New Twitter background

I've created a new Twitter background in Gimp from some of my favourite pieces I've submitted to my deviantART portfolio.

I do enjoy playing with Gimp and creating/manipulating pictures.

Too bad the visible part of the background on Twitter is dependant on the size of the screen you are looking at it on.

Oh well. All fun

M

Resolutions of 2009 (A reflection of the year)

So, last December I made the following new years resolutions: (taken from a deviantART journal entry)

- Take more photos. If I see a good target, shot it!
- Look into starting Karate again (it's been 7 long years since training stopped)
- Get (at least) 5km fit for Nov. 3rd
- Research more about what I do in my career. Better thy self.

Have I kept to them? Let's see.

Photography

I have been taking more photos, and some new work has gone up onto deviantART but not as much as I'd like. Now that I have a premium membership I hope that I'll be more productive with my photography. I may try the whole, take a picture of yourself everyday thing. Might force me to think more about it.

Karate

This one has just been flat out fail. I haven't started again. I suck.

Running

I probably could run 5km by Nov. 3rd, but I never tried. My training was going well(-ish) up until December. Kind of fell apart though. This has to be rectified, starting Jan. 2nd.

Career

Over the past year I have learnt to be more confident in myself and my abilities when it comes to my job. I'm still finding that sometimes holding myself back for too long before I force myself to "fake it 'til I make it". It's coming with time and experience, just got to keep it up.


What's in store for 2010? More of the same really, only a lot more of it. More photography, more training, more confidence in myself in my career. Nothing new, just consistent. I think it's easier to focus on things you are already doing than try to force new rules and regulations on yourself every new year.

I guess we shall see how I've done in 12 months.

Happy new year all.

M

Posting your DeviantART gallery to Twitter

I recently discovered someone awesome and have decided to share.

I use TwitterFeed to post new blog entries, such as this one, to my Twitter profile. This is much more efficient than having to manually go and do it myself. What TwitterFeed does is watch an RSS feed of my blog, and when it is updated, tells the (Twitter) world about it.

I wanted to do this for my deviantART gallery too. I saw that you can have an RSS feed of your DA journal, but I couldn't find anything for a deviants gallery. So I tried playing with the RSS url and guess what I did... Hacker extreme!! I managed to find the right url.

So, like with this blog, I simply added the RSS url to TwitterFeed and, like magic, all new additions to my DA gallery are now posted to my Twitter profile, with shortened link too.

Simple.

For those wishing to use this, the DA gallery RSS feed url is:

http://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3A{YOUR USERNAME GOES HERE}

M

NOTE: For those following me and wonder why my TwitterFeed posts have #fb at the end, this is for my Facebook profile. I'm using an application called "Selective Twitter Status" that watches my Twitter updates and pulls out ones with #fb and sets it to my FB status.

All these goings on, TwitterFeed watching RSS, STS watching Twitter... I feel a bit like Big Brother.

New Deviations

2 days in a row now I've updated my deviantart profile with new photos. (Well, I say new, they are from earlier in the year and I've only just got round to uploading them.)

I've got more to come. Going to see about uploading one a day until they are all out.

I really should take more photos. I really enjoy it and get real satisfaction from getting a good shot. It all comes down to time, and not having enough of it.

M