Perhaps I'm claiming too much by using the word creativity in the title of this post. What I've done is give my blog a facelift. That panoramic view was captured by my smartphone camera from the front porch of our house. I'm always amazed both by the view and by the ability of my phone to take pictures. This is one of several I have taken looking south as the sun sets, casting what appears to me a strange Mediterranean light over the golf course and lakefront houses in the distance.
But nice as that element may be, what I'm most proud of is my one and only animated "gif," the winking Shakespeare that used to adorn one of the pages on my original website, a page that listed all the hyperlinks to online literature resources I had gathered while teaching in the honors program at the University of Maryland. As a sort of design element, I wanted a suitable image to place in the upper left corner of that page. I settled on this iconic engraving of the bard from the first folio and added my own fanciful touch.
Mainly, I just wanted to see if I could make an animated gif. Having seen some on other websites, I wondered how they were made, and soon discovered a free program for creating them. It did not take long to come up with the idea for a winking Shakespeare as a simple experiment. With a mere three imbedded images I had my playful little work of animated whimsy, which for many years adorned that page on my website. When the website eventually disappeared (except for ghosts of it on the Wayback Machine), so too did winking Shakespeare. But I missed him, and so having found that I still had a copy of the original gif, I decided to bring him back, at least for a while.
And this is how I spend my time -- when I'm not doing important work, of course.
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