The Joys of Gimp

I’m still trying to get used to Gimp, which seems great but has a lot more features for such a program than I’m used to. I’ve also only just managed to get an advanced camera, so the photos I’m uploading here are from a basic digital camera.

I’ve applied a fairly basic image distortion until I understand Gimp better. It should be easy enough to figure out which one has been distorted and which is the original.

        

The specifics of Gimp

Overall, I found Gimp quite confusing. I didn’t particularly like the interface, which I found worked against what I would expect to find in an open-source program, which would be immediately attractive to a first-time user. I found it messy and difficult to navigate, and a lot of the functions were hidden (or at least not immediately visible). Once I had managed to navigate my way around the interface, I did find some of the functions easy to manipulate. These options allowed my photographs to be more finally tuned (especially utilising the ‘crop’ function) as well as highlighting any blemishes. I found this particularly useful when considering the different manner in which images would appear on a website (as opposed to on your computer). Despite all this, the program that comes with my computer (iPhoto) managed most of the functions to an acceptable level, and definitely had a more user-friendly feel. I would love to find some sort of program that navigates the middle-ground between the two, and will spend some time trying to find such a program in time for my class next week.

My Introduction to WordPress

This is a blog to chart my progress at familiarising myself with aspects of DigiMedia. Setting up the blog was easier than I expected, although access to slides might have helped there.

Is Posting An Image Difficult?

Not really! This is the view from an apartment I used to live in, looking west over the Liberties.

How About Linking To A Video?
Again, this is fairly straight forward. I must admit, I wasn’t quite ‘new’ to this type of (basic) linking from an early, ill-advised livejournal account. Here’s a very interesting time lapse video showing the Northern Lights in Iceland. Click on the link, go for the widescreen option and relax.

Can we embed videos as well?

This is a very strange video from Casiotone For The Painfully Alone. It is interesting that it is posted twice on Youtube, one with nearly half a million ‘hits’ while the one I’ve linked to has only 6,000. I initially linked to the video with less hits as I thought that there wasn’t an advertisement, but subsequent viewings have shown that both carry advertisements.

My Initial Thoughts On WordPress

I like it. The site is very straight-forward, and very easy to navigate. The range of options for the look of your wordpress site (even the ‘free’ options) are numerous and cover a whole range of styles. The toolbars to edit your posts may seem overbearing at first glance, but their placing at the left (and right) of the screen means you can forget about them for the time being (while always keeping themselves in your peripheral vision, so that you don’t forget to clean up afterwards). The autosave function is a blessing while the little extras to personalise the whole thing (for example, the ‘gravatar’) make the whole experience pleasant.

Some minor dislikes would include some resistance from the site to painless linking occasionally. Sometimes it does not prompt you to enter a ‘title’ for your url link, which means you are left with an empty space instead of a link. Keeping an eye on this, however, will prevent it from occuring again.