Tag Archives: design

Free online resources for making graphics

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
March 24 2020

I culled a bunch of different sites, but here are the main ones. For most of them, they allow you to upload your own photos or use stock ones, let you add text, some have video options, etc.

To get a feel for them, one of the best ways is to assign yourself a specific sample project. For myself, I have a book challenge that I do every month, and the members want book badges. I have no real skill in doing this. I did my first two months in Powerpoint using existing clipart and the covers of the books we were reading. Kind of cheesy, but hey, they got book badges.

  • spark.adobe.com — Adobe’s free tool, although of course they also try to upsell you on Premium templates. Didn’t thrill me.

202003223-01-adobe-spark

  • https://www.canva.com — There’s a pro version, but not needed. This was more of a business card design, but it had potential.
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So you want your own website…

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
December 4 2018

Since a lot of friends know I have my own website, it isn’t uncommon to get questions about how they get their own website, dipping their toe in the vast sea of having their own presence online. Usually I frame the discussion around three questions.

A. Do you want your own domain?

This is almost always a no-brainer for people as they often think in very specific terms and have some domain names in mind. My domain, polywogg.ca, is registered to me and only me. It is the same for every company on the planet that has a site, usually. They all register a domain name that is unique to them.

It isn’t the only way to go. Lots of people use free sites at various hosters and end up with sites like “http://AndreasWorld.wordpress.com” or “LoveOfBooks.blogger.com”. Their “unique” presence is still there but the hoster’s name shows up too. For some, they don’t care about that; for most, they do.  » Read the rest

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Version 4.0 of my website

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
July 2 2017

In my last post about the server side of my website (Version 3.3 of my websites: the technical side of things and Version 3.3 of my websites: the software side), I talked about a problem I was having with GreenGeeks that they couldn’t solve. It was a lot more complicated than just one problem, or even their laissez-faire approach to changing settings on my site without telling me, it was more of a governance issue and I finally had to bail on them. I’m still using them for one site that has low traffic, just until the prepaid balance is used up, and then I’ll migrate it over to my new host.

Because I did indeed find a new host, as I said…I moved to WebHostingCanada. And things were going along pretty well with them.

I had an error at one point, one that I haven’t resolved yet, where my WP-CRON (the file that regularly runs a set command at a set time) doesn’t want to post “scheduled” posts.  » Read the rest

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Looking for data visualization tools in all the wrong places…

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
January 9 2017

So I confess that once upon a time, I paid for some of my living expenses through the fact that I knew how to work a computer for things like graphics and formatting. No, seriously, back in the early 90s, it made me stand out from other people, the fact that I knew how to work Lotus 1-2-3, Word and WordPerfect, dBase IV and, drumroll please, Harvard Graphics. At the time, I think it was version 3.0, and while people could do very basic graphs in Lotus, the real trick was to choose a variety of simple graphs in Harvard Graphics, add your data, and voila, you were good to go. Back in ’93, for my first job at DFAIT, we did a presentation for Cabinet where all the graphs were done in HG, in colour, and there were about 30 of them. Blew the Cabinet people away, colour slides. In government.  » Read the rest

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WordPress, missed schedule, and why I don’t run my own server

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
January 4 2017

The other night, I was browsing my posts list in my admin panel on the website and noticed something odd — my scheduled post for yesterday morning didn’t actually post. And right next to it in the internal WordPress admin panel was a nice little red warning called “missed schedule”. I had seen this before and thought it was just a glitch, no biggie — just click publish now and it goes live. No problem with the post, it just didn’t go live when it should have. I don’t often schedule future posts when I’m writing detailed posts, although I might change the time stamp to 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning even if I’m writing it at 1:00 in the afternoon, like now. Just a small quirk I do to manage an indexing protocol that checks the time stamp, no real reason.

However, from time to time, I will write a bunch of posts all at once, and I want them spread out over several days.  » Read the rest

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