Snack Time

I found a couple of web sites yesterday where I was able to create some more gadgets for this page. The first one I found was called PhotoSnack, a site which lets you make photo slideshows. I made a nice one of my little girl in just under two hours. The slideshow itself didn't take all that long to make, that was just a matter of minutes, what took up the time was deciding which photos to use and then resizing and cropping them. It was fun. I enjoyed doing it and it kept me off the streets for a while.

Then I found its sister site, BannerSnack, and I thought I'd be a little more adventurous. I made a banner showing all the ships I served on when I was in the navy. This one took up most of the day but that was only because my first attempt at it was a disaster. After making the slideshow I knew that I'd have to resize and crop the pictures I wanted for the banner so I got stuck in to finding the pictures and chopping them down to size.

It took quite a while to do that but when I came to make the banner I found that the size that I'd made the photos were too small for the banner I wanted (I thought I'd be able to resize the banner once it was created but that wasn't possible). So it was back to the drawing board and start all over again with the pictures.

This time I got them all to the right size and it was time for the fun to begin. If you want to make a banner in ten minutes then this sort of thing is not for you - it IS possible to make one in under ten minutes but if you didn't want to spend any time on it, it would just be a fairly basic banner. I decided to go ahead with trying out different transitions and different effects, and then I added some text and played about with the different text effects, it's was all this that made the whole process a little longer than ten minutes. I enjoyed every minute of it, including cropping and resizing the pictures. If I could find a job that required this sort of image manipulation I would be more than happy.

Maybe the finished banner isn't quite as professional looking as what it could be but I'm quite pleased with my first attempt at banner making. It took some time to make it, but that's the whole reason I'm here in the first place, I wanted something to occupy my time and this was perfect. I've put the banner in the right hand column of this page, have a look and see what you think - and then decide if you want to make something similar for your own page.