I wanted something relatively mindless but productive to do this evening. I decided that a new background image gallery for my background image site, Symmetrical Backgrounds,  would fit the bill.

I wanted some happy stuff, so I decided to make a gallery of colorful backgrounds. Some of them may be too colorful to ever find an application but they are available as options, anyway. To find images on which to base my backgrounds for this gallery I did a Google search for Colorful Pictures and hit the images link. There was a good selection from which to choose.

To make the symmetrical tiles I take a small area of the image and make a cut. Then I flip and stitch a couple of times to make the final image. My photo editor has a panoramic function that I use to stitch the parts of the images. If there is a design in the portion of the image that I choose there can be some interesting geometrics in the tiled background. Check out the Colorful Cuts Gallery.

I use Irfanview for an image editor. There is a built in function to produce html pages. I have modified the templates for use on my sites. The gallery pages that are produced use the subject image as the background image for the page.

I just noticed this evening that Irfanview can be used as a color picker. If you open a file in the window and click on a color that color is displayed as an RGB and html number. This is a feature that I will use from time to time in my design work. I wonder what other wonders lurk within the program, or many of the programs that I probably don’t use to their fullest potential.

I have added a new page to the Mixer in a Box site, the Z-Mixer page. There is a screen shot of the whole Z Mixer strip. I put the photo in a scroll box to give a visual representation of the Z Mixer in the SAC GUI.

To create the image I took screen shots of the various sections of the Z Mixer and used my photo editor, IrfanView, to stitch the screen shots together into one continuous image. IfranView has a panorama routine that will do this. If you look closely you can see some of the seams, but the representation is pretty good.

I intend to add a few more pages to this site in the near future.

While I was fussing with the site I did a few minor tweaks to the code and found that I had not activated the comment system. I have added quick links at the top of the pages to the comment box, so it was important to discover that the system was not active, and correct that situation.

I selected four feeds and put them up on The Closet Online site last evening. I put one feed on the front page and repeat it along with three other feeds in a new ‘Fashion News’ section of the site. While I was there I tweaked some things about the site a bit.

I think that the color scheme that I used for the site probably does not really work as well as it might, considering the direction that the site has taken. I will probably change that to something more appropriate. I like the way that it looks, but I went to another of my sites last evening and thought that I may have the backgrounds reversed between the sites. The other site is the PC Application Store site, check it out and see what you think. Just leave a comment here with your opinion. Thanks.

I have also added a feed from this blog to my personal site homepage. (And in the process noticed that I had screwed things up with the blog, so I am off to see if I can figure out what I have done here!)

So, I found the problem with this blog and it is now displaying properly. I had grabbed a logo for something that I mentioned in the post and got a bunch of extra code. I deleted the spare parts from the post. Luckily I now have enough experience to recognize what the problem was at the code level. If I didn’t know a little about the code I would have had no idea why things were screwed up.

I also added a good news feed to the homepage of MC Rally. I had found this feed the other evening when I first started checking into the possibilities. When I checked the site, after uploading the modified page and associated files, I noticed that all the articles listed in the feed had the current date. The content is timely!

As I work with these things a bit I am learning some things. Some of the feeds are not updated on a regular basis. A lot of the feeds will not display in my RSS reader. I load them into a test site that I have set up to check. I tried on my local server, but they do not display here. Probably the software lacks a feature that would allow that to happen.