Go Make Something

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Your Make It Mondays challenge is to create a piece of artwork inspired by coffee, tea, or your favorite hot beverage. Your goal is just to make something—anything at all. You can draw, paint, collage, journal, whatever. Let this be the week you stop making excuses not to create!

Have fun, and don’t forget to come back and post a link to your finished photos—or, you can upload them to the Make It Mondays Flickr photo pool.

This is my latest tool purchase: a Zutter Bind-It-All. It punches holes and binds with their double-O wire bindings. I haven’t played with it much yet, but I did manage to bind a bunch of index cards together to test it out.

Does anyone else have one of these? Do you like it? What have you been doing with it?

Make yourself a cup of tea, and settle in for an endless stream of vintage collage goodness, courtesy of the members of the Vintage Collage Art group on Flickr:

Comments are a wonderful thing. They give a blogger feedback on what they’ve written, and let them know that they’re not alone on the Internet. Writing is a lonely thing when you can’t tell if anyone is reading your words.

As I’m writing this, Go Make Something has over 1,600 approved comments posted by users. Like many blog owners, I moderate comments, so they have to be reviewed before posting—which means not everything that’s submitted gets posted.

I often think, as I’m flipping through comments, that people don’t realize what they are, and what they aren’t. Maybe this will help those folks along:

Comments should be just that: comments. They’re not supposed to be War and Peace. They’re not a tool for your to use to post your life story. They should be sentence or two, giving your thoughts on what you’ve just read. If you have more than a few sentences, perhaps your comment should become a post on your own blog. I do this a lot on my personal journal—leave a comment under the original post, letting the blogger know that I’ve read it, and I’m writing my response in my own blog, because I have a lot to say.

Comments should be relevant to the post on which they’re left. I delete dozens of comment submissions every day that have nothing to do with the posts under which they would appear. For example, if you leave a comment on this post, it should be about THIS post—not about something you’ve seen elsewhere on the site. If you have a comment about the Surprise Balls article, go to that article, and use the comment form on tat page—don’t leave it here.

Comments should be about the content, not about you. I delete a lot of comments that are all about the person who posted them, and have nothing to do with the article on which they’re posted. If you want to write about yourself, why not write on your own blog? The exception to this would be if a blogger asks you to leave information about yourself—like my current giveaway at Ten Two Studios, where I ask for comments about your favorite Christmas memories.

Comments should be exactly what you’d say if you were speaking to the blogger, face to face. The Internet often gives people a feeling that they can say anything they wish, with no recriminations. If you wouldn’t say it to me if we were face to face, why on earth would you leave it as a comment on my blog? Things that are mean, rude, confrontational, or that are aimed at the poster or other commenters more than the post should be left unwritten. Think whatever you like—don’t leave it as a comment. It might come back around and bite you later.

Today’s example of this: someone hit the Surprise Balls article this morning, and left the comment “you’re all idiots”. I’m assuming she meant that the folks who had left previous comments before her were idiots, but she could have been calling me one, too. What’s the point of leaving a comment like that? It has nothing to do with the article, and it certainly isn’t going to be approved to appear on the site.

Comments should not be used as a tool to promote your own site, blog or business. I delete all comment submissions that are nothing more than “visit my site” messages. However, there are plenty of links to other people’s blogs on this site, left with comments. If you look at the comment form on this post, you’ll see there’s a place to fill in a web site address—most comment forms have this. When you leave a comment, this converts your name to a link to your site. Leave a relevant comment on a properly filled in comment form, and it’s a good way to get a link to your site posted. Leave a comment form that does nothing but pimp your site, and most bloggers will do what I do: delete it, while quietly calling you ugly names under her breath.

Ideally, comments should be positive and helpful, as long as the post is positive and helpful. If a blogger has written an article you find helpful, or posted artwork you enjoy, leave a positive comment to encourage her to do so again.

Did that help? Feel free to leave your thoughts on this post!

Enter a magical world created by Texas artist Stephanie Rubiano, filled with winged figures from a bygone eras:

I visit a lot of blogs in the course of my work week, whether it’s checking pages that have linked to my various sites, reading articles that friends have suggested, looking at the artwork done for the various challenges, or just random surfing.

One of the most annoying things I encounter is blogs that have added auto-start music to their templates. These sites are slow to load, because they have to load up a music player, and they’re loud enough to make my dog bark. If I’m really interested in staying on the blog, I have to hunt down the player, and switch it off. More often than not, I just abandon the site to shut the music off.

If you have a blog, and have added music to it, please, please, PLEASE don’t set it to start as soon as the page loads. It’s startling. It’s annoying. It’s not workplace-friendly.

Just say no to music on blogs!

It’s that time of year again…

The annual printable image countdown to Christmas will begin on December 1st. Each day until Christmas, a new printable image will be revealed. Previous countdowns have included collage images, gift packaging, tags and tag pockets, faux postage stamps—well, pretty much anything that falls out of my head onto my graphics tablet.

The countdown happens here. Bookmark that page, post a link to it on your blogs, and then get ready to download an armload of printable images!

This week, I’ve found quite a few links to Go Make Something in blog posts that contain finished project images from this site. That’s a big no-no.

Under the terms of use, reposting any content from Go Make Something is prohibited. Capturing images, uploading them to your blog and using them as eye candy is also prohibited. The images on this site are meant for use on this site only.

In general, if an image is not your original work, don’t post it. So, if you’d like to link to, say, the Surprise Balls article, why not just make a suprise ball of your own to show off, instead of stealing the photo of mine?

Having said that, there are ways to use images that aren’t yours in your blogs. Flickr has a very handy Blog This option that allows you to post images someone else has uploaded to Flickr. If the Blog This option appears above the image, it means the person who has uploaded it is OK with it being blogged. If it’s not there, it’s been turned off, and you’ll know that you shouldn’t use it. (This does not mean you should capture images from other people’s sites and upload them to Flickr to use them. That’s prohibited by Flickr’s terms of use.)

I often showcase groups of images from Flickr using badges—basically, a visual RSS feed of the image group I’ve chosen. This is more technical, but if you know how to work with badges and feeds, you’ll be able to work it out. This is a handy community feature of images uploaded at Flickr.

There you go. Miss Manners says don’t use other people’s images unless their sites offer a community function that allows image sharing.

I’ve been writing on the Internet since 1996. That’s a long time by blogging standards!

Over the course of moving from site to site, and changing from static HTML pages to Greymatter to blogging with WordPress, some things haven’t changed. There are certain basic ideas that used to be called nettiquette that haven’t changed in all the years of been writing. They’re the Internet version of say please and thank-you, don’t talk with your mouth full, and don’t cut in front of people in line.

And now, I’m going to write about them.

I decided to start adding articles about blogging ettiquette to this site simply because so many people now have art blogs. It seems like most of the members of my favorite arty groups all have them, in one form or another. It’s become so simple to set up a blog without ever visting sites that teach about writing online, that most people never learn those basic rules of blogging ettiquette.

Even those who don’t have blogs need to know a little nettiquette. If you visit blogs, leave comments, or want to share ideas from a blog with an online group, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do those things.

Rather than continue shaking my head as I surf, I decided I would write down what I know, to help those who haven’t read dozens of articles about online communication catch up. I want everyone to be a good blogger or blog user, and to have a successful experience—so, maybe some of the stuff I’ve picked up over the years will come in handy.

This week’s Make It Mondays challenge is to create a piece of artwork inspired by Autumn. Whatever you want to make is fine—an ATC, a gluebook page, an altered book layout, a card, whatever. Your goal is just to make something. When you’re finished, post a photo of your work on your blog or photostream, or to the Make It Mondays photo pool at Flickr.

Good luck, and don’t forget to come back and post a link to your finished photos!