The Olives includes opinions and memoirish entries on my main interests: politics, citizen governance, making things, and pretty much everything else. If you don’t like olives, you probably won’t want to read these.
Watching the News Coronavirus Counting Game It will make watching the news worth it when there isn’t any. Which journalists have books on their walls? Or paintings? Or photographs? Or certificates? How many books by Stephen King can you count? By Rachel Maddow? About Trump? How many mix fiction and nonfiction? New and old? And do you see any old books? Percentage of unadorned white walls to bookshelves? Are certificates framed, […]
Explaining to a seven-year-old how to tell when 5 hours had passed, I pointed to the clock. No, she said. I know how to tell time, but I don’t comprehend it. How long is it? What can I do in five hours? I was almost 70 then and I couldn’t comprehend time either. Hours, yes. But I was in the decades. How long my life had been—how long anything […]
Roger Ebert ranked this of “Views of Grand Rapids” the best music video ever made. After Newsweek pronounced the city one of the top ten dying the cities in the nation, residents sang and danced back. This world-record setting 9+ minute lip dub features every willing resident of Grand Rapids and they sing, dance, and move in formation to Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie. In the background is Grand Rapids—probably […]
Pattern in Islamic Art is an online archive of over 5,000 beautiful Islamic patterns. Images sortable by museum, monument, region, town, materials used (ceramic tiles, plasterwork, wood, etc.), or by architectural feature (decorative panel, doors & doorways, lattice-work, etc.) Excellent images and documentation. Images are also available in prints. The image above is from Pattern in Islamic Art: Grand Mosquée de Paris This mosque was founded in 1926 and built […]
Learning WordPress has just become easier. WordPress has launched a new site, Learn WordPress, directed at WordPress.com users, those whose site is hosted by WordPress. WordPress.com sites are free and have limited but often adequate features. You then pay WordPress people to fix and refine your site if it needs it, or to add more features. I host sites on my server independently of the WordPress.com site, using the same software but with […]
Majestic describes themselves as “The planet’s largest Link Index database.” What they know is a lot more than I know, for sure. What they can tell you for only one of their services is how many links there are to your site and how many of them are “good links.” Good links come from sites with real content. Bad link come from link mills that only link to a lot of […]
What is SEO, Search Engine Optimization? “Search engine optimization” is a fancy way to describe methods that help search engines find your site. This site, SharonVillines.com, is the place where I put things I don’t want to forget—and probably will unless I write them down. I’m not concerned about the world’s ability to find this site, but more concerned about my ability to find the stuff I store on it. […]
A lovely online source of brand colors complete with color numbers—no guessing. Includes colors from Adobe, Airbnb, Amazon, AOL, Basecamp, Behance, Better Business Bureau (they have colors?), Bing, bitly, Boeing, Digg, Dribbble, Drupal, Ebay, Firefox (a big palette), Freshbooks (very fresh), Google, HootSuite, Kickstarter, Klout, Microsoft, and many more. Memorable address BrandColors.net. Has a search function to find one quickly. Click on the colors to see the color number. You […]
IM Free provides a curated overview of freely available photos, all available for commercial use. All photos are thoroughly grouped and tagged, and usually released under a Creative Commons license. Overall, there are literally thousands of available items which you can use right away. And if you need even more pictures, Gratisography, Unsplash andPicjumbo are further resources worth looking into, with a growing collection of free high-resolution pictures that you can use for commercial and private projects. […]
Counting Names and Phrases in the Times The New York Times Chronicle is a new resource for “visualizing language usage in New York Times news coverage throughout its history,” which began in 1851. Enter a word or phrase and it will appear as a colored line on a graph showing the percentage of articles it appeared in from 1851 to the present. You can search several words or phrases sequentially and each one will appear in […]
