Hello, Goodbye

I say Hi
You say Low
You say Why
And I say I don't know

I started this blog to talk about events and issues relating to leaving my day job and taking up art full time. Studio work, health care, what I was reading, over a 100 posts so far , including a long gap in which I was too busy surviving to keep up the thread.

Now it's time to say "goodbye", though I'm going to start this off by saying "hello". Yes, this is the farewell post  for Squishtoid.blogspot.com, though it has already had its first post from its new home, JoeHigginsMonotypes.com.

I had planned on a website to highlight my various activities since I took a very excellent "Internet Marketing for Artists" seminar with the good folks from Creative_Capital.org in July, '12. The blog was already in a bit of a slump by then when the idea of importing it into my website hit me. The instructors at IMA said this was possible- importing a Blogger blog into a WordPress website. But owing to many projects and part time jobs on my table, the website didn't make it up until last week. As for Squishtoid, with my idea of giving it a fresh start in a new domain it kind of got lost in the shuffle. The perfect being the enemy of the good in this case.

It probably needn't have taken that long, but I'm not all that tech-adept, and wanted some time to sit and learn it, though the blog import was actually accomplished with a widget and was the easiest part of it. The moral of the story:

DO attempt this at home.

WordPress is a bare-bones open source program, and not your silky smooth, WYSIWYG, drag and drop, rocket ship style program like those made by Adobe. It requires a few good sized blocks of free time, some googling and help-center searching, but if I can do it anyone can. The page is no where near complete, by the way. I plan to add more portfolio pages, a workshop page, a contact page, and eventually, a You Tube channel and PayPal app for buying small artworks. But this time I decided not to let the perfect torpedo the good. I have several shows and workshops coming up this Summer, so it needed to get resolved. I also will have promo spot airing on Colorado Public Television ( Ch. 12) and needed a site to direct viewers to. More about that later.

I'll leave this page here for now, though I assume Blogger will come wanting their server space back at some point. You can follow future Squishtoid Blog posts at JoeHigginsMonotypes.com. You can also search the archives there, and look at a small library of recent monotypes. Eventually you'll be able to download info sheets and pictures. It will be updated pretty regularly because it's really sort of pointless to do all that work and not update. I think I learned my lesson there.

Above, a picture from near South Pass City, Wy. from an early Squishtoid post. It's pretty much the same view Oregon Trail travelers saw decades ago. You can see a long way.  I'm entering my fourth Summer of pretty much calling my own shots. There've been some misses, but somehow, the Squish abides.