I opened a new blog the other day, The Keyword Kove Blog. I wanted an alphabet soup background for this blog.

I found some images and made a few backgrounds from which to choose. Some of the designs were interesting so I thought that I could add some more soups and put up a gallery. I did this last evening.

The process that I use builds a symmetrical image from a part of a larger image. The result is an image tile that can provide a seamless background image for a page. The process produces some interesting geometrics. Often the subject picture is not recognizable as such but the background produced can have intricate designs.

Check out the new gallery at The Soup Kitchen Gallery.

I have done a few things around the hosting space that I have not documented here. I added a comment box and reformatted the FreeBird Leather Sewing site. I also added blogs to three sites that are tied to an article distribution service. There are supposed to be articles added on a regular basis. The service does not work as well as I had hoped. There were a few articles added initially, but the follow up is slow to non-existent.

Yesterday I thought of using Gem Stones as a basis for web page backgrounds. I found several pictures of various Gems that were usable for the purpose. I made my usual symmetrical images. I finished the job this evening and uploaded the results to the Symmetrical Backgrounds site. Some of the backgrounds are very bright and happy and some of them are more subdued. All in all, the new gallery is a nice addition to the site. There are some backgrounds that would take very special pages and some that could be used more generally.

The update to Symmetrical Backgrounds is proceeding apace. I have moved (locally) all the older images into the gallery format. The landing page has the gallery index as a tickler. There is one thumb from each gallery and a description of the images in the gallery in the center column. The thumb links to the index page for the gallery and I will probably add a ‘See the Gallery’ text link as well.

The original index pages for the various classes of images were very large. One advantage of using the gallery generator is that there are small file size thumbnails of each image. This will allow the index page to load much faster. There is also much less scrolling necessary to view the thumbs. All of the image pages are smaller, too, so the whole site should operate faster. People don’t like to wait for pages to load, although with expanding broadband usage this is less of a problem.

I still have to make some decisions and redo the menus. I am adding some banners, so at least a few must be selected. Then it will be on to the testing phase. I will test locally on my installation of xampp before I put this update on the web. It is a major rebuild of the site, and I am bound to have forgotten something somewhere.

If all goes well I may be able to upload the new site tonight. Of course, I will announce the event on this page, so subscribe to the RSS feed so that you will be advised when the event takes place!