well, while I’m waiting for the nameservers to propagate…

I suppose that I could try and write a post. I always get this far and can’t seem to do the job. I have so many things to write about, but go blank as soon as I click the start new post button.
I really need to send out an update for my few subscribers too.

Ok, so to try and get going.. .

hmmm.

Well, not to worry, they always say that anxiety makes it worse.

I am really glad to have got the site up and running, although it still needs work, I’m not saying it doesn’t.

I have known for a long time that I needed a new website, as the old one was, well, old! I think it was pretty good for a newbie, I slapped it together using rudimentary knowledge of html and css starting from a template from my old web hosting. I was of course, proud as punch at first, until I started getting people to go and check it out and somebody described it as well, quaint, I suppose is a reasonable translation from the original conversation, in Spanish. And I suddenly realised that I had just built a web 1.0 site, in the age of web 2.0 and my state of the art, was not in the same state as the art.

Then, having that sort of  mind, I fell into a long funk over her comment and stopped telling people to go and look and didn’t really recover for a couple of years. Then, although there had been some false starts along the way, recently I have been ramping up my activity and getting my act together and all those clichés, (true in the case at hand) and decided to do something about my web presence. I really wanted something like my acquaintance Ben Frost has, at his Ben Frost is Dead site. I assumed that as he is somewhat a success, his fantastic looking site, (which not co-incidentally looks a lot like my new one) was a professional job, which may have been quite out of my league. Anyway, thought can’t hurt to ask, and used his contact form to contact him and ask him who did it and how much he spent.

Right around that time I made the acquaintance of a gallery owner here in Madrid and arranged to make contact with him. He gave me his card  and I said I would email him. Seeing how the only email address I like to use with this sort of thing is the scott at spaingaroo one, I suddenly got all antsy about my old fashioned look at spaingaroo.com.

Not being able to wait, (and it had been like a week and a bit since I wrote to Ben) I decided to try a couple of Artist template sites, that are, you know, simple no coding required sort of things. I looked into the service at other people’s pixels, (I’m not going to directly link to them, but they are easy to find by a google search) but although they seemed earnest and the service looks good, I couldn’t see how to get any fullscreen images, which is what I had my heart set on. I then looked into another of those services that I had on my radar, from some time back, when I did the Art Miami competition, (which incidentally, was an enormous disappointment to me) which was the SeeMe portfolio sites, which had been bought up by Artists Wanted team, or so the story goes. I decided after a little experimentation, (very little really) to jump in and although they offered a monthly version, for some reason I opted for the year long service. (I’m sure I will figure out why at some point, everything happens for a reason, or not)

So to cut a long, and expanding, story short, I had only just got my Artists Wanted portfolio together, when Ben Frost replied to my email. Well, imagine my surprise when he told me that his site was a WordPress installation with a paid theme, and he said he had built it himself. I did the Homer Simpson duh, and in five mins with google had found the theme and after umming and arring for a week or so have gone ahead and got my version up and running.

So I will probably populate this site with a type of image and the other portfolio with some other ones. You know how hard it is to appear coherent. or do you?

Lot’s of love

scotty