I’ve been quiet lately because I’ve been recovering from major hip surgery in February. But I haven’t been idle.

I’ve updated the Gothla website for our third workshop and hafla weekend in mid-July 2009. This year, we’re featuring Ariellah, Morgana, Shakra, Asharah and Deva Matisa, internationally recognised exponents of gothic bellydancing.

PayPal has been expanding its merchant services. This year, I shall be able to download booking information directly and print out attendee lists for each of the workshops. Extra levels of security hopefully protect our account from fraud and unwanted chargebacks when someone wrongfully claims back money paid through their account.

I’m getting products ready for the Gothla shop, which is hosted by Spreadshirt, based in Germany. Spreadshirt works best with vector images, that is, drawings. We like to change the colour of our Gothla logo for our t-shirts each year and we would like to be able to sell a generic t-shirt based on the photo in our banner.

I experimented with a couple of programs that can transform photos (raster objects) to vector images.

I was particularly pleased with the results from VectorMagic, although it’s not cheap to download the software, which gives you more control than the free online conversion service. The Gothla logo converted without a hitch. I wasn’t able to reduce the complexity of the photo to a vector image equivalent which Spreadshirt could have used. But I suspect that I needed more knowledge of technique, such as reducing the photo to a layer mask in Photoshop before beginning to make the vector image in Illustrator.

The face of Gothla UK, a raster image

Vectorised version of the face of Gothla UK

Essentially, there were too many small elements in my vector version. The t-shirt process requires smooth, definite lines. Ironically, I could have got the photo printed on a light coloured t-shirt, but since the event is Goth, we require black backgrounds.

I did begin to learn something of how vector software works. I hadn’t used Adobe Illustrator before and was delighted to discover its many uses, like making unwanted backgrounds disappear. I think I’ll have another go using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator using ideas from t-shirt factory.

I’ve also had time and opportunity to read more. I’m currently learning jQuery, a Javascript library resource which enables coders to attach behaviours to element attributes in the same sort of way as CSS. The benefits of using techniques such as jQuery are their minimalist approach and friendly approach to web accessibility. Web surfers relying on screen readers should be able to read web pages without having to wade through screeds of Javascript code.

I’ve discovered Nettuts, a website featuring a host of web development tutorials which deserves very close scrutiny. Want to know about Ajax, or CSS, or PHP, or building content management systems? Make this website one of your resources.

And I’ve been twittering a lot. I find twitter extremely useful for picking up information and exchanging ideas. The growth in social networking has inspired me to devote a whole new page on my website to FriendFeed. This is where you’ll be able to find out what I’ve been saying on twitter and facebook, and what I’ve been bookmarking on deli.cious and stumbleupon as I’ve been surfing the web.

Google Reader has declared that ‘square is the new round.’ That was the message that I spotted in the Google Reader blog a couple of days ago.

As well as introducing its new favicon, the tiny square image that you should spot in the address bar, Google has revamped its online RSS reader to reflect calmer, less intrusive colour schemes, AND, square corners.

In the several workshops that I went to last year on online optimization and marketing and SEO, attendees were told that Web 2.0 was characterized by rounded corners. Since we were all there to learn how to increase our online profiles, we were advised to use Web 2.0 graphical elements.

I decided to use rounded corners for my right hand links. But I never really liked them. They looked clumsy on the page. So I’ve been glad to revert to my normal rectangular style today.

Google has a point. Any element on a web page that distracts the visitor from reading and scanning the content wastes the visitor’s time.

Google’s Online Reader has to present a lot of information. I am only following 35 blogs and news sources in my Reader but that encompasses hundreds of stories a day. Somehow, Google has to get that information to me on one screen, so that I don’t have to scroll unnecessarily.

The re-design of the Reader aims to direct the eye to the main content. Collapsible menus allow you to focus on what you want to read first.

Some people monitor far more blogs than I do. I wonder how much time they actually manage to spend working, because monitoring news sources is a time consuming task.

I’ve adopted another way of accessing RSS feeds with Google. If you have a Google account, you can design your own Google entry page, called iGoogle. I have added tabs which focus on topics of interest to me.

I am pleased to share with you my SEO tab which I use to update myself with posts from writers blogging about Search Engine Optimization. It’s very far from being an exhaustive list, but it’s a start.

And here’s a post from the Google Reader blog to show you how to start using Google Reader to access your RSS feeds.

Any questions, please get in touch.