A.G. Bloggin'

Happy New Year!

Wishing all the best to you for 2006!

Wishing for lasting peace and harmony among us all.

Wishing for a better world in which our children and all following generations can live.

posted by JanetS @ 11:39 PM 0 comments

Minor Corrections

I just noticed three bad Blue Vinyl Fonts links on the resources page and corrected them. I also corrected some info and link to Paint Shop Pro -- it's now at Corel and now in version 10 instead of 9.

You'll now be able to go to the correct pages. My apologies for the inconvenience of sending you to the wrong places earlier.

posted by JanetS @ 1:45 PM 0 comments

Holiday Wishes

Since I will be visiting family for an assortment of things including a niece's birthday and my brother flying in for the holidays, I want to wish all of you now a merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah, both falling on the 25th this year. And since I don't think I'll be near a computer on the 26th either, happy Kwanzaa and Boxing Day for those who celebrate or observe those holidays.

Me, I've been bad by not releasing any sets yet. Winter just started yesterday so I think I still have time to put out another wintry set. If not, then look forward to something for spring.

2006 will be more busy for me because I need to take an outside job to support my hobbies and other household expenses. Bye, bye jeans. Time to put on a business dress for those interviews!

posted by JanetS @ 12:57 PM 0 comments

Visitor 7500!

Another milestone reached today before noon PST. Happened sooner than I thought it would but how nice it did.

Visitor number 7500 hails from Nicaragua and surfs using a computer with Windows XP and IE 6. This visitor was using Google to find butterfly wallpaper. Unfortunately, all I have is the Butterfly Nebula wallpaper, so this visitor didn't stay long.

Thank you, anyway, for stopping in.

posted by JanetS @ 12:51 PM 0 comments

Snowflake Font

Around this time a lot of people search for snowflake dingbat fonts and how to use them. While I don't offer fonts at this time, I can point you to places where you can find those fonts.

P22 is a commercial font foundry. They offer a lot of cool fonts to buy. If you subscribe to their newsletter (and what fontaholic wouldn't?), you sometimes get free, limited use fonts. Their snowflake font was one offered awhile ago to us subscribers, but you can still download it on this page. Consider buying one or more of their cool, reasonably-priced fonts as well.

Chank! is another commercial font foundry that offers free fonts from their on-site and guest designers. A free dingbat by Spunk called Spunkflakes is your key to snowflake font heaven. Available in Mac and Windows formats. Consider buying for cheap, Chankflakes or FriskyFlakes (really cheap!), both available as Mac or Windows versions. Snowflake dingbats are also available in an open type package of multiple fonts for only $49 on their site.

Aenigma Fonts offers a PC only free dingbat font called Faux Snow. Click on View to see one example or on CS to see the whole character set. Clicking the name opens the download window. Another possibility is the font, 90 Stars, which actually look like five-pointed snowflakes to me. Check out the character set first.

You can also find a servicable snowflake (one style only) in the Microsoft Wingdings using capital T. It's not the prettiest snowflake but it has the requisite six-sides. I created a background tile using this font that you are free to download to use on your computer's desktop or a web page. Go to my patterned tiles page at http://www.arride.com/ptiles5.html to view and download this graphic.

How to use:

After you download the font, open the file into your fonts folder in your computer's hard drive. In Windows navigate to your control panel then open the Fonts folder. Once inside, click on Install font then navigate to your downloaded font. Be sure you've unpacked the font from its zip file first or else you won't see it to install it.

Most PCs using Windows will have a built-in paint program called Paint (duh) and you can use that to create a snowflake from the selected font. However, it is not a sophisticated enough program to create one as a transparent background .gif usable on different colored web pages nor with layers on another graphic such as a photo.

For that I suggest looking at some of the graphics software listed on my resources page. I might add that Paint Shop Pro is perfect for this purpose.

If you want to use snowflakes in a text document such as a letter, you won't have to worry about any of the above. Just use the dingbat like you're using a different font by changing the font selection in your document. However, keep in mind that unless your recipient also has the same font in their computer, they will not see the snowflake in the document as is. In order for the recipient to see a snowflake, the snowflake has to be added to the document as an image. A printout of the document from YOUR computer will have the snowflake, of course. This caveat is true of web pages also.

Those are just a few of the places to find snowflake fonts and use them. You can find more by searching in your favorite search engine or directory using the words, "font dingbat snowflakes."

(edited 11/27/2007 to add disclaimer in paragraph 9, on 11/28/2007 to add another font in paragraph 4, and on 12/14/2007 to add the link to a snowflake graphic)

posted by JanetS @ 6:18 PM 0 comments

A Change in Resources Page

Matthew Petty finally closed down his font site, Disturbed Fonts. All of his fonts are now in the public domain. I offer a download of his "Trash" font for both PC and Mac but you can also find this font and a few others at DaFont. I've changed the resources page to reflect the new status.

I managed to download all of the fonts he offered before he closed his site. I'm not sure what to do with them now, but I may open a font archive in the future that includes his fonts. A new web site will take more effort on my part and my life is changing in ways unanticipated a year ago. So, time will tell.

posted by JanetS @ 6:01 PM 0 comments

Down, Down, Down...

My web host reported a network outage at the datacenter on Dec. 11th as did my three site uptime monitors. One of them also reported an outage on Dec. 12th. Both outages lasted about one hour. No reasons given by the host.

posted by JanetS @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

Hmmm, Downtime Ag'in

This is getting old, folks. Downtime late Tuesday evening until early Wednesday morning for about an hour. Got a question turned into my host to find out what's going on, but I doubt I'll hear anything pertinent. Maybe the server is going kaput or there's too many sites hosted on it. Wouldn't doubt either.

Still trying to decide what set or next graphic to release. Busy month for me inside and outside of Internet. Hang in there!

posted by JanetS @ 2:00 PM 0 comments

Downtime Early Saturday

In the wee hours of Saturday morning, Dec. 4, the site experienced downtime of about one hour. Reported by all three of my site monitoring tools.

posted by JanetS @ 10:09 AM 0 comments