Why I did it

Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter by Stephanie Pearl McPhee

I don’t like this new trend – of a few years now- of using negative words for women, as titles. Provocative, or just plain sexist? (A fellow cartoonist suggested a title for my Love Me or Go to Hell book that had the word Bitch in it – I didn’t feel comfortable with that. I have no problem at all with Hell, however. :))

So, why Yarn Harlot? The author sounds like a perfectly nice housewife in Canada who collects yarns and makes many projects with them. I love yarn, too – and also knitting!

The essays were okay. The  points I remember from the book, were that she kept part of her yarn “stash” in the piano, and that you have to watch for moths, one of which I already knew from experience. She also said everyone eventually gets holes in their socks, even hand-knitted ones. I felt better, because I feel guilty when I get holes in my socks.

I read about half of this book. (Script writers often read only the first 10 pages of a script, you know. ) Knitters might like it. She has 58 reviews on Amazon. Lucky girl!

Whoa, I haven’t submitted anything to Illustration Friday for a while and they have a whole new hot new look! Lots more artists featured, kicky graphics. Nice.

Topic today: Talent. That reminds me of the talents Jesus said not to bury. Also, our good qualities, like how smart this owl is – even though he might not be that good with money, or asking for it.  Originally published in my Psychology Today cartoon blog.

Thumbnails not showing on Facebook

This isn’t a little bug or glitch, this is serious business nowadays! Anyone with the intelligence of a teenager knows 1) the importance of Facebook as social media supreme, whether you like it or not , and 2) importance of images in every blog, site and outlet in the whole world. As we artists have always known. :)

This problem of no thumbnails on Facebook had been going on for some 3 weeks for my new blog of chocolate cartoons, Dark.  Every time I tried to post a link on Facebook, in either my personal Facebook page, or my chocolate book page, I would get the ugly blue no-show icon. Not the best draw for visitors when you are starting a new art blog.

I finally had to find an answer. I had been blaming my theme (template, for you non – WordPress people), which is Elegant Grunge. It has fancy and quite attractive frames around each image. As everyone who does SEO knows, frames used to be lethal for indexing by Google and other scrapers, as bots couldn’t read the text or see images through frames. Now, Google has grown up, and has been indexing my images just fine, so why couldn’t Facebook see them?

But it wasn’t just Facebook who wouldn’t show thumbnails; bitly wouldn’t index images, either, which is on my backend. Not public, but still annoying when I am trying to keep track of posts.

So I started hunting for info on images in frames for a few days, and couldn’t find anything helpful. Either Elegant Grunge is the only theme that uses frames on images (not true) or no one else had a problem with them. I found Fix, on ansonalex.com, to be helpful, and finally started trying his suggestions there, one by one. Here are his suggestions that I tried:

• Installed the Add Facebook Share Thumbnail + Meta Plugin. Nothing.
• Even with the plugin, you have to add another line of code.  I think this was when my bitly links suddenly showed thumbnails, but nothing on Facebook yet.
• The images were named properly, so that was okay.
• Alex Anson at Fix suggests adding 3 lines of code to your header. I thought my title and description were fine, but added this one, just in case: <link rel=”image_src” type=”
  image/jpeg

  ” href=”

  http://www.yourdomain.com/image/path.jpg

  “/> No change. (Also, I’m a dummy nerd, I guess, because I wasn’t sure what the actual code should be. Do I keep image and path in the code?)

• Removed the http and the final /on the post url, as he suggested last. No change. Feeling discouraged… Continue Reading →

woman tells friend it's okay to cry, even if her mascara runs

For Illustration Friday. I thought this was my second cartoon on makeup in here, but it’s my first. (My cartoon on hair is here. )

Subject in Illustration Friday is Return. Do you think when mascara runs it might be considered a “return” or rerun? Let’s hope.

Also, my almost complete favorite makeup is M.A.C. Lasts forever, smells good, great colors (except for blushes, too orange.) And 2 of my neighbors are makeup artists in the studio, and they use MAC, too!

More cartoons like this in my Psych Today blog.

And my Easter bunny cartoon is up in my chocolate blog!