• I’ve had a lovely morning today, at Garway Primary School in Herefordshire, where I was honoured to be asked to officially open their lovely new library.

    It was a beautiful morning. The rape fields are starting to flower, so the countryside is turning dazzling yellow.

    Garway is pretty much in the middle of nowhere and very lovely for it. Theirs must be some of the luckiest children in the country, if not the world! There are not many in the school, so the teachers have quite a lot of time for the children and it shows, all of them bright and perky, well-prepared and full of questions. It’s the kind of school that I’m sure everyone wishes they went to or that they could get their children into.

    When you have a small number of children in a school, they all know each other really well. I suppose that has its drawbacks – like there’s no place to hide – but in the long run I’m sure it pays to have smaller class sizes and a certain distance from all the pressures of modern life.

    After my sessions I was grilled by the school journalists, who kept coming up with supplemental questions. One of them, I’m sure, is going to be a writer when she grows up!

    Good luck to you all and enjoy your lovely new library!

  • There is something sad, but ultimately satisfying about getting to grips with new software. I’ve been battling all week with with Joomla!, an online Content Management System, that has interesting ways of obfuscating the simplest of requirements, but I think I’m getting the hang of it and heck, it’s free, so who am I to grumble. The instructions are not that clear and you need to know quite a lot about databases and file structures to even start setting it up.

    Added to that I’ve bought a plugin to show videos – it’s wonderful, but the manual is not very helpful. Learning how another piece of software works is doubling the load but learning how the two interact id=s a bit of a headache!

    It’s a work in progress, but you are welcome to see what I’ve done so far at www.shoorayner.com/DrawingSchool. Click the menu item for animals and you will see some videos. The Puppy one is a full length drawing video the others are short clips for testing with. I can start filling up with videos now.

    I’m hoping that this will be viewable in schools. If yo can get it showing on your whiteboard, without the blockers stopping it, I’d love to know – otherwise ask you it department to clear it.

    Just the very start of what is going to be a pretty major project over the years, I think. I’m going to link it to my online shop, which I’m also working on at the moment, so you can buy the full HD video as a download if you want or buy a set on a pen drive.

    Watch this space – or rather, go and watch the videos!

  • Of course the secret is to back up your website before you do anything! The new Drawing School website I’m building was going swimmingly, until I received a security announcement to upgrade the software.

    I misunderstood the upgrade instructions and have blown everything. I tried a new installation with connections to the old database, but it didn’t like that at all. So, because I didn’t save my site before upgrading – which is the first thing anyone tells you to do – I am now tediously setting up the whole thing again from scratch.

    I’m trying to be positive. I’m telling myself that it’s a learning experience and that I’m getting to know the system software better than ever before! I will be a Joomla! yet.