The perfect backdrop, Chickeymonkey’s Thumper jacket.
What’s not to love about blowin’ bubbles?
They’ll make you feel like a kid again.

Next time you’re at the store, pick up some bubbles,
and go blow.

It’s been a couple of months since I carried my camera around with any kind of passion to take a photograph. Winter had me tightly in its grips – until last week. I wore open toed shoes to church (my piggies are aubergine, go figure!). I cleared away the dead and dried out iris from last fall to reveal tulips and new iris making their way up out of the earth. I felt excited again! So much so that I even took the cover off the grill and fired it up, we had grilled chicken for dinner that night.

Aaah spring is coming.

My camera is at the ready once again, I removed the screen from the front window yesterday for clear photos once I saw the “official” confirmation of Spring in my front yard:

I’ve seen them around, yes, but I needed to see him in my front yard. He needed to be right there.

More random and springy snaps in between dog naps below!

Our resident red bellied woodpecker has begun making regular appearances
on the suet block out back,
While Copper collected all of his toys,
and one of my furry flip flops,
in and around his cozy little shoebox.

I’m debating what to do with my bathroom, tile, paint, wallpaper?
We’re still piecing it together…

While Copper takes a nap.

I admired the architecture of the buildings around Palmer College
on the way home last weekend,

Quintin joined in the St. Patrick’s Day festivities,
donning a clover scrunchie,

And our sweet little Chickeymonkey
smiled adorably at her piano recital…

While Copper took a nap.

The red bellied woodpecker made yet another loud entrance
(you can’t miss ’em when you hear ’em)…

And we figured out how to fix this mess and reinstall the toilet,

While Copper took a nap.

As you can see, Copper sleeps through most everything, and I have entirely too much stuff to do. Any suggestions on the bathroom remodel are MORE than welcome. My dear sweet hubby can tell you how many times I’ve changed my mind about what to do, since I’ve lost count. I was going to install ceramic tile last weekend until the floor decided to be WAY too unlevel (we live on a slab) to even out without a professional and a load of concrete – and I ended up at Lowe’s 5 minutes before closing time for peel & stick flooring.

I cannot tell you how I yearn for a custom built home. Maybe next year, eh?

Or the year after that… or the year after that…

Oh, how I *love* me some creative license.

Go, click around.

Thank you, once again, to Kimberly – for giving me the freedom to be totally creative with your latest blog design. I want to build a house in Petroville.

This is not the first time I’ve seen this – spammers somehow hack into WordPress template files and add in their junk, styling it inline so it’s not visible on your blog. Hidden junk mail, basically, in your theme. It happened to me over a year ago, but this particular incident was a refresher course as I found it in a client’s header file while upgrading and updating her theme. Please, please please – check your theme template files regularly. Particularly your header.php, those buggers like to get their links in there and set up negative margins before your content begins on the page.

Here are a couple of screenshots – click to enlarge. You can see the menu_rll is the div id used to enclose the spam. In this case, they hacked into both the header.php as well as the main index.php.

Found in the header.php template

Found in the index.php templateIt is helpful if you change your admin password somewhat regularly, other than that I can’t tell you exactly how they manage to get in there. I’ve had a pretty secure password for years (I rotate it out) and keep my file permissions secure as well, so I’ve never been able to get a straight answer about the “how does this happen”. It’s aggravating – as these types of links should be PAID for and you should not be spammed or hacked into displaying them without your knowledge. I have tried to pursue these sites before (none of these links are live, I will not give them any free linkage here) – they always play dumb that they had no idea the people they pay to manage their links were hacking sites.

So folks, this might be news to you – but you might just find some spammy links in your template files. Go on and check, it only takes a minute. Look under presentation/theme editor and just scroll through your template files to make sure there’s nothing spammy going on with your website that you don’t know about. And also – if you’re not using the most current version of WordPress, It’s time to upgrade.. Eliminate any possible vulnerability.

UPDATE: Another WP user discovered massive amounts of spam in his template, it actually affected his Google ads – the ad content started getting “spammy” and he couldn’t figure out why. Check out his experience here.

Another update: I am also being told that when upgrading – it is HIGHLY advised to completely delete everything but the wp-config file and upload the fresh upgrade to ensure any files that were hacked are gone and avoid future vulnerabilities. For detailed and easy to follow upgrade instructions, see my post here.

Also see: TechCrunch “WordPress Security Issues Lead To Mass Hacking. Is Your Blog Next?“

My new hard drive arrived yesterday. I upgraded my 5 year old Inspiron as much as I could – and it was time to retire it. Now, sitting on my desk is a teenie-tiny VERY shiny new XPS 210. It took an afternoon of crawling around on the floor and getting sweaty and dusty – but I’m rearing to go today and excited to see how much faster I’ll be able to work now that I’m sporting Adobe Illustrator CS3, as well. Of course I’ll never ditch my old trusted companion, Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo – it’s been too good to me.

I attempted to switch my mail client to Thunderbird – and I really, really wanted to do that – but I have to fall into my trusty old rut and stick with Outlook Express. I know, I know. Pat me on the head all day long – I have thousands of precious pieces of mail that I was too afraid to lose. Some day, I’ll make that switch.

Backing up my bookmarks and all that jazz was pretty easy, everything went relatively smoothly, I think! I started over from scratch last summer to try to salvage what was left of my old hard drive, so I’m familiar with this shaky ground. It’ll calm down in a few days.

The really cool thing? Yesterday morning, I walked away and stared out my studio windows while I waited for a file to open. Today? All I did was blink. Now THAT computes. Thanks, Dell. Now I have no excuse to get up and refresh my coffee or hit the shower.

This is not a paid advertisement. I just really, really like Dell. And the Dell Dude’s that surf the internet aren’t so bad, either.

Custom Portrait of Emily
8? x 10? Oil Painting
Canvas Panel
© 2008 Leanne Wildermuth
All Rights ReservedPortfolio View

I’ve added a detail shot of Emily’s face below, so keep on reading. For anyone interested in having your own custom portrait done, you can view my custom portrait packages here in my shop. You can quick-order by selecting a size and checking out through Paypal right here.

Keep reading »

Selecting the keywords for your site to bring your business to the top 20 search results in Google is a pretty big deal – and it can also be extremely difficult. You can analyze keywords all day long but you really don’t know what someone is going to “call something”, it’s like Googling for “pop” or “coke”. How do you choose which one is more popular over the other? Which one is used more often, and is a more “common” term?

Being an artist – it’s even more challenging. How do people search for art? DO people search for art? Does anyone even think about having a custom pet portrait done, or is it a somewhat unique idea limited to a certain group of people? Then I’m left to wonder if people use fine art terminology, like realism, abstract, surreal, impressionism or pop art – or do they boil it down to layman’s terms, like painter, artist, pet art – or even further down to the specific painting or artist name that they search for?

This brings me to my poll – how would you Google it? If you were looking for an artist to paint your pet, what would you type into that search box on Google? I’d love to get your feedback. You can select up to 3 answers, and of course comments are open so you can let me know if you’d use a term that I haven’t listed here. Your input and feedback is very much appreciated, and will help a lot of artists looking for this kind of input to get their portfolio’s online and noticed by the right people.

View poll in the sidebar under “POLLS”

Updated to add– While I totally appreciate that there are wonderful SEO companies and knowledgeable SEO experts who offer services to nail keywords, the purpose of my post was to get human input. Since artists, primarily, are not well off to pay for these kinds of services, they rely on the help, assistance and feedback from other artists and friends. 🙂

I’ve completed Emily’s portrait and it’s out for proofing, so there may (or may not) be minor tweaking going on – but overall this portrait is complete and back under the fan. I have to say – painting white poodle fur is very interesting. Especially getting the shadows of the fur just so, there’s a little depth but not too much – the fine wisps of fur on her tail and ears – the grass coming up around her, a very enjoyable painting to work. I’ll post the final scan and painting details once she’s dry.

I’ve completed Emily’s underpainting today – the shadow of her white fur is basically what you’re looking at. I also roughed in her eyes, nose and mouth. They will be further enhanced with the next layer of paint. I’ll set the fan on her tonight so that I can speed up dry time and if all goes well, I’ll finish her portrait tomorrow.