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Some stuff doesn't belong on the Plant and Creature pages, so it's here.

The beginning of my Gif collection (clipart type nature images) available for your personal use.

April 08 update: I got most of the making web pages glitches fixed, I've gotten a lot of practice with the new camera, and now I've discovered that the pictures look completely different on different monitors. I'm working on calibrating my monitor.

As my garden and my site grew, my photo collection grew too. After a few years it got nearly impossible to make new pages because to took too long to find the pictures I wanted for the page. Picasa is a free photo organizing software from Google; it comes in the Google Pack: With Picasa, you can scroll through thumbnails of all of your pictures at once, and assign whole batches of them keywords. Then you can type in a keyword, and find those pictures again when you want them. It's fabulous!

To change the size when you're looking at a site, you can hold the control (ctrl) key on your keyboard while you press the + & - keys. (View, text size, in the toolbar at the top also gives you larger and smaller options if you'd rather do it by mouse clicks.) Internet Explorer and Opera change the size of the whole screen, pictures and all, so the layout of the page stays the same. Firefox leaves the images alone, but changes the text size.

That's where I got stuck making my site; I figured out after making a lot of it that some folks couldn't read it all because the text went under (or over) the images when the text size got too big. I knew my design was dangerous, but I didn't know how to lay out the pages the way I wanted them and make the text shrink and grow properly, so I just left extra space for the text. Guess what - I didn't leave ENOUGH space to accommodate the various operating systems, browsers, monitors and resolutions.

The best solution I could come up with was to add scroll bars when the text got too big. I don't WANT scroll bars all over my pages, so I'm still designing with HUGE text, and displaying it for you with a smaller text. That method looks fine on some computers, leaves too much empty space under the words on others, and adds scrollbars to the text areas on the rest. Let me know how it looks on your computer; I'm aiming for a happy medium that works for most people.

It's interesting how differently the pages display depending on what web browser you view them in. Have you tried Mozilla Firefox? It's free.

Submit Photos to Shutterstock and make $$$!

I REALLY want a better camera, but, as with all of us, funding is too stretched with every possible thing going up except what we make. I'm giving Shutterstock a try and will try some of the other stock photo sites as I find time to go through my photos. If you give it a try too, please use this link: http://submit.shutterstock.com/?ref=225034 when you sign up with them; I'd greatly appreciate it! It'll send me a few pennies without taking any from you, as you can see on their page here: http://submit.shutterstock.com/refinfo.mhtml

Well... that was depressing... sent 10 photos, 10 photos rejected - same day answer, and on a Sunday no less... who's reviewing photos on the weekend?