{"id":5570,"date":"2011-01-16T19:50:14","date_gmt":"2011-01-17T00:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=5570"},"modified":"2011-01-16T19:50:14","modified_gmt":"2011-01-17T00:50:14","slug":"on-cat-pictures-and-facebook-profiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=5570","title":{"rendered":"On Cat Pictures and Facebook Profiles"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t know who said it first, but I think it’s true — the Internet was made for cat photos. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Last week, Facebook upgraded my profile<\/a> to the new profile page design. I’d heard wailing and gnashing of teeth from friends who upgraded their profile pages immediately after they were announced; I was content to wait until Facebook forced the change upon me.<\/p>\n

To be honest, there was some reluctance on my part. I didn’t like “new” Twitter at first, but it grew on me, and while I’m not sure that I’ve managed to figure out the pop-up sidebar thing I’ve found the new Twitter useful.<\/p>\n

To bring this back to Facebook, I’d read, maybe a month ago, about things people were doing with their new profile pages to trick them out. Facebook now showed, in addition to the profile picture, a filmstrip of five other pictures, and people were making photo montages. I’d filed this knowledge away in the back of my mind. Someday, I would use it. The day I read it, though, it wasn’t useful…<\/p>\n

Friday, I knew that I was going to do a photo montage on Facebook. I don’t have many pictures of myself, so the idea of doing a montage of my eyes across the filmstrip didn’t make a lot of sense. I did, however, have pictures of cats. And my EB Games store.<\/p>\n

I decided on cats.<\/p>\n

I looked up instructions for sizing the pictures for the photo montage. Went through my discs of photos. And I decided to use a photo of Guinevere, a polydactyl that I owned a decade ago until her sudden death.<\/p>\n

It was a photograph that I loved, and it’s currently in a frame on my desk at the office. She was sleeping, in a flower pot, in sunlight, and there’s a lovely interplay between light and shadow.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The instructions described how to crop the photo, and crop the photo I did, creating six different photos, and I uploaded them into Facebook.<\/p>\n

It looked good, but I didn’t quite like it. The filmstrip was a mass of light and dark, sunlight shining down on plant leaves, and the profile pic was lovely but it didn’t feel connected to the filmstrip.<\/p>\n

I left it up overnight.<\/p>\n

In the morning, I settled on a different picture.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I found a different set of instructions; this one explained how to use a mask template<\/a> in PhotoShop or GIMP<\/a> to crop the photos.<\/p>\n

I think it worked out very<\/i> well. Oh, the angle’s not perfect; his bushy tail drops below the filmstrip so you can’t see how truly massive<\/i> that tail was. But, it’s still a pretty piece of work.<\/p>\n

The Internet is for cat photos, after all. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

I admit, it does break the heart some to see Percy when I log into Facebook, because I still miss him every single day<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless.<\/p>\n

If you want to trick out your Facebook profile, have at it. It take a little bit of work, some familiarity with photo editing or image manipulation software, and when it works it looks pretty damn snazzy.<\/p>\n

Good luck! :h2g2:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t know who said it first, but I think it’s true — the Internet was made for cat photos. \ud83d\ude42 Last week, Facebook upgraded my profile to the new profile page design. I’d heard wailing and gnashing of teeth from friends who upgraded their profile pages immediately after they were announced; I was contentContinue reading “On Cat Pictures and Facebook Profiles”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[409],"tags":[4132,752,784],"class_list":["post-5570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cats","tag-cats","tag-facebook","tag-postaday2011","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}