Sunday, January 12, 2014

Work Work Work..on the website

            Late last night I went to check something on my website and realised I was way behind in keeping it updated. So I started updating the pages of the website....what a chore that has become. I built it and maintain it but it is way larger than when I first built it 18 or so years ago. It's a beast!
           My website is divided into two galleries, pen & ink and painting galleries. The painting gallery is keeping me plenty busy when it comes to updating pages, adding new paintings etc. I spent most of today fixing glitches on pages and adding 8 more pages for new paintings. I still have other work that needs to get posted there but that's going to have to wait.

The ftp program I use to load pages online sometimes works slow. I was having a boatload of problems with my computer too the last few months. A slow computer and an iffy internet connection is no fun. I got a cool Christmas present from Linda that I was begging for, a Toshiba 3 terrabyte desktop harddrive ($80-90). I moved almost all of my images and all of my music files onto that which made my computer speed back up and work better...gigabytes and gigabytes of photos/music were moved over to that puppy but because it holds so much it hardly put a dent on it's storage capacity. I also made a complete backup of my computer on it too. I think I've used about 1/10th of it's disk space. I love that little black box on my desk. For the bad internet connection I bought a Netgear WiFi Range Extender ($60.). Plugs into any wall outlet halfway between my computer and our router and bam...a way better signal here. I went from a connection of around 20-30 on a good day to 80-90 now....much faster connection. Life is good. If you store a lot of image files, like most artists, having more storage helps a lot.

           

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ron, I love the Internet, but also hate the time needed to maintain it all! I too have an external hard drive where everything of any value goes. The important thing is to label all files logically, as the other day I was looking for something from 2003, and spent a lost of time looking in several folders all labeled Misc Art Scans 03!!! Have a great New Year of Painting.

Ron Guthrie said...

I know that feeling Maggie. When I started out I had one folder for "Art Images"....that quickly changed to Drawings 2005,2006...then Paintings 2006, Paintings 2007 etc. I'm really a stickler for filing things now thanks to those long searches a while back.

Reference photos are time consuming too. I now file all of those by location and date...a little easier now. It all keeps you on your toes, that's for sure.

Unknown said...

An arduous task ahead, indeed. Digitization of data is often tough, not in the procedure of the work, perse, but the physical aspects, both in terms of the actual labor, as well as the stress and the strain on the disk space. It's worth all the trouble though, because our works and our materials should live on in more than one way, and in more than just a single medium. Here's to hoping the storage systems you have on the ready are up to it.

Manda @ Scality

Ron Guthrie said...

Hi Manda,
I've pretty much transfered most of my images and it was a bit of a chore. The good thing is I have found things that I couldn't find before by trying to organize things along the way, yahoo! It has been well worth the effort and I feel very good about knowing my images and copies of my paintings are safe from a computer problem.

I actually backed up copies of final artwork on my computer, some CD's that are stored in a metal case and now on the added drive so 3 backups should work to protect those images.
Thanks !!