Improvement in the Catalog feature and more to come.

We have been working on perfecting the Catalog feature and I think that Matt has it almost right. In the first cut you couldn't make a link to your public list, but now you can. Here is a little catalog I made of metal art.

We know that artists can't make a catalog right now, but we are fixing that. We are planning to use these lists to help navigation on the site, so making a good list will help people find good art and find the maker of the list too.

Let us know if there is something you like or don't like about it. We are in active work mode on it right now.

Care package from Gwendolyn O'Connor

Gwendolyn is a new artist on BG and has sold a few pieces of in her first month with us. Imagine our surprise when the post office delivered a box of homemade cookies from Hawaii from Gwendolyn!

Since everyone who works here (except for me) is young and active, the cookies were quickly consumed. For the record, I like to think of myself as middle aged and active. There were lots of cookies, maybe 40 or more? I managed to only eat 2 of them, so this is a moral victory.

There is a counter just outside of Todd's office where the public junk food is offered. My wife calls this leaving food out for the animals. We often have something good there, in addition to our free employee soft drink program.

Thanks Gwendolyn, those cookies were sure good.

A lifestyle artist - 81 square feet of house!

I was looking at a new clothing company's webpage, that I received as a link from a friend. Was looking at their blog and they had a little video about this lady who sold her house and made a new one on a trailer. Here is the video about it.

I getting bids to put solar panels on my house right now, but I'm not ready to live in a tool shed. Where would you hang your paintings? Where would you store your tablesaw? But it is an interesting idea of a better way to live. I'm planning on getting a great result through better technology myself.

Makes NYC apartments seems roomy.

Art show review - Bill Price's MFA show - comic

I thought it would be fun to take a few of the photos into a comic (using Comic Life on the Mac). Here is my first try. Click on the picture to see the big version.

Bill is just getting his MFA in Blacksmithing here at SIU and his stuff is good. It is really good. The whole show was birds in one form or another. I'm fairly sure I have seen one or two pieces that I like as well in other MFA shows, but Bill had 20 or 25 good pieces.

Hopefully, he will sign up and start selling here soon.

Time to reload your art - improved photo import

A couple of posts back Sharon Cummings pointed out that our photo importer wasn't doing a very good job. She was correct in telling us that we were losing more resolution then we should from digital photos.

When artists upload pictures, we slice and dice those pictures into the sizes and shapes we need for the site. When we first started the site up, we asked the artists to provide the thumbnails and other sizes we needed, and that was a terrible mistake (easy for photographers and very, very hard for everyone else). We went out and found a program that did the transformations and added it to the site. Until today, we haven't updated that program in several years.

Not only is the importer used to make the different sizes we use on the site, it also makes the photos a reasonable size. We really can't afford to download 4 and 7 gigabyte images, it would be way too slow. Our goal is to have photos at less then 300k in size, which should be good enough for computer monitors (based on today's technology).

Today we updated our photo importer to allow more resolution and clarity. If you want your photos to look better on the site, you are going to have to load them again. We are very sorry to put our artist through this, but we don't have any choice. The good news is that your work will look much better on the site.

Remember, our software will not allow you to delete the last photo for your piece of art. Load the new photo and then delete the old one.

We are happy to hear about what we are doing right and wrong. Please do comment, it helps us get better.

Chalkboard Art - guess you can't ship it?

A friend sent me a link to this story that ran in a Seattle newspaper about chalkboard art. Very interesting.