stargirl-designs.com Blog

Wow, I haven’t posted in a long time.  Laziness…

DC Web Women have made me co-chair of the expos committee.  I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing!  I’ve never done anything like this.  Currently we are signed up to do a booth at the Government Video and Technology Expo in December.  We’re also in talks with a few other expos.  Guess it’s a good way to get the word out about DCWW.  And for our members to make contacts.  It will all be a first for me.  Hope I get the hang of it !

I’ve moved all my photos to Flickr. It’s SO much better than my old online album.   Much easier to work with and organize.  And of course, you can easily access other people photos, on just about any subject.  Cats, New York, lighthouses, any thing you can think of.

I’m starting to take photography very seriously as a hobby.  I went on my second Washington Photo Safari a couple of weeks back.  Architectural treasures of Pennsylvania Avenue.  It was fun but incredibly hot.  Not a lot of shade on Penn in June!   Anyway, I’ll probably be talking about photography here.   I was going to keep it just web design and web-related stuff but what the hell.  It’s my blog!

The first thing I need to do is get a better camera.  I was thinking of getting a Canon A700 but after one of the other people on the Penn Ave. safari let me look through his camera I’m leaning towards that one: the Canon S2 IS.  It’s still point and shoot, but very SLR-like, with a 12x optical zoom.  My current camera is a cheap Vivitar I got at Target for less than $100.  It’s not bad, I’ve had a lot of fun with it, but it doesn’t do much and it’s got a crappy digital zoom.  It will do, though, until I have $300 to spare for the S2.

I recently become aware of a new kind of web advertising practice. I’ve only seen it on one site, although I’m sure others use it. And it is positively VILE. The person who thought it up should burn in hell. The site I’ve seen it on is ScienceDaily. For example a story on Neptune’s moon Triton has green underlined links in the text. These are NOT links to related stories keyed on the highlighted word, but instead rolling your mouse over them brings a pseudo-popup window that contains a link to a site wanting to sell you something that has perhaps a most tenuous connection or association with the underlined word. I can tolerate ads before, after, on sides of, or even as floating images in the article. But sneaking them into the text itself? That is so many forms of disgusting…

Thankfully, if you have the Adblock and Adblock Filterset.G extensions for Firefox (no one should use any other browser), this stuff gets blocked automatically.

I went to a steering committee meeting on Wednesday of DC Web Women, an organization of women who work in the web field.  The main part of the organization is a mailing list, where we talk about web stuff, technology, jobs, etc.  But it was great at the meeting to hear about all the other stuff they do, and just meet all of the women who run it in person.  I am now signed up for two workshops and plan to offer my services to help with outreach.

The first workshop is on PHP.  I took a class in it years ago, through HWG, but I could definitely use a refresher.  We are in the process of converting our website at work to PHP, so it will come in handy. The other workshop is just for fun: tips and tricks for digital photography.  I love taking pictures but I’m a complete amateur without much of a clue about what I’m doing.  I get some great pictures every once in a while but I’m sure it’s just luck!

My new business cards finally came this week, and I picked them up this morning. I’m very happy with how they turned out.  Vistaprint does good work.

Rented a P.O. Box last weekend. I had thought there weren’t any UPS Stores near me, but a new one opened nearby that wasn’t even listed on their website yet. It’s very convenient so I’m happy. And I ordered my business cards. They won’t have the same colors as my website but hopefully that won’t be a problem.

Now I just need to work on the website. I think I will tackle my CV first. I know alot of my astronomy experience isn’t really relevant to do web design, but certainly all the programming I’ve done along the way is.

Mundane stuff to talk about here, but what the hey. Just making notes on how things are developing.

Ok, what do I say. I’m the Stargirl and I’m trying to start a part-time web design business. This is in addition to my day job as an astronomer for the Navy. I’ve wanted to do this for several years but have never quite gotten everything together. Well, I’m trying to change that and this blog is a start.

One thing that has recently lit a fire under me is joining the DC Web Women mailing list. It’s great hearing all the women talk about their experiences in the field, all the stories and questions and tips. I actually only heard about the list because I saw a link to it on the website of a classmate in the CSS 2.1 class that I am currently taking.

Just last night someone asked me for a business card and I didn’t have one to give her. Urgh! Need to get those and my website done. Lots of work to do…