What's Up at Mindful Webworks

Infrequent notes about the website.
Page 1 of 4, entries 1 - 25 of 83

2014 March

Mon 2014 Mar 31 New Directed Reversion Yantra CafePress Shop

New CafePress store for Directed Reversion Yantra which I neglected to mention last Wednesday. From this webwork.

Mon 2014 Mar 31 Overhaul Complete

Took much longer than I anticipated — and everything does, no matter how I inflate my estimations — but I've (mostly) finally finished the redecoration of the website's many views, those pages which show summaries or posts but aren't the actual posts pages themselves, if that isn't too technical. Anyway, there was a lot of furniture to move around.

I'm calling that done-enough, and hope to finally return to providing content, starting tomorrow.

Wed 2014 Mar 19 New Carrying Life Yantra CafePress shop

New CafePress shop for Carrying Life Yantra added today, one year after Carrying Life was first published.

Also, today, reverted the default "front page" on posts/previews views to the previews tab.

Wed 2014 Mar 12 New Racing Inward Yantra CafePress shop

New CafePress shop for Racing Inwards Yantra added today, one year after Racing Inwards was first published.

Wed 2014 Mar 12 CafePress removes "Blue" products

CafePress has blocked the products based on Blue, and that shop has been closed pending whatever this is about. What their robots emailed me:

We recently learned that your CafePress account contains material which may not be in compliance with our policies. Specifically, we prohibit the display or sale of products which depict the use of "hard core" drugs, content which may infringe the rights of a third party including copyrights and trademarks, and material which is generally offensive or in bad taste. Accordingly, we have set the content that we believe to be questionable to "pending status" which disables said content from being displayed in your shop or purchased. For more information on acceptable and prohibited content, please review our Content Usage Policy....

Let's see... there's nothing about "hard core" drugs, or drugs at all.

Although I did my best to make sure I used only public-domain images, there is a possibility that something I used was copyright, without my knowing it.

There certainly couldn't be anything in that patriotic, anti-tyranny content that anyone could find objectionable, except tyrants and haters.

So, must be the copyright. @@

Sun 2014 Mar 09 "Blue" graphic added to market

The graphic from Blue has been added to products in a new Blue Marketplace shop. A true blue reworking of the image is available on the Journal.

2014 February

Sun 2014 Feb 16 Tinkering Behind the Scenes

One thing leads to another. I've spent the last several weeks caught up in technical details.

Adjutants Wall DecalIt began with adding Adjutants images to the Mindful Webworks Marketplace (CafePress) store.

This led to an overhaul of every shop in the Marketplace, which had been woefully neglected since its inception. More work could be done on it, but the shops look a lot better, brighter, and like Mindful Webworks pages.

Also, all the prices were lowered to 5% above cost, so buy lots more stuff.

Next, I put a banner at the top of all the Mindful Webworks website pages, announcing the Marketplace pricing. Seemed a simple enough idea.

However, this caused several other blocks on some pages to look jumbled and out of place. There's a system of weights and pulleys behind your monitor screen, which arrange the various blocks on a page, the header, sidebars, footer, and content stuff. I ended up adjusting every weight and pulley in the website. Believe me, it's better now even if it mostly looks the same. Future disarray will be avoidable.

When that was all done, I realized there were some things that were just wrong here and there. The "Larger" button on Daily Doodles pages and home page, for example, did not always correctly point to the larger image. Other adjustments too obscure to bother describing also took a while.

The website itself may be only a frame for the content, but I like to think of it as a big ol' Mindful Webwork; the mothership.

I hope to be getting back to regularly spawning content in time for the website's 18th anniversary on March 17th.

2014 January

Thu 2014 Jan 23 Seven Adjutants at CafePress

Support Mindful! Buy stuff!

Opened today, a new aisle in the UB Comix shop at CafePress, featuring images from Adjutants — wall decor, yoga mat... more when I get around to it.

The Adjutants yoga mat is also in the Yoga Mats section. CafePress discontinued the yoga mats they used to carry, so all of the Yantra yoga mats that used to be in the store are gone. So, it's the only one now. For now. Moar when I get a round tuit.

Tue 2014 Jan 21 Daily Doodles III series to conclude Feb 1.

Just finished getting the last Daily Doodles III pages prepared for publication. The last new doodle will go up the last day of the month, and the first of February there will be one more special. Had fun. Learned a lot. Hope I entertained some folks.

2013 November

Thu 2013 Nov 14 New Daily Doodles Series

A third Daily Doodles series, planned to run only about three months, begun Nov 12.

Already, none of the new series is actually a doodle, but rather photo manipulations. But so far, they are daily.

Sun 2013 Nov 03 Searching for Sgt Schultz

Looking at my YouTube stats, I was surprised to see a spike just before Halloween. The surge was several dozen hits (which is viral for little ol' youtube.com/mindfulwebworker's uploads).

Near as I can discern, most of that was a little vid I did back in May, "Familiar Voices," which overlays (among others) Hogan's Heroes' Sgt Schultz's "I see nothing" voice on Eric Holder testifying.

The viewing spike was apparently generated by people, all over the country, independently searching for some variation of Hogan's Heroes and Sgt Schultz... and sometimes also Obama.

Make of it what you will.

[Retroposted to the date of my original comment on Ace of Spades blog.]

2013 October

Thu 2013 Oct 24 Doodles Done - Where'd 3 months go?

Concluded 1 year of Daily Doodles at the end of July, in case you weren't paying attention.

August was spent on some behind-the-scenes tinkering to make keeping up with Offsite Comments be less wear-and-tear on the mindful commenter.

September was spent on some behind-the-scenes tinkering to make keeping up with Playlists be less wear-and-tear on the mindful playlister.

October has been spent refining both programs, and bringing old clunky data into the new shiny system, n both comments (still ongoing) and playlists (completed!).

Along the way, pushing the old Paleolithic computer past its limits with some video production. 2013 Oct 13 Washington DC (v2) and its predecessor demonstrating how said limits affect results.

Have also been working on re-designing how the album pages work. Radical Incline is the prototype for showing all the content instead of just the teasers.

2013 July

Sun 2013 Jul 14 Patriotic Doodles conclude today

It started out with a small brown snake we found in the house, converted to a Doodle with a caption below the doodle about not treading upon, and suddenly Independence Day and the Spirit of 1776 had been celebrated with two weeks of red, white, and blue Doodles, with ten being based on the Bill of Rights.

Sun 2013 Jul 14 Daily Doodles wrapping up a year

I've filled one year of Daily Doodles — #365 will run on Jul 31. Whatever else they were, they were daily. Several series were spun, some to be featured in other albums. I hope to get many more images up on products in the Daily Doodle Marketplace on CafePress.

Sun 2013 Jul 14 Front Page Logo Changed

Recently changed out the main pages graphic from the old animated rainbow logo that's been there, perhaps, since the website's inception in 1996.

The new logo a) matches what's being used in Mindful videos, and b) has been called unreadable. Perhaps some reworking of the logo is in order.

The front page was also overhauled, in celebration of making changes.

2013 May

Sun 2013 May 19 The stagnation of the Blog Heap

Today, I declared the Blog-Heap o'Links as inactive, in the front-page album menu and on the header for the Blog-Heap pages. :(

The Blog-Heap, already neglected when Mindful made the transition to the dynamic version of the website, never really caught up. I have some ideas for reviving it, sometime, if possible.

Also, I remembered once again that I have this whatzup page. So here's this.

Still working on keeping all the plates spinning at once. Transport Future has also been idle for too long.

I have been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes website maintenance. Still transitioning to dynamic, really, and made some good improvements lately. None of which should be evident to the casual websurfer. But it helps.

2013 January

Sat 2013 Jan 26 Bugs squashed, styles improved

• It was brought to my attention (h/t Jack) that there were some little things not showing up to the general public, but looked right to us: the newly-created "previous" and "next" button thumbnail images, the last/next pointing images, and, oh my! all the embedded playlists! The webmaster really got chewed out for that one. Now fixed. Crazymaking kind of thing, leaves us wondering what else don't we know about that hasn't been showing up right for who knows how long?
• Tidied up the css a little bit, not that anyone should notice if it worked right, but still a lot of cleaning up needed. A work in progress.
• Working on a new cartoon series, starting in February.

Fri 2013 Jan 18 UB Comix and Radical Incline prettied up

• Finished cleaning up and checking links on all the UB Comix pages.
• All Radical Incline pages have been decorated with next- and previous-page buttons. Also many minor styling adjustments.

Tue 2013 Jan 15 More UB Comix upgrade

• Worked on both the hi- and lo-res versions of UB Comix #7: Mysteries of Sevens. Apparently, I had already upgraded the UB links on these pages. There were two bad links, now fixed. The link to Bible Gateway caused the framed versions to quit working, so that one link opens in a separate tab. Added the new pagers to #7 hi-res.

• Updated and checked UB Comix #8.

• Added the new pager and fixed some elements of all the rest of the UB Comix. Some behind-the-scenes work left on #9 through #11, and links to be checked, but basic appearances are final.

Mon 2013 Jan 14 More work on UB Comix

• Continuing to upgrade the UB Comix. Updated the pager, checked links, and generally cleaned and tidied up issues #5 and 6.

Sun 2013 Jan 13 UB Comix start to get a makeover

• Working on UB Comix — re-working the last and next buttons, attaching images properly (that's inside tech talk for I did it wrong the first time), cleaning up peripheral information, and verifying links. Managed to get through #1, #2, and Spirit Contact and Dreams, just the higher-resolution versions, and #3 & #4.

Sat 2013 Jan 12 Playing Tag

• Created a unifying menu and look for all the various tags pages, like Subjects.

Fri 2013 Jan 11 End of the Road gets a makeover

• Revamped the End of the Road pages. New, larger, color scan on the title panel. New greyscale (replacing monochrome) panels #2 and #3. All panels stripped of Daily Doodles birthmarks, text, border, and signatures. Altogether, makes the page considerably less cluttered and the comic story more readable. At least, that's the idea.

Thu 2013 Jan 10 New front page for Head Shop Comix etc.

• Created a new front-page view for Head Shop, and began moving all HS front-page links to the new view; I may have missed a few. The longstanding old page has been legacied for now. That means, nothing was done to it, but bookmark the new page.

Tue 2013 Jan 08 Tinkering with views

• Modified All Subjects so hover text now includes the subject's description, and parent term, if any.
• Modified All Media to better (I hope) display the results.
• Added All Sources of media for all the playlists.
• Added All Tags commingling Subjects, Sources, and Blog Headers.

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