And by soul, I mean art. And by art, I mean my photographs.

The next St. Paul Art Crawl fast approaches - the 25th, 26th and 27th of April in fact. Now I’m not people-friendly enough to actually open my doors to let strangers paw through our goods and make small chit-chat whilst eating expensive foreign cheese and drinking San Pellegrino, but part of the reason we moved here was so that I’d be right on the art crawl circuit.

So instead I’ll be setting up a small display to hang on our front door with some of my nicer pieces¹, with a slew of business cards and a link to my shop. And I’d love for you, dear reader, to be on the ground floor of the Pavleck Art movement!

Indeed, I’m quite serious. I have a lot of money and time invested into my little photography side business, and I’d like to see if I have what it takes to make it with the big dogs. So I’ve setup an Etsy.com shop, and I implore you to check it out. There isn’t much there now, but I plan to add more to it over the weekend. I’d like to know what you think of my prices, especially - to high? To low? To purple?

When you’re done there, feel free to check out Pavleck.Com proper, and if you are really daring, feel free to crawl through the thousands of photos I have up on my Flickr site². I’d like to know what else you think I should put up for sale, and if you have any other ideas.

In fact, I’m so into this idea, that I’ll make ya a deal - if you give me some nice constructive criticism I will reward you! I’ll be ordering a lot of prints over the next several weeks, and I will give you one! A signed, framed photograph of my choosing³ will make it to your door! And they aren’t you’re average HP inkjet print either. Printed via a laser photographic process on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, it ensures a vibrant print that won’t fade, yellow, or bleed. They’ll last longer then me. I’ll contact you via email when it’s ready to go out, so be sure to leave a valid email address when you post. And if you’re post is really good, it might even be a limited edition run, that will never again be printed.⁴

Now let me have it! While you’re doing that, I’ll be busy mucking about trying to pretty up the main site and add some personalization to the Etsy site.⁵

1. So stop on by the Rossmor building during the art crawl - we’re on the 5th floor [↩]
2. 3,892 photos to be exact [↩]
3. Ultimately it’s my choosing, but if there’s one you really really like I might just be able to oblige [↩]
4. After I’ve printed a run, I destroy all digital traces of the photograph except for a low quality “for web” version [↩]
5. Thank God I’m a better photographer then I am a writer [↩]

One of my bigger online pet peeves is the html tag target=”_blank”. If you create a link to a another site, and throw in ‘target=”_blank”‘, it will open it in a new window. Most sites don’t bother with it, some sites - such as the Google newsreader - use it because they should and a lot of other sites use it all the damn time.

Stop telling me how to open a link! I’ve found out how to stop that annoying trait, and you can use it too! If you’re using FireFox, like you should be, simply download Tab Mix Plus!

Tab Mix Plus has a ton of options, and can do a lot more then I’m using it for, but the biggest thing is it lets your browser ignore that stupid ass target tag and open up that link in the current tab you’re in. And all it takes is downloading it, then opening the options under Tools > Tab Mix Plus Options and changing the option for “Open links that open in a new window in:” from it’s default of “New Tab” to “Current Tab”. Click ok and you’re done - the power is back in your hands!

This is just a temporary fix though, as it works this way across all windows - including GReader. I’m going to either write a Greasemonkey script to do this on a per-site basis or work on my own plugin that has this behavior on, but can be overridden for specific sites - look for that eventually. Happy surfing!