Here’s the thing: I’m probably too impatient, but it didn’t look to me as if I was ever going to find what I was looking for. Pretty much everything I saw had that shiny web 2.0 sheen. I have a couple of problems with that, but let’s stick with the easy stuff and say that those kinds of icons don’t generally scale down very well to small sizes. Gradients in particular suffer when they’re over-reduced, and lots of the glass effects rely heavily on gradients.

Anyway, I’ve ended up making my own set of rss icons for use on the site. I’ll only really need the smallest sizes, and those are the ones that work best. They’re simple, flat, 3-colour icons with slightly rounded corners. All of them are in .gif format, and the transparency at the corners has grey matting, which should let them work fairly well on most backgrounds.

I’m pleased to offer them here under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. You can download the individual sizes you need right from the page, and there’s a zip archive containing all of them. Enjoy.

… and here’s the zip file of them all.

Delivr is a free, easy-to-use ecard service. As well as images from myself and other featured artists, there’s a well-rounded selection of photos from flickr that should suit most occasions. Definitely worth checking out if you ecard. Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s a verb.

These picture were made by painting directly onto bitmap masks to selectively reveal a flat coloured layer overlaying a background, most often white over black. If you don’t know what that means and you’re interested, I’ll explain a little further down.

Mask painting is an unusual and awkward way to work and because of this it sometimes yields unexpected results, which is one of my main motivations for exploring peripheral techniques like this. So on that level at least, some of these pictures were successful. My personal favourites are this one and this one.

All of the pictures in this collection are monochrome or nearly so. I have some more colourful examples but I haven’t decided what to do with them yet; I thought they looked out of place with the monochrome ones.

Here’s a brief description of how mask painting works. I’m going to assume almost no knowledge of Photoshop.

Pictures made in Photoshop are built from layers. A layer is like a big transparent sheet that you can draw, paint, and paste pictures on. Layers are placed on top of each other to make a stack, which can contain as many layers as you want.

Photoshop offers lots of different ways to  play around with layers. One way is to use something called a layer mask. Just like a mask in the real world, a layer mask selectively reveals some parts and hides others. Layer masks work like this: any parts which are painted black make the contents of their layer invisible, any parts painted white make the contents of their layer visible, and grey gives partial visibility.

Ok, so the way these pictures were made was by making a background layer, usually solid black, which was then overlaid by a layer of a contrasting colour, usually solid white. Then the solid white layer was masked with an all-black mask, completely hiding it, so that only the background layer was visible. Then the mask was painted on directly with white, grey, or black to reveal or hide the white layer a little at a time, gradually building up a picture.

If you’re familiar with Photoshop you’re probably wondering why you’d bother doing this, since it’s pretty much the same as painting white directly onto a layer. But if you try it for yourself you may find that it handles differently enough from direct layer painting to make it challenging and interesting, and requires enough adjustment of technique to make the results refreshingly unpredictable sometimes.

Remember ImageReady? It was the .gif editor which shipped with Photoshop up until version CS2, after which it was removed. From CS3 onwards it was only possible to open animated .gifs in Photoshop by using (in fact mis-using) a script designed to import movie clips. Unfortunately this method also  gave each frame a fixed delay (exactly as if it was dealing with a movie clip) and disregarded the orginal frame delays, making it impossible to edit animated .gifs properly in Photoshop.

Adobe support was very vague on specifics about the whole thing. What they did seem clear about was that I should use Fireworks for editing animated .gifs. My feeling was; it probably wasn’t not too much of a coincidence that this happened just after Adobe purchased Macromedia — and inherited their web graphics editor, Fireworks.

Up until that time I don’t think I’d ever been unhappy with a PS upgrade. But when Photoshop CS3 shipped with animated .gif support removed it felt more like a downgrade to me, and I’ve been whining and bitching about it to anyone who will listen ever since.

Thankfully (and I do mean that) I can shut the hell up now. Photoshop CS5 has quietly reinstated full animated .gif support. No import script, no silly work-arounds, just double-click the file to open it with the frame delays intact. Exactly the way it should have been from the first day ImageReady was abandoned.

Actually it’s a huge  improvement over ImageReady, because it’s seamlessly integrated into the main Photoshop application, making the entire process of creating and editing animated .gifs much smoother. Sure it’s a bit late arriving, but it’s here now and it’s good. And to be fair, in the meantime Photoshop has continued to improve in lots of other ways.

I still can’t find any mention of any of this in the What’s New links. And in the help files, as far as I can see, Adobe seem to be behaving as if it’s been this way all along.

I was going to try to set up some kind of joke here about airbrushing mistakes out of history, but in the end I didn’t.

When I began the site redesign I was able to put the initial clutch of collections together fairly quickly because the images in each of those collections had similar or related filenames, so I could assemble the images based on filenames alone. But I’m done with the easy stuff now. It turns out I currently have about 5000 uncategorized images spread across multiple directories on multiple hosts, pretty much all of which have unhelpful filenames. Added to that, very few of them are accessible online, they’re all just sitting on remote servers.

And for the most part that’s probably a Good Thing — the majority of the pictures I make are in response to other pictures and comments on the b3ta.com message board. They’re often based on in-jokes, and they’re often really poorly made, because that’s part of the humour. Maybe they were genuinely funny to me and my buddies for ten minutes last year… but they’ll be totally incomprehensible to anyone else, and I don’t want to include them in the new site. So what I’ve needed to do for some time now is take a look at all of those images and pull out any I might want to use.

Well today I finally put up a little script to display the contents of image directories in a webpage, 200 at a time, and I’ve spent most of the day going through each page and dragging images into bookmark folders on the FireFox toolbar. Of course there’s still a lot of sorting and organizing to do, but at least now I’ve got some shortlists to work from, which is a big step towards getting some more collections online.

I know it won’t be everyone’s idea of the perfect birthday, but this task has been hanging over me for ages, and right now I feel as if I’ve given myself a little present by getting it done.

I also get distracted a lot. I originally started putting this site together so that I could get some of my pictures online. In between bouts of coding I starting writing notes in a little space at the very top of the front page, to say what I was planning to work on next. Sometimes though I wanted a little more space to type into… so I decided to put together a quick and simple WordPress blog to use as a news page.

That was 10 lost days ago. WordPress turned out to be much more fun than I anticipated, and I’ve ended up putting together a kind of mini theme, the imaginatively titled “mofaha 0.1″. It’s a loooong way from a fully-developed theme,  but hopefully it covers just about everything I’ll need here.

I’ll be posting more about the mofaha theme here in the near future. There are several decent-looking tutorials online about building a WordPress theme from scratch, but I couldn’t find anything specifically aimed at someone like me, who wants to put together something fairly quickly and who needs it to fit into an existing design. I’m far from an expert (with my 10 days experience) but I do have a few tips for people in a similar position and I’ll be sharing those when I get around to it.

Along with the new blog come some new RSS feeds which I’ll be putting links up for pretty soon. Most modern browsers will be able to find them already. Just look in the location bar of your browser for the orange RSS symbol and click it for a list of available feeds.

That’s about it for now I think… hopefully the next thing I’ll do will be to add some more pictures. After all that’s what I built the site for :)