Vandyke Learns to Keyboard

Pasting from Word and other places

vandyke2004 — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:04:28 +0000

Have just had to spend a couple of hours editing the cr*p that gets pasted in from Word and other places without you realising it.

I did all my notes for Heroes and heroines in Word first then cut and pasted.

Mistake.

Code is still messy on those pages but at least you can read most of the words on the page now…

Heroes and Heroines Wordle

vandyke2004 — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:12:23 +0000

Trouble with YouTube

vandyke2004 — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:10:44 +0000

I haven’t used it before except to view other people’s stuff of course. I had a lot of trouble getting an mp4 file to upload see page 03:After Effects Alphabet. I tried other file formats but most of them wouldn’t upload at all despite their file types being listed by YouTube as being OK for video. The mp4 took ages, hours, to be ‘cleared’ by them – I don’t know what they do to the files once they’re uploaded but it must be v v v complicated…
If anyone knows any tips for getting videos to upload more easily, please let me know.

Aaaaaaarghhhhhh……

vandyke2004 — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:23:50 +0000

$20 p.a. for smallest space upgrade (5gb) – which includes letting u upload audio files and … $60 p.a. to upload videos. Yes, that’s right, you heard right. $60 What a rip off.

Well, never mind, pix will have to do. And maybe a link to YouTube.

Line breaks and audio/video in WordPress

vandyke2004 — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:07:54 +0000

Just discovered that WordPress does not really like you deciding for yourself, either in html code or using the wysiwyg editor, where line breaks should go. I’m using this code at the mo

but sometimes it seems to get stripped out of the html when you've gone away from the code view then back to it. There are fixes around in the form of 'plug-ins' but I've yet to understand how you plug in a plug-in, so that'll have to wait for another day. I've also just discovered that in order to put up an audio file you have to get more space, paid for I presume, even if u don't need it, and in order to put up a video file you also have to pay for that. Just about to investigate how much. Please expect small explosion approx 5 miles west of Denbigh town anytime soon.

Juxtaposition finished …

vandyke2004 — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:49:12 +0000

… at last!
Spent all day finishing the photoshop-ing of the last image – Seismic Shift. See it at the end of the Juxtaposition page. Now, what was the next subject we did? Oh yes, Illustrator/ After Effects I think, to make the Animated Alphabet. Watch this space.

Categorising page links in WordPress

vandyke2004 — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:34:01 +0000

You can’t. I’ve just spent an hour or so Googling this thorny little number and checking the wordpress forum and have concluded that you can’t split your list of links to pages into categories. (Unless you install and learn how to use a plug-in, then it may be possible, but that seems a bit complicated.) So my lazy way is to number the pages that relate to sections of the course, so they appear at the top of the alphabetical list of page links. I’ve retitled the one on wire modelling so that it starts with 01. The next section of the course – Juxtaposition – will be 02 etc. The rest of the pages are ‘Heroes’ in alphabetical order.

After a long absence…

vandyke2004 — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:46:44 +0000

… the time has come to get on with this and add some info about all the other amazing things we’ve been up to since February. Anyway, the time has also come for an assessment very soon so we’d better make it look like we’ve done something, eh?

The second project we undertook was to make some images in Photoshop to show the effects of juxtaposition. See the ‘Juxtaposition’ link on this page.

Time for a review of Heroes and Heroines

vandyke2004 — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:03:41 +0000

…o how I hope u can paste from word or i might be here for a year typing it out again. Also time to get frustrated with trying to get the layout right here. See page(s) to the right on Heroes and Heroines.

9pm -ish … Well they’re all there but the layout of the blog looks rubbish now…i thought there’d be a way of grouping all those new pages together under a Heroes and Heroines heading but I don’t think there is. So it’ll have to stay like this.

O well, enuf for today.

It’s telly time now …

OK, things are (metaphorically) hottin up…

vandyke2004 — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:53:01 +0000

…The boss says it’s time to start recordin what’s been goin on at Rhyl Women’s Centre since last October. Well some of what’s been goin on, not everythin, natch.
Just my own attempts to keep up with the flurry of digital media activity that I’ve witnessed/absorbed/responded to/produced and been confounded by since this course started last October. A flurry only matched by that of the snow swirling past my window as I practise my keyboarding skills, sitting in my very messy computer cupboard, up a hill, somewhere in North Wales.
Oh btw, the course is Glyndwr University’s FdA Digital Media Design and Production.
So, I’m goin to add some pages on the various delights that the boss has introduced us to. So far they’ve included observational drawing/wire modelling (or ‘how to get your hands cut to shreds’), photography, Photoshop, juxtaposition/photo montage, Illustrator and animation with After Effects. That’s enuf for now, isn’t it?
See the first link, ’Observational Drawing/Wire Modelling’ in the right-hand panel.