Archive for the “General” Category

At the risk of sounding egocentric (and I swear that’s not my intention), here you have two self portraits made in different styles.

So, as I am not very close friend to be on photos, this way you can say you’ve seen “my face”

Click on the image to enlarge

Another sample of a couple steps before the final result. Here I show the initial pencil and one of the two faces almost finished. Don’t know why, but personally I love the contrast of part of drawing watercolored and the other just with the pencil and I almost always do photos to my drawings in that state, before finalizing them. What do you think?

Some data for those of you interestend in such things ( I have been asked several times) is that most of my watercolors are done on Canson Montval 300 grams paper and with an old Schminke watercolor box for which I have much affection even though it’s made powder.

You can see the final outcome of this drawing in particular on my Watercolor Gallery

Click on the image to enlarge

At last the blog is completely updated. Despite the shortage of votes, on the other hand normal in a blog that disappeared after 6 months, to be born again, I have decided to maintain the template “Vintage”. Adding a few more plugins and creating a Creative Commons license for the content of the blog (you can see it at the footer of the blog and in the near future, in the About page that I will create) the blog is ready to concentrate “exclusively” in the content. Well …… ahem, I do not know if this happens to other bloggers but personally, once you begin to personalize your blog, rapidly becomes a vice. Before I get into this I rather knew nothing about things like CSS, SEO, PHP, XHTML …… and now it has become one of my favorite readings, thanks to blogs like Anieto2k, Xyberneticos, Planeta wordpress, Ayuda wordpress plus few more, domestic and foreign. Thanks to them i’ve gone deeper into the changes of my blog. In fact, thanks to these readings, I was able to validate this blog in the W3C (as of today), except some of its pages due to small things like a wrong line break tags.

Finally, I must strongly recommend (again), for those who want their blogs in several languages, the xlanguage plugin. Of course, it does not translate automatically, you have to write content in several languages for yourselves, but apart from that it has the great advantage that even feeds are served to the user in the language you choose when you access the site ….

Finally, thank everyone for the part you played and I hope that this blog will soon cease to be a monologue with myself.

At last I’ve finished updating the blog and, as you will see, I’ve changed the template. I did so because I found the perfect template: Mandingo. A theme incredibly customizable and without having to touch a single line of code of the template’s key files. This template has been prepared so you can introduce the amendments in a section of the options page specifically prepared for this, among other wonders: SEO optimization , several color schemes , dynamic layout … in short, better going to it’s page and try the demo. As always, the high customization allowed was not enough for me and I’ve changed it a little bit more. And finally I was with two different designs in my hands for the blog. And here is why the title of this post. That’s because I like both so much that I don’t know which one use …. because they are totally opposite. One is “modern”, based on the scheme “orange” included with Mandingo and the other is more similar to the one in my old blog (few post below this one), and is a completely new layout (another one of the wonders of Mandingo, you can add your own schemes).

The fact is that I can’t get decided ….. because I like both and opposite poles. I use watercolors and the computer, I like to illustrate fairy tales and to do interfaces designs, I like the Lord of the Rings and Iron Man, classical music and NIN, fantasy and scifi …… you get the point, don’t you?

So I ask you, the ones that are reading this: which one you like best?. Below this post you have screenshots of both designs, “Modern”, the orange one and “Vintage” the other. And because I know that sometimes you don’t have the time to write a comment, I have included a new plugin WP_Polls so I can show a poll so you just have to choose one option and vote.

So …… Which one do you prefer?

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Well, apart from the “joke” of the title that probably won’t be understood if you’re not spanish (and probably they won’t understand either) I have already done most of the updating. I’m up to date with the version of Wordpress thanks to the magnificent Wordpress plugin Wordpress Automatic Update. In addition I’ve added some new plugins and I’m in a try-out period to be sure nothing fails. Fortunately the theme fSpring Widgets by Fredrik Fahlstad even with my modifications, that let’s face it, are not expert ones, works perfectly (as far as I can tell) with 2.51 version of Wordpress

Now the only thing left to be done is to replace the Babel plugin I was using until now to write this blog in two languages, with the xLanguage plugin that I discovered recently and seems to allow the blog to be totally bilingual, translating all: categories, pages, Feeds, etc.. and not only the posts. The only problem is that it seems far more complicated to implement and I am still studying it because I have to add  some localization files and don’t know exactly how many nor where (the only one I have is the spanish one that I put on /wp-content/languages/). Well….. everything  for internationalization.

The new plugins I used and I’m testing are:

• Admin Drop Down Menu - by Ozh, which allows a much more comfortable dashboard for the administration of the blog.
• Google XML sitemaps - To create a site map (obviously) that is more friendly with the search engines (essential)
• Maintenance Mode - To don’t drive you crazy when I’m making changes to the blog.
• WP-EditArea- by the Spanish guy anieto, it allows a much more friendly edition of the theme archives inside the wordpress environment, acting as a code editorWell, That’s it for now, I’ll keep you informed