The new Glimbit.com

Finally pushed through the indecisiveness and created my little portfolio website. (Click “website” up above.) It’s a start. The Glimbit Lightbug came out of the process, and he’s received some compliments.

Tip: For developing CSS, I recommend CSS Mate, an addon for Firefox. It opens a sidebar with the stylesheet code and allows you to make changes and see your changes on the page. Sure you can use Dreamweaver, but I found that developing a template for a dynamic website like Wordpress was easier this way. I make lots of little changes to margins, widths, etc. in pixels, nudging a little here and there, and to see the changes on my dynamic site live was a huge help.

Top Posts for November

Based on the number of people that viewed the actual post page, not just the home page with the last 7 posts, the Illustration Friday content remain the most-visited. I participated twice this month, for “Scale” and “Zoo” and got some nice responses.

I don’t really know what the top posts were because I usually give the full post right on the front page. If I really wanted to know what people were interested in at the site, I would put a “(more)” jump after a brief introduction, forcing people to click and load and click and … I hate clicking. I prefer to keep things as quick and easy as possible.

I know that people like to see tips on drawing, for comics and from life. I’m anxious to oblige and continue to search bulletin boards (virtual and non-) and other places for word of figure drawing sessions in the Boston area.

Gutentag World!

After the U.S. and Canada, it turns out Germany sends the most visitors to this blog. I’d like to give a special welcome to those 6 people in Schwetzingen, Germany! See if you can ask the other 22,425 people in your town to stop by and say hi.

Strange Search Terms

This blog is showing up in image searches on google mostly, and I guess that’s fine for now. People sometimes find this blog when they search google or yahoo for “charcoal”, “portrait” and other drawing terms. I usually see many bizarre search terms, but this month I only saw one:

“John Krasinski is shy”

Spamalot

Had a whopping 374 scraps of spam this month, yet little of it was entertaining. I did enjoy this:

“You site very nice. Thanks owner.”

That was such a sweet thing to say, I almost unspammed it.

What’s Next?

Now that the Glimbit website is up and running, I’ve turned my focus to my comics portfolio. You’ll see some thumbnails and more sketches of Firefly characters and other space western types. I’m also thinking about starting up a blog devoted to information on drawing, covering different materials, different genres. There are some good blogs already out there, so I’ll have to figure out something to differentiate this new blog.

On the side, November has been a very encouraging month. Thanks, friends who visited often and posted well-wishes and feedback!