4.x database. Now I was in trouble.

Hey, no problem I thought. I was told to do a backup before the upgrade, and I had done that. I used the phpMyAdmin tool to do the backup, I could do a restore to a new 5.x table the same way, right? Not exactly. I had a LOT of data in my database. 1and1 will only let you import 2meg. I had 4 times that. I needed to reduce some data.

I know, compression! First I tried to do the data dump with zip compression. Then I found out that the import tool didn’t support it. Sheesh. Then I tried the gzip compression. For me, this resulted in exactly the same file size. This wasn’t working at all. I just need to get rid of some data. Continue reading →

Picture Donations

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Winter Jay Horizontal

I am donating an image to the Minnesota Lions Eye Bank for them to use on their holiday card this year. I let them look through quite a few of my images, and the blue jay above is what they selected. I am quite happy that they wanted to look through and use one of my images. The eye bank does a great service, and I am happy to donate an image for them to use.

Fishing Village

My friend Theresa is also going through a tough time right now, and medical expenses have been mounting. They are having a benefit (see the benefit link on this site) to raise money. I have donated the above image printed at 16×24 on 1.5″ standout, and a two hour portrait photo session. They are having an auction with several other items in it as well. I am very happy to donate these to her cause. Lots of us are really pulling for you Theresa! See you at the benefit.

Gallery Showing

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Gallery Event

This was the setting of my first photo gallery. It was awesome. We had the perfect sized room at the front of the Fabulous Catering kitchen, who also catered the event. It just happened to be my birthday, but I concentrated on the gallery thing.

This was just one corner. Annie did a great job of getting frames, and then hanging all the pictures I had printed off. We are going to have a really full house once we get these back.

If you every get the chance to put on an event like this, I would recommend that you just go for it. It is such a rush to see your work on the wall, and have people looking at it and commenting on how great it is!

Anyway, it was a great event, and I want to thank all the people that came, Annie and her helpers for all the work they did, and Fabulous Catering where we had the event and all the great food they provided.

My First Gallery Showing

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Gallery Collection

Annie is throwing me a 40th birthday party. As part of the event, we are doing a gallery showing of some of my work. I printed up some of my new images, such as some of the DLWS images that I have shown lately. With the new images and some of the ones we had around the house, we had two dozen images framed. Very cool. Annie did a great job of picking out some frames.

I had the pictures printed from WHCC, and they were great as usual. I think that they were a little darker this time, but I had been using a different color calibration tool than the last time I had things printed. I think I may just have to try to turn down the gamma setting.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the part tonight. Thanks Annie!

War of Art book winners

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Two Wet

I went to random.org, and had it pick some numbers for me. It picked 6, 1, 2 for me, so Kristen, Marianne, and Sue have won a copy of Steven Pressfields book “the War of Art”.

Sue, please send me your address, and I will ship one to you. Kristen, and Marianne, you two saved me some shipping costs 🙂 I will get your copies to you soon.

New Photography Site Up

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I finally have the Christopher Ward Photography site up and running. I feel like I have been working on this new site for ever. Off and on for a couple of months anyway. This was a new site for me in several ways. First is that I designed it based on a business card, and I started by putting it together in Photoshop.

New Christopher Ward Photography Site

This site is much better representation of where I am at, and where I am trying to get to. Some of the other landscape pictures and city shots I really liked, and maybe I will find a place for them on this site somehow.

Some of the cool things about this site…

The menu at the top with the rollover images is one big image and some CSS tricks. I plan to blog about that later. The index page, and the galleries page have slide shows that use jQuery and the cross slide plugin. It does the Ken Burns effect on the galleries page. Not sure if I should keep it. It seems like it is jerky and pixelated in versions 6 and 7 of IE. Works great on Firefox and Safari.

Clicking on an image in a gallery brings up a larger image and allows you to move between the images using the Thickbox jQuery plugin.

The text on the galleries thumbnails is done with a transparent PNG overlay. I forgot that IE6 doesn’t handle it very well, and that IE6 could be used as much as 30% still. I might need to just redo those images with the overlay put on in Photoshop. I did have plans to change the thumbnails dynamically, but I might not bother now.