Sparkle the Designer Cat's Blog, page 425

A Blogging Friday Flashback

Since my human is attending BlogPaws, I thought you might like to see how far my blog has come since it began! Most of my blog’s old looks still exist on archive.org’s Wayback Machine — I bet if you look up your own blog, you can find some of your past looks too!

This is from January 2003, when I first started blogging. My human didn’t even know about blog platforms at the time. She coded this html layout by hand… and it shows!

I love how it says, “Although my pedigree is impeccable, I only have a little bit of an attitude — I promise!” Um, yeah, that promise was broken in short order.

At first, the blog was just a monthly diary of what was going on in my life, but after a few months I added my advice column, and then book reviews — and my wall calendar! This grab is from late 2004. As you can see, my human was still hand-coding my site, and if anything, her skills had degraded some.

Eventually, my human improved the look of some of the sidebar links, and I added more things: my CafePress shop (now I am mostly on Zazzle), an interview with Sparta, the Mean Kitty (if you remember him), and more. This is from 2008. By then, my human wanted to switch me over to WordPress, but she was still figuring out how it worked.

Finally, in 2009, she switched my blog over to WordPress! It was a lot of work, since I had over 6 years’ worth of posts that had to be moved over manually to the new platform. And of course she had to get fancy with the homepage “slider” that featured my latest posts — and that everyone hated. For the first few months, it was brown (which went with my fur), but when I got the deal for my second book, I switched the colors to go with the book cover.

I stuck with that layout, terrible slider and all for longer than I wanted to! My human got a webmaster to create a new layout for me, but she flaked out after a few months. Then she found someone else who created what you see today! It’s not 100% perfect, but it is 1000% better than when I started!
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Metal Cats Book Winner!

Oh! Excuse me, but I was just practicing my heavy metal face. It is not as easy as the cats in the the Metal Cats book make it look! Anyhow, I do have a winner for this copy and it is…

Kitties Blue from The Cat on My Head!

Concatulations, kitties! By an awesome coincidence, their human will be at BlogPaws, same as my human, so I am having her deliver it in person!

If you still want a copy of Metal Cats, you can get it here!

Disclosure: Links to Amazon are Associate links, and I get a small commission for each sale… ’cause I have a serious cat toy habit I need to support!
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

What the Kitty Tarot Cards Said

I have picked three names to do readings with the Mystical Cats Tarot cards! They are:

1. Carlos

2. Katie Isabella

who will get the Shield of Sekhmet spread, which involves three cards, and

3. Truffles of Melissa’s Mochas, Mysteries and Meows, who will have the Nine Lives spread, a nine-card, lifetime reading. Truffles, my human wasn’t able to finish your reading before leaving for BlogPaws, so you will have to wait until next week. But Carlos and Katie, I have your readings now!

As I said, the Shield of Sekhmet spread is three cards:

The first card tells you what weakens you.

The second card tells you what strengthens you.

The third card tells you how you can best use your power.

Carlos, you asked, “I would like to know if I’ll ever be a manly mancat or will I have this skinny and sleek boyish figure for the rest of my days!” Let me shuffle the cards.

Here are the three cards I have chosen, with the help of feline spirit!

1. The 4 of Sky, reversed

2. The 10 of Earth

3. The 3 of Sea

Note that none of these cards are from the Major Arcana or are kitty court cards, which indicates to me that perhaps feline spirit is aware that Carlos’ question is a rather frivolous one. Nevertheless, there is much wisdom here.

What weakens you, according to the 4 of Sky, is denial. The sword cards are cards of battle and conflict. Here you see a cat withdrawing from this tumultuous lifestyle into solitude. What I believe this means for you, Carlos, is that you need to get real, and know your true nature. Manly mancat or boyish kitty? It is a choice only you can make!

What strengthens you, in the 10 of Earth, is the happiness you feel in your home and your willingness to share its comforts. This does not mean you have to let a bunch of other cats move in with you, but do be aware that keeping company with others will keep both body and mind active. Never hog your space — or your food — and you will always be sleek and boyish in spirit, even as you grow ever manlier.

Carlos, your final card is the 3 of Sea — the card that tells you how to best use your power. It emphasizes the lessons of friendship hinted at in the 10 of Earth — and suggests that your pals need not be the same species as you. Friends can be anybody and come from anywhere. Have that fluidity of spontaneous fun, and it will never matter where the physical takes you. It is spirit that matters.

Now, Katie, here are the cards I pulled for you. I will say that they are quite a bit more powerful than Carlos’.

1. The Floating Cat

2. The Ace of Fire

3. The Sky King

The equivalent to the Floating Cat in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck is the Hanged Man, and what this means for you, Katie, is that you are quite a brilliant and inspired kitty with an unusual way of looking at things. Since the Floating Cat pops up as the card indicating what weakens you, I must say that sometimes you let these wonderful characteristics get the better of you, and you lose perspective — what is literal or actual and what lives solely in spirit? We kitties in general get those mixed up a lot, but you more than other cats tend to do this, as your imagination is even more active than most.

The Ace of Fire strengthens you. On top of being imaginative, you are also very passionate! You have a lot of energy and are a force to be reckoned with when you have set your mind on something. A kitty like you cannot be denied… as your human probably knows.

The final card, the Sky King, tells you how you can best use your power. As I mentioned earlier, the Sky cards symbolize a warrior clan, but its king is neither rash nor cruel. He has the ability to pull back and look at the whole picture. That way he is able to use his considerable power for good. This card is urging you to take your gifts of imagination and passion, and temper them with rational thought in order for you to achieve all that you are truly capable of. Since we kitties do not care about rational thought, Katie, I suggest you leave this part up to your human.

I hope you liked my readings!
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Binga and No Declaw Graphics at My Zazzle Shop!

Right before heading off to BlogPaws, my human created a few new items for my Zazzle shop! First up is a greeting card featuring Binga:

TORTIE Tortoiseshell Cat Card by Designercat

And she is also on a stamp!

TORTIE Tortoiseshell Cat Stamps by Designercat

She also expanded my No Declaw Kitty line to include this cool ringer mug:

No Declaw Kitty Ringer Mug by Designercat

And a cat food bowl:

No Declaw Kitty Cat Food Bowl by Designercat

And a bumper sticker!

No Declaw Kitty Bumper Sticker by Designercat

I hope you like them! If there is anything in particular you’d like to see me have in my Zazzle shop, let me know!
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

An Open Letter to Waffles

Waffles, I hear you are going to BlogPaws with Glogirly. You need to be careful! There will be a very annoying human there and you need to watch out for her! She has long, dark hair and she likes to wear black a lot. Sadly, I know her quite well. In fact, I live with her. If you are not careful, she will put her hands all over you!

Look at what she does! She says she is trying to “arrange” me for a shot, but she really just wants to fondle me. Ewwww! You can tell I am not fooled. So if you see her, run, run away!

Aw well. At least she is your problem for a few days, and not mine.
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Help Special Needs Kitty Tiny Timmy Beat Fleas, Naturally! Support His Indiegogo Campaign

Today I am going to tell you about something I have been very passionate about for a very, very long time, but have not spoken about until today. Do you know that sitting on the shelves at your local drugstores, Walmarts and other low-budget retail stores, there are cheap flea products that have harmed and even killed cats and dogs? Why these poisonous products are still being sold is anyone’s guess because for many years, there has been a grass roots effort to get them banned. People have even traveled to the Environmental Protection Agency’s offices to complain about these products, but so far, they are still available.

Why haven’t I written about this battle? Because in spite of all the efforts to get rid of these dangerous, pesticide-laden flea products, there hasn’t been a dedicated movement working hard to come up with an alternative — something that didn’t use toxic ingredients, including natural ones, or essential oils that aren’t good for us cats (we are especially sensitive to these). I didn’t want to just post photos of cats suffering the ill effects of these products when I had no answer. But finally someone — who has been directly impacted by dangerous over-the-counter flea products — is doing something great to come up with alternatives.

Meet Tiny Timmy… and his human.

Tiny Timmy was rescued from people that dosed him with one of these awful flea medications. He almost did not survive, but with a lot of care and a lot of love, he lived. Not unscathed, however. Timmy is permanently neurologically damaged from his encounter with the flea medicine. This does not stop him from enjoying life and being a happy kitty, but imagine what his life might have been like if this had not happened to him in the first place. You can read all of Timmy’s story here.

Timmy’s human decided it was time to take matters into her own hands and come up with an anti-flea product that would kill fleas, but not harm cats, dogs, or the children who might want to cuddle or play with them. Her first product is called Dirty Flea Soap, and in addition to getting rid of fleas naturally, it’s also good for the skin problems that come with flea infestation: dry, itchy skin, hot spots and the like. This rich soap is gluten-free, sustainable and has no GMOs. It is a wonderful product… but it is just the beginning!

Tiny Timmy’s human currently has an Indiegogo campaign to broaden her vision. At first, all she wanted was to sell enough bars of this soap to be able to donate some to rescues. Well, it was very successful — over 1,000 bars got donated! But now it’s time to turn this effort into a real business, with all the paperwork that requires. Plus, she wants to improve the base soap recipe to make it even more environmentally friendly. She also wants to create new products, such as a spray and liquid soap. All this requires money, hence the Indiegogo campaign. Here is the video for the campaign:

If you can’t see the above video, you can see it on their Indiegogo page.

The good news is that so far Tiny Timmy and his human have raised over $3,000! The bad news is that their goal is $8,900 — and there are only 6 days before the end of their campaign. With Indiegogo, they will get the money, even if they don’t reach their goal… but Indiegogo takes a significantly bigger percentage of the money if the campaign falls short! So can you please spread the word about this very worthy effort everywhere you can? And if you can afford to, chip in some money — there are many different levels and some really great perks! I want to see Timmy hit and maybe even surpass his goal!

Visit Timmy’s Indiegogo campaign here to find out all the details — and contribute!

Just to let you know, neither Timmy nor his human asked me to post about their Indiegogo campaign. In fact, I don’t even know them and they didn’t know I was posting about it. I just want to help them because I really believe in what they are doing.
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

What Cats Are Good For

Yesterday, I saw a blog post from the awesome artist and human, Bernadette Kazmarski, in which non-cat people wondered “what good” her five cats were! Can you imagine? Her response was in her post, and it made great points from a human perspective. But I also thought it would be fun for me to turn things around, and tell humans what we cats can do for you!

* We are truth tellers. Whereas a dog acts like you are wonderful all the time, even when you are not, we cats let you know where you really stand. And that is important, if you humans ever want to improve yourselves.

* We are healers. It’s true — our purrs can promote bone strength, help heal infection and muscle soreness, and lower blood pressure and stress! This infographic tells all.

* We keep your home free of vermin. In fact, we have fun doing it!

* We provide sustenance. It’s not our fault you don’t want to eat the bugs and mice we catch. We offer them to you — we can’t force you to eat them.

* We help you increase your awareness. Really! We are full of surprises, and it takes effort to stay one step ahead of us.

* We are great alarm clocks. We know how to get you up in the mornings.

* We help you develop positive traits like patience, creative thinking and acceptance. ’Cause that’s what it takes to live with us.

* We teach you that simple pleasures, like watching birds out the window, are more important than material things, such as couches that can get scratched up.

* We show you that friendship and loyalty must be earned if they are to mean anything.

This is my list. What do you kitties do for your humans?
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Sunday Catinee: Drummer Cat

Since I’ve been rocking hard this past week, I thought I’d carry the theme over to my Sunday Catinee with this drummer cat and his drummer human. I searched high and low for the original of this video but sadly, could not find it, so I can’t tell you the name of the CD the guy is holding at the beginning of the clip. I do want to say, these two make an awesome drumming duo! See for yourself below — it’s just more proof that everything is better when you add a kitty!

If you can’t see the above video, click here to watch it on YouTube!
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

Caturday Art: The Perfect Effects Edition

I was going to feature another kitty today from the requests I received, but my human found out about a cool, professional-level photo editing software program that is temporarily being given away, so I wanted to focus on that first. I’ll feature my first other kitty next Caturday.

The name of the editing software is Perfect Effects 8, and it is part of a suite of photo editing software called Perfect Photo Suite 8 used by many professional photographers. My human has an earlier version of Perfect Photo Suite, and she has used it a lot for her own photo blog (which she has been too busy to devote any time to for a while). She downloaded the free copy of Perfect Effects 8 and picked out the above photo of me for experiments. First she touched it up in Photoshop, cropping and enhancing it a touch and removing distracting things like the magazine in the background. So this is what she started with below:

Then she took it into the Perfect Effects program and started playing around with it. There are a lot of ways to add subtle color and sharpening enhancements that make plain photos look pretty awesome, but she figured you would probably want to see something dramatic, so she used some fairly complex filters, like the one below, called Deep Forest Glow:

There are also a bunch of black and white filters, including a series that emulate old fashioned film. My human went back to my photo and added a filter that does a pretty nice version of one of her favorite old black and white films, called Ilford Pan F 50 (yes, they still make it):

There are also a number of vintage look filters (you know, like you have on all those phone apps), like this one, called Dirty Bird. It combines faded and degraded colors with scratches and a damaged look:

But the cool thing about Perfect Effects is the ability to layer the effects — and you can adjust each effect too. Here is one example — first she started off with a complex, preset filter called Magic City — it’s kind of HDR-like:

She saved it, and then layered a black and white filter called Roadie on top of it. Roadie makes photos look kind of rough, and it exaggerated some of what Magic City did:

Then she took a step backward with a vintage filter effect called Calotype. Because of the earlier filters, the photo has more detail than it normally would, and she also adjusted the vignetting:

I don’t know how long the company that makes Perfect Photo Suite is going to offer free copies of Perfect Effects 8, so if you want it, you should probably download it now — you can get it here. It works on both Mac and Windows computers. There is no catch, other than you’ll be on their mailing list, and they don’t bug you very often. If you want a sneak peek of the program, you can watch a seven-minute video intro. If you get it, I expect to see some interesting effects from you!

For more Caturday Art, visit Athena!
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!

The Blog Topic Generator… for #Cats

Since I leave the boring business side of blogging to my human, she is subscribed to a bunch of different marketing and blog newsletters. Here is one email that arrived yesterday:

Stuck in a rut when it comes to blog topic ideas?

We’ve created the Blog Topic Generator, an interactive tool to help you come up with creative blog post ideas, in seconds. Type in general topics you want to write about and the tool will give you five blog post ideas, just for you. And, you don’t need to fill out a form to get the first five topics.

“Why not give this a try and see if it works for kitties?” I thought. So I clicked on the form and filled the list with topics that would interest cats: Cats (duh), Playtime and Treats.

And this is what the Blog Topic Generator came up with:

I don’t know about you, but my favorite is #3 — “Think You’re Cut Out for Doing Treats? Take This Quiz.” I didn’t even know that treats could be done. I thought they were meant to be eaten. I am not even sure what exactly constitutes “doing” treats. I could never do #4, since I know way more than 15 cats blogs I would recommend! I think I’ve done a blog post on #1 several times. As for the playtime posts? Well, playtime seems to be a foreign concept to the marketing employees who designed this Blog Topic Generator. I feel kind of sorry for them.

Figuring that one attempt wasn’t enough of a test, I decided to try again, this time with the topics Cats, Behavior and Food. I thought maybe being a little more serious would get results that at least made more sense. I was wrong.

Wow. I have no idea how they came up with a post entitled “Miley Cyrus and Behavior: 10 Surprising Things They Have in Common.” At least the tool didn’t try to compare her with us cats! As for the rest of the list, well, maybe some day I could do 10 Quick Tips About Food, but from what perspective? How to steal it? How to shun it? I’d have to get more specific. And do your bosses have things they want you to know about us kitties? I hope they are telling you.

Want to have fun too? Why not try the Blog Topic Generator yourself — then come back here and let me know what you got!
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!