Yzabel / January 19, 2007

Website: The Fantastic Written Works of… Me

Until today, I had only mentioned it in a couple of places, but now that I’ve more or less finished building it, I’ve realized that I haven’t even written a word about it here on the Y Logs! Time to change that, I say.

(To those who’ve already seen a similar announcement in the past days: you can stop reading here, there’s nothing new under the sun for you.
Also: the website is mostly in French. Sorry about that. I’m focusing it on my career in my native country, that’s why… but you can still have a look if you wish, I don’t mind participation in English, and I will of course answer in English as well.)

More than one year ago, I had already mentioned my little yzabel.net domain name, and had vaguely used it for a purpose I’ve given up on since then. However, recently, I’ve decided to really do something with it this time, and not a pitiful blog. Therefore, I took on the opportunity to test a certain CMS and design a new site, a site that’ll be focused on my career as an author (amateur as well as upcoming one, because my dreams are strong and my pen very industrious)

.Contrary to my writing LJ, I’m not going to note down there a detailed account of how well my writing is going (or not). I want it to be a little more… let’s say ‘open’. On the other hand, I’m seriously toying with the idea of publishing Unsung Heroes on it, since I can’t do much with that story in France anyway. And Unsung Heroes WILL remain in English.

If you’ve visited Yzabel.net one year ago and found it completely lame (which I easily understand), or even if you had never seen it, this is the kind of new things you’ll find on it. And I do hope that one day, that page will become “the website of famous author Yzabel”. /smile/

Yzabel / August 25, 2006

Deep Magic

I don’t know how late I am exactly on this topic, since I only noticed it today on the Niltoy forums. In any case, for those of you who knew this e-zine as well as for those who had never heard of it, Deep Magic is closing down after August 31st, and in the process, they’ve made all their previous issues free for download. It’s sad news–I didn’t knew this website, I admit it, but now that I’ve heard of it and had a peek, it seemed pretty interesting. The magazines contained articles, short stories, interviews of both famous and non-famous writers, and even an ongoing novel, from what I could see just now.

Current and previous issues are available here.

Yzabel / January 23, 2006

Nice Review

With my Internet connection behaving in quite a hectic way during the past week or so, I hadn’t really kept up to date with many posts, blogs and the likes (as could be seen easily enough–it’s Murphy’s law in action: when the connection drops dead, it’s always from 6pm to the next morning!). This is why I only saw this today: a nice little review on BloggyAward. What needs to be said is a warm “thank you”, I guess!

Yzabel / December 15, 2005

FYI: Yzabel.Net

A few months ago, I gave in and got a domain name with, well, my pen name in it, and found myself facing the following problem: what to do when you have a brand new Yzabel.net to deal with, but nothing to put on it? Granted, this webspace has been put to use for more than only a handful of pages (I direct other domain names to these, is all), but it was the entrance one, the index.html, that I didn’t know what to do about. I contemplated migrating my illustrations site, but what for? Paradygma does very well where it is now. A writing site, maybe? Sure, but what to put on it? I can’t afford to give away first print rights on everything I write, and if it’s to publish a couple short stories only, it’s not really worth it.Thus, for anyone who’d be interested, Yzabel.net will, for the time being, feature announcements regarding my available blogs, websites, updates, and the likes (yes, including Paradygma). I figured out it might be easy enough to keep everything in one place this way.You can start stalking me now.blogging, internet

Yzabel / December 13, 2005

Misunderstandings Or Real Attacks?

I’m pondering this matter today, after having considered a discussion I’ve had (well, started, too) on a forum in the past few days.The thread itself turned out in an unexpected way. I was ready to wake up to a flood of insults and to an angry mob flaming me for my “evil” views (which all readers here know of: I don’t want children, and am tired of seeing certain people trying to persuade me into it); instead, I discovered that a place I thought ridden with angst and immaturity was in fact also home to a good deal of sensible people respecting others’ opinions.Save for one.Read More

Yzabel / December 5, 2005

The Power of CSS

I really need to find a good book regarding the art of wielding stylesheets to their full extent. I’ve only used them for basic formatting, I admit, and this is a shame, since there’s just so much I could do with them if taking the time to dive deeper into it.

Recently, I was flipping the pages of an old computer arts-related magazine that I had grabbed at the office (or was it at school?) and never finished; that’s when I stumbled upon an article mentioning effects that could be created on images through the use of stylesheets. The image on the right is a screenshot of what I obtained in my browser thanks to the Alpha filter, and to do so, a simple line of code did the trick. No need to fire off Photoshop or any other graphic tool. This is the reason why I want—no, I need—to learn more. I don’t want to remain standing here with the feeling that I’m brushing past something interesting, when I could in fact embrace it with both my arms.Of course, there’s the problem of browser compatibility, but this is where all the fun lies, isn’t it?

Yzabel / December 2, 2005

Website Update Finished

And I didn’t put any Flash into it.

Not much got written nor prepared today, since most of my free time has been put into finishing the redesign for Paradygma. It’s not totally done yet—I may decide later on to add some more information to the pictures, among other things—but at least, it’s now rid of the blah-blah, the frames and the iframes, as well as of the guestbook and news-with-comments that were attracting spammers and spambots faster than a porn mag does a teenager. Who needs these toys on a portfolio, anyway? I like simplicity.

PS – It’s in such moments that you realize that a Spam Karma or an Akismet is a two-clicks blessing.

Yzabel / December 1, 2005

Websites and Flash

As I was working on a redesign for Paradygma—among other things, I want to make it more of a portfolio, not a showcase for every tiny bit of an illustration I’ve done—I realized that I’m really not fond of Flash. Not fond at all.

Every graphic-designer, illustrator and their dog seems to have this liking to creating their webpages in Flash. Alright, it’s pretty. The first thirty seconds. After this, I grow tired of not being able to open links into a new tab/window, of having to cope with intros and images displaying square by square or line by line only, in other words: all the bling-bling. I’m not really for the tacky stuff, and my, some of these are tackier than the deco of all of our five local Chinese restaurants put together.Read More

Yzabel / November 26, 2005

A Color Scheme Generator

A quick link for today, but one I’ve found useful when it comes to web-design and picking the right color schemes: Wellstyled’s Color Scheme Generator.

Through the use of a wheel of colors, you can pick a color dominant, and see how other colors fare against it. Different options are available; whether you wish to prioritize the view of simple contrasts or to see how multiple color schemes are rendered against the chosen background, it’ll be easy to get a first idea of what a webpage will look like. A whole set of options also allows you to check how the displayed scheme will appear to color blind people (protanopy, full color blindness…). There’s much more you can do with it, but these are already a good preview of what this color picker lets you do.

I keep a stack of such little tools nearby. I always find them useful to see in a few clicks if the idea I have in mind can work or if it’ll be a visual aggression all by itself, this without demanding me to modify my stylesheets and upload them first.

Yzabel / November 7, 2005

Storyright – Story Planner

It’s only today that I’ve discovered this site, which is still in it beta version, but looks pretty interesting all the same: Storyright. From what I’ve seen of it, it’s a story planner that lets you write about your story, its themes, its plots and subplots, as well as fill out “character sheets” (the latter including various data fields: physical description, role in the story, education, likes&dislikes, etc). I’ve signed up for an account, although I haven’t toyed with all the functions yet, but all in all, this seems like a nice and free alternative to the expensive software out there such as Power Writer (which is good in my opinion, but I really don’t have 190$ to shell out for a planning software right now). Story outlines can also be exported as Word documents, so that your work isn’t totally dependent on the state of the server on which the site is hosted.So far, what bothers me with it is that it only seems to work as intended under IE, and that, well, you need to have an Internet connection to use it. For the rest, I haven’t tested it enough to tell. It looks like it refreshes fast, at the least.outline, planning, story, storyright, writing