A little bit about me:

I am a web designer and developer by profession and an artist, writer and musician the rest of the time.

My artistic endeavors include fine arts and graphic arts for the web.  My graphics art works are generally incorporated in the websites I design.  I also specialize in vintage art and photography restoration work.

I write poetry, articles for the web, copy for websites, and routinely write in forums and blogs.  My web articles are on many websites all over the web.

I am a singer/songwriter, play rhythm guitar and some keyboard.  I’ve composed music using Cakewalk and similar music composition software. 

I worked as an accountant from the time I started out in the workforce until 1992, starting my own bookkeeping and payroll business in 1987.  I’ve since sold my interest in that business, it continues on under new ownership.  In 1986, I started down the high technology road, starting with computerized accounting programs, from there to database programming and since 1998, website development.  I’m still doing that type of work and in between projects, I work on building up websites under Alpha Net Developers, Inc. in which I am a principal.

This blog is my “anything” blog, where I just write or post whatever I feel like. 

So a welcome to you, I hope you enjoy the postings!

Santa Claus came every year to my house when I was a little girl, flying through the night skies in Saskatchewan and later Alberta over the snow covered horizon. 

One year, when I was about five years old, I was laying awake on Christmas Eve.  I had been warned that I shouldn’t get out of bed, but I couldn’t help it, I just had to get up and look out the window, pressing my nose against the frost covered glass, hoping and praying to see the reindeer sleigh against the moonlight. 

As I peered out the window, the house was completely still except for the clicking of the furnace.  Then I thought I heard some shuffling downstairs.  I crept out of my bedroom and down the stairs as quietly as I could.  I was sure it was Santa Claus and I didn’t want to get caught peeking. 

Hiding in a corner and peering into the living room, I could see our Christmas tree.  My Mom and Dad had left the lights on the tree and the room was bathed in the warm glow of the Christmas tree lights.  To my amazement, Santa Claus came out of the kitchen.  Sure enough, he was all dressed in red and he was eating one of the cookies my brother and I had left out for him!  Frozen in surprise, I couldn’t move a muscle, just watched as he crossed the living room, turning his back to me to do something under the Christmas tree. 

I realized that if he turned around he would see me, and my Mom told me that little children who didn’t behave themselves might not have their stockings filled, so while he had his back to me I ran as fast as I could back down the hall, up the stairs and jumped into my bed.  I pulled the covers up and closed my eyes, just in case he came upstairs to check on my brother and me.  I laid there hugging myself, with a sense of wonder and delight.  Really, it was one of the best moments in my life!

I must have fallen asleep right away, for when I woke it was Christmas morning.  I ran downstairs and checked the milk and cookies we had left out for Santa Claus.  The milk glass was empty, the cookies had been eaten and my Christmas stocking was bulging with goodies.  

Then my Mom came down and I told her I had seen Santa Claus.  She smiled and said, “That’s wonderful darling!” So even she thought it could happen! 

Was it just imagination?  Perhaps.  But saying it was just the over active imagination of a small child doesn’t take away the reality of the moment, that precious feeling of magic and wonder that made that Christmas Eve so special that I remember it vividly to this day!

I’ve always loved Santa Claus and I’ve always loved illustration art.  A few years ago, I was introduced to an amazing woman who is a vintage collector.  She showed me her vintage postcards and scrap collection, which included Santa Claus postcards from the 19th century and the early 20th century.  I caught the vintage postcard bug!

Now I have my own collection of Santa Claus postcards, most of which are 100 plus years old.  You can see from the the postcards that Santa Claus wasn’t always dressed in a red jacket, trousers and black boots.  He was dressed in red, blue, green, brown, long robes, short robes, and fancy robes.  Nor was he always jolly and fat!  Some of the Santa Clauses are downright forbidding looking.

I decided to do some research on Santa Claus and learn about his history.  As it turns out, the jolly ho-ho-ho Santa Claus we are so familiar with didn’t become “THE” Santa Claus until 1931, when Coca Cola published an advertisement portraying him dressed in a red jacket and trousers, fat, jolly and ruddy cheeked.  It seems that Coca Cola spent a great deal of money on advertisements featuring their version of Santa Claus and everybody grabbed their coattails and went along for the ride.  Next thing you know, Santa Claus is in department stores and everybody dresses him that way.  Wow - really makes you think about the power of advertising!

Looking back through history, it seems that Santa Claus has had a very long and illustrious career, and at times was held in disrepute and banned.  At heart, he is very much a European icon, starting out with the winter celebrations of Northern Europe and merging over time with Roman celebrations and Celtic celebrations, then with Saint Nicholas, a Roman Catholic Saint, shaped further by the new mass media of the 19th century.  The crowning touches in America were made by the Coca Cola company, the culmination of well over 2,000 years of continued folklore and tradition.

I’ve put up a gallery of vintage Santa Claus postcards you can go and look at - you’ll be amazed at the tremendous variety in what Santa Claus looked like around the end of the 19th century.

Here’s the link to the gallery:

http://www.24kvintageart.com/vintage-santa-claus/thumbs.html

Enjoy!

As a website designer, I encounter quirky problems with various browsers.  Usually it’s some problem between the IE browser and the Firefox browser which leaves me with torn hair and a tired brain.  This time it was the form input fields that were misbehaving. 

The problem was that I would create a text input field in a form, and no matter what I did, two of the fields would turn yellow.  They turned yellow when I specifically set the background color, yellow when I set the background.  It was just plain weird. 

So I googled, looking for any posts where somebody else was experiencing the same problem.  After a daunting number of searches, I finally found a good hearted soul who had figured out what the problem was, solved the problem and written it up for the world to use. 

It turns out that I had installed a google toolbar and it was busy helping me, setting my form text input field to yellow whenever it found the word “email”, turning the form field yellow so I would know that I could autofill the field.  Incredibly it was able to override my HMTL and CSS settings!

There is a fix, and although it isn’t pretty, it will work if you really want the form input field to stay whatever color you set it to: 

Here’s the link to the fix and comments on the problem:

http://code.jenseng.com/google/.

Special thinks to Jon Jensen for sharing his knowledge on the Internet!

My blog is powered by WordPress, which they offer to the Internet community free of charge.  That’s pretty cool.  I decided that I should contribute back to the WordPress community and so I’ve made a whole bunch of vintage graphics headers for the WordPress default Kubric template.

I’ve created a blog on WordPress on which to display the headers and post the images so people can use them on their blogs. 

The name of my WordPress community blog is “Victorian Times” - if you’d like vintage headers for your Kubrick template on your WordPress blog, head over and check them out.  I just started on this at the end of November, I’ll be posting new ones each week. 

Here’s the link: 

Victorian Times Blog: http://victoriantimes.wordpress.com

Enjoy!

Out on the road
I leave my troubles and my worries behind
My spirits lifting I just start to unwind
I get a feeling that I just can’t define
 
Don’t really know why must be the gypsy in me
It runs through my heart like a sweet melody
Don’t really know why must be the gypsy in me T
That longs for the road and longs to be free

Out on the road
I leave my troubles and my worries behind
My spirits lifting I just start to unwind
I get a feeling that I just can’t define

Don’t really know why must be the gypsy in me
And I really can’t tell you where this highway will lead
And I don’t really care must be the gypsy in me
That longs for the road and longs to be free

Don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow
But I know I’ll be travelling free

© Copyright 2000 by Sharlee Plett

Logical Tags:

The logical tags include the H1, H2, H3, H4, P, BLOCKQUOTE, EM, STRONG AND CITE tags.  There are more, but these are the main tags anyone would use.

The logical tags follow the formal rules of writing college papers or essays, setting the written material out in a logical structure. 

H1 is the title of the piece.  H2 subdivides the piece into broad ideas.  H3 divides the H2 ideas further, and H4 subdivides the H3 ideas.

Within the H tags are the P tags which set out the paragraphs.  The first sentence of the entire piece is supposed to outline the broad scope or premise of the piece.  The last paragraph summarizes the piece or states the conclusion.

Within each paragraph, the first sentence sets out the idea contained in the paragraph.  The last sentence concludes that paragraph.

EM stands for emphasis.  It shows the reader that the writer is emphasizing a point.  STRONG shows that this is a more important point.  BLOCKQUOTE is reserved for quoting from other writers.

The CITE tag is used at the end of the entire article to list the research and supporting documents for the piece.  On the Internet the citations usually include links to the citations. 

Using the logical tags properly makes it easier for text to speech readers to work on your site. It also makes it easier for people to read long articles because people think in terms of little sections and they scan (not read) to what they are interested in.

Plus, the search engines actually do recognize these tags and give a greater weight or importance to them.  The most important tag is the H1 tag.  It is supposed to match the website TITLE tag in the metatag section of your web page.  If it does, you get a better search response on any words in your H1 tag.

Formatting Tags

Formatting tags simply change the appearance of the text or color on a page.  These include the B (bold) tag, BR (Line break),  I (italics) tags.  There are more of these types of tags but most people don’t use them. 

These tags do not tell search engines or directories anything about the content.  They just change the appearance of the displayed information.

Most formatting is done these days with CSS, which has its own set of rules and tags to use.  The logical tags are customized to alter their appearance with CSS.  For example the default setting for the appearance of the H1 tag is a butt ugly HUGE font size with a massive amount of space between it and the text entry.  With CSS you can set the H1 tag to a reasonable size with a reasonable amount of space after it.

Structure Tags

These include DIV, TABLE, TR, TD tags to name a few.  The DIV tag can be used to position or style sections on the page.  The TABLE, TR, TD tags are used to created rows and columns of information.  Design purists take the position that these tags should only be used for tables of data.  In fact, most designs on the Internet use tables to organize the layout of the page. 

The alternative to using tables to layout the page is CSS, which uses the DIV tag to lay out the page.  Since most people have great difficulty using CSS, this isn’t a favored method.  Blogs use CSS layout so you will be sure to encounter this if you are using a blog and try to customize it’s appearance.

This probably explains why the search engines love blogs so much - they use CSS and they are heavily text oriented.  Behind the scenes, the headers on your blogs are actually H tags.  The blogs use the P tags by default - that’s why you always get a new paragraph, rather than a new line when you press enter.

It lives in a little popup window that stays open over other windows.  You can drag its little box all over your screen, minimize it, close it, or just leave it open while you work. 

It has a nifty eyedropper that you use to select any part of your screen and grab the color.  Once you’ve grabbed a color, it shows you the color in its sample window and its hex code below.

You can customize the color you’ve selected, adjusting its hue, saturation and luminosity.  Color Cop shows you the RGB value of your customized color and when you return to the front screen, shows the color in selection boxes along with the hex code.

You can copy the hex code from Color Cop to the clipboard and drop it into your graphics editing software.

Color cop remembers the last several colors you worked with and your last screen position, and will remember whatever was there when you last closed it.

It is versatile too, with color code support for HTML hex, Delphi hex, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic hex, and Visual C++ hex.

It is freeware, with no nags and no popups.  You can download it from:

http://www.download.com/Color-Cop/3000-2383_4-10047009.html

I was about to tell her that I had enough luggage when a little gray kitten paw poked through the side of the case.  “You’re going to love him,” she smiled, and zipped open the case.

Deep gray eyes caught and held mine from inside the case and two little paws reached over the edge towards me.  He never took his eyes off me and his tiny mews caught my heartstrings. 

It was a tiny little tabby gray kitten, with tiger stripes on his back and leopard spots on his belly.  We put him on the couch, where he tottered about unsteadily, anxiously mewing. 

“He’s about 4 weeks old, the kids found him caught in a tree at the park and brought him home,” she told me, reaching over and scratching him behind his ears, “his mom was probably killed by a coyote.   He was up a tree, and his brother and sister cowering at the foot of it.”

“Will you take him?  He has nowhere to go and I can’t keep him with the dog in our household.”

And so Mr. Christy moved in with me today.

That’s what I decided to name him.  I had just finished watching Robin Williams as Christy in the movie “What Dreams May Come” and love the character he plays in the movie.

Meow! 

He wanted my permission to use the lyrics of my poem, “Creation,” which I had posted on my website, Sharlee.com, in his choral work, Creation Canticles, which was to be performed by the Worcester Choral Society.  I granted him permission to use the lyrics.

Several months later Adrian sent me the completed score in a PDF.  I stored it away, thinking it was wonderful that the Internet had made it possible for me to publish my work, and for him to find and put it to use in such a beautiful way.

You can read the lyrics of the poem on my website.  Be sure to watch the flash version of it too, created for me by Lorri Lee Arnason.  The link is on the poem’s page.

http://sharlee.com/poemcreation.htm 

The Creation Canticles was performed in 2004,  and received wonderful reviews.

Here are a couple of them:

West Midlands Network - Making Music
Regional Bulletin May 2004
www.makingmusic.org.uk/westmidlands

Adrian Lucas took over the WORCESTER FESTIVAL CHORAL SOCIETY in 1996 and last year, following in the footsteps of both David Willcocks and Christopher Robinson, he became conductor of the CITY OF BIRMINGHAM CHOIR also.

He has been increasingly drawn to composition in recent years and, although his Creation Canticles is his largest work to date, he has written a number of smaller scale pieces, including a 25 minute carol sequence, Noel, for upper voices, harp and organ. He will be writing a Te Deum for the opening service next year’s Three Choirs Festival.

The texts for Creation Canticles are taken from the contemporary American poet, Sharlee Plett, John Dryden, A.E. Russell, Edmond Holmes and the final number is from St Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun.

In the programme note Adrian Lucas comments that the work aims to be a set of reflections on the wonders of creation, rather than a chronological portrayal of events, and its direct choral writing, colourful orchestration and sense of mystery left a big impression with the listener. Surely here is a work that should be taken up by other choral societies.

From the Worcester Choral Society’s Website
http://www.worcesterfestivalchoralsociety.org.uk/

The Worcester Festival Choral Society is the leading promoter of major concerts in Worcester. As well as being one of the oldest, it is one of most highly-regarded choirs in the country and has a singing membership of about 200. It presents about three major prestigious concerts each year, highlights in the Worcestershire Music and Arts scene.

The Society commissioned a major choral work from Adrian Lucas, Creation Canticles, which was given it’s highly successful premiere in 2004.