<$Tuesday, January 29, 2008$>
Growing Up is growing up (part 2)
| You might have noticed a little link up there in the logo banner to a little something called "the Growing Up Network." This is because I'm currently in the process of turning Growing Up into a network of three blogs: This one, renamed Growing Money; Growing Healthy, my health and fitness blog; and introducing Growing a Home, where I'll blog about my journey to buy a house and turn it into a home. These blogs are all connected via a new home page. My next step will be to set it up with its own domain, but that won't happen until after payday. I'm pretty pleased with how the home page turned out. My biggest limitation toward designing my own web pages since my computer died was the loss of my Photoshop program. I did the majority of my designing in there, and then just futzed around with the HTML until the finished project came as close as I could get it to the Photoshop design. I know all about GIMP, and once we replace our computer, I'm sure it will take care of all my web design needs. In the mean time, though, since I'm primarily stuck using borrowed computers for all my online business, anything that has to be downloaded and installed is out of the question. Thankfully, the internets have caught up to my needs by providing free web based image editors, and they have come a long way. I started out using Picture2life (aka editmypicture.com), and while they've grown a lot in their functionality since I first started using them, they have an unfortunate tendency to crash or freeze up in the middle of editing my pictures. I recently discovered Picnik. It appears to be more reliable and user-friendly than Picture2life, but the free version is fairly limited if you want to use it in a design capacity. The paid version has a lot more functionality, and I thought $24.95 a year was a pretty reasonable price to pay for those extra functions. Still, I decided to keep looking. Yesterday I found Phixr, which turns out to be almost exactly what I wanted. It's very close to Photoshop in both function and form, and I was really impressed with how much I could do with it. The only drawback I could see was that it doesn't have a great selection of fonts to choose from. I got around this by combining it with the other two programs mentioned above. Between the three of them, I could accomplish pretty much everything I needed. In a pinch, there's also always Big Huge Labs' Flickr toys, with their motivational poster generator, ID badge maker, picture framer, and more. I used their magazine cover generator to create the home page for JMBauhaus.com. This one is a lot of fun to play with. With all of the web based applications available these days, you could easily get away with not even having any office-type software on your computer. I'm sure Microsoft is just loving that. I know I sure am. |
