My favourite blogs are both new and old ones but that I read frequently and whose authors I love.

1. La Casa Panda – Because GeNmA is my favourite Panda-man and his entries are always hilarious and he makes me smile when I read his archives. Little known fact: He and I became friends through our blogs, he’s the first blogger I met IRL.
2. queengilda.com – I first read Gilda’s blog in 2007. I find her entries charming, full of insight and I love the way she highlights her points. Also, I love her pictures and she’s always sweet. She’s a super fashion designer and a beautiful person.
3. Frock & Roll – I remember that I started reading this way back when it was called “Miss Corrine”. Corrine is who I consider the sweetest person in the blogsphere. Her post titles bring a smile to my face and I find her little stories hilarious. She’s plain awesome!
4. Erica Lee XO – Erica’s is one of the newest blogs that I started reading this summer. Her entries are super insightful, helpful and so personal. I’ll never forget her first comment here and how cute she was when I sent her an email.
5. Sweet Fancy Treat – I just started reading Daiane’s blog like two weeks ago and I’m super impressed with it. She’s interviewed a lot of people that I didn’t even know about. I like her outlook on fashion and I kinda relate to her. I also like that she responds to all the comments she gets, that’s so sweet!

Honorable mentions:

Yes and Yes, Nubby Twiglet, This is Star, Six Revisions, Smashing Magazine, Aurea Camacho, Lick my Cupcakes, Joanne Faith, Lemon Soda, The Oatmeal, Geeks are Sexy, Style Scrapbook, Chic Muse, Sea of Shoes, Blonde Salad, Fabulously Broke in the City, Everyday Minimalist, Style on a String and College Fashion.

Which are your favourite blogs?

Kisses,

Julie.

P.S.: You can also follow my blog on Bloglovin!

I got a cold and it’s getting better… I just want to be healthy enough to be able to take everything on my first German lesson tomorrow. Since I spent all day in bed, I decided to be a little productive and style the comments on my blog.

I usually would go for the Highlight Author Comments plug in, but it wasn’t cutting it for what I wanted. I wanted to be able to change more than the background colour or the border in my comments. So I used a little piece of code that I found online and then messed up with it a LOT!

I had a bit of trouble with my CSS classes because they weren’t showing up so I spent all morning fixing that and I love how they look now. Also, I got rid of the threaded comments (since no one was really using them and the look was annoying me to no end) and I installed the @Reply/ w comment preview plug in to be able to answer your comments in a much simpler way.

I also figured out how to make different styles for odd and even numbered comments. It’s super easy, I can’t believe I was too lazy to figure it out before!

This is how my comments look like now:

Click to enlarge

You might also notice that I changed the font here. I got rid of  WP-Cufon and implemented @font-face in the CSS for my blog. If you’re in IE you will see that all the titles and stuff are in Arial Narrow, however, if you use any other browser, you will see that my fonts are now Bebas Neue. I really like how they look, I don’t know how to describe but I sure like that my titles and my navigation menu have rollovers available (what’s the point of programming those things when you really can’t use them?).

So, that’s what I’ve been doing all day. How’s your Friday been? Any plans for the weekend? What do you think of the little changes?

Kisses,

Julie.

After a long while, we got tired that we didn’t get any merchandise and our prayers were “answered” and we got a campus store. The Astore, seriously, that is the name in Spanish, opened on Tuesday and is full of university branded stuff.

What I don’t like about it, is the horrendous US college style ‘A’ that they’re using in everything.

That one

Anyways, one of the things I’ve been coveting for the past 2 years (when I found out that there was going to be one) is a stuffed Leonel! Our college team is the Lions, formerly the Falcons, and our mascot is Leonel. A super cute Lion who wears an orange college jersey.

I bought one at a ridiculous price, but I bought the graduate edition (since I am graduating this semester plus, the other ones were sold out). He’s super cute and I totally love him!!

Leonel!

Close up!

Leonel is living in my couch, next to my Mao Zedong pillow. He’s super soft and his cap comes off. I might buy the one with the orange jersey as well (or just the jersey if they sell it) but that will be when I have money again.

What’s your school mascot?

Kisses,

Julie.

I decided to turn on the comment moderation after I received a comment which I talked about on my negative comments post. I have to say that while it keeps the – lack of – negative remarks in my comments, it was also too much hassle. My inbox got swamped (well, not swamped but there were a lot of emails) by emails about a new comment, then another email when said comment got approved.

It got more manageable when I started using the WordPress iPhone App (which I recommend 100% if you have an iPhone/iPad/iPod touch) because then, I wouldn’t get so many emails. Still, opening the app and waiting to see if it wouldn’t crash was a hassle in itself and let’s be honest, typing on the iPod touch is hard.

So after reading the comments on this post by Daiane, I decided to leave my comment moderation in its default settings. Those settings mean that if you are a new reader and want to comment, then I have to approve your first comment but after that, you’re able to write to your heart’s content (unless I ban you because you’re writing a lot of catty stuff, which I’m sure you won’t).

Thanks to some plug-ins I have installed, I barely get spam comments. That means that word verification is not necessary, plus I find it completely annoying.

I’m all for freedom of speech, but I’m all against catty comments and just overall nastiness. I don’t get mad at constructive criticism but when it turn personal and nasty I have to draw a line.

How do you moderate your comments? What anti-spam tools do you use? Do you use word verification? Why?

Kisses,

Julie.

This week I programmed my first mobile app, for Java. It was a little app that did nothing but print some programmed stuff. Still, it’s awesome to see it running on my old phone, the first step towards making my own apps. I’m so excited :DD.

The other day, there was a lot of rain, I left school at like 7:30 pm and traffic was horrible! So horrible that for the first time ever, I was stuck on the 2nd floor like this:

I was like an hour and half drive back home from college. I ended up tired and cranky and everywhere was flooded. This rain needs to stop now…

On Wednesday, I went to see my scholarship service boss. The joy of being a senior is that I don’t have to do anything. He told me that he would call me if anything came up but if this semester is anything like the last one, I will be doing nothing. On my way back to the parking lot, I saw a helicopter in the main courtyard:

I don’t know who came to uni in it (probably a very important business person who was giving a speech or something). This isn’t the first time that a helicopter lands at school, many people who give speeches here come via helicopter. It’s noisy and way too much, IMO.

On Thursday, I got ready to go to school, I don’t have classes or anything but I needed to go to get my ACADEMIC EXCELENCE AWARD!!! I’ve never gotten one and I was so excited! These awards are presented to the top 5% students in each major. In my major Alekz, PC, O and I got the award. My parents came along with me, but with our camera dead we had no way to document the event. I sat with PC and he kept me amused throughout the ceremony (which was super long, an hour and half total). I had some awful cheap wine and then my dad whined that he wanted to get home and we left. Here’s my award:

Yesterday, I went to get registered for my German classes. The Language Centre is at the college near my house, so instead of getting there at an ungodly hour, I got there at 11.

Bad choice…

The line was HUGE!! And I mean HUGE!! It went from the language centre building, to other two buildings and then all the way back. I followed the line and got in it, a few moments later two guys came and got in line after me. I didn’t pay much attention to them, I pulled my iPod and started reading Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. I got to chapter 3, when the two guys behind me were discussing so much that one of them went to ask how much time we would have to be there. The other guy asked me what language I was registering into (he was registering for French) and we got into easy conversation. His friend came back and we started talking about the line, college, work, romantic diners over Skype, sex services over Facetime and many, many more things. Well, I think that it’s obvious that the 3 hour queue went by in a jiffy. I got two new friends and got registered, I must admit that it was the funnest queue I’ve ever been at. I’m glad that I got there late. My classes start next Saturday and I can’t wait!

So, how you’ve been?

Kisses,

Julie.

Why am I so happy about this? In case you haven’t noticed, some of my lastest tweets now read “vía -juliettemaxwell.com-” like so:

vía -juliettemaxwell.com-

How does this work?

I was updating my plug ins (I always do this whenever I see that something needs to be updated) and then I saw a warning that said something along the lines of Twitter changing the way to authenticate it’s users and that I had to do some extra things to activate my Twitter Tools once again.

You just have to create your own Twitter App. YES! Your website has to become a Twitter App in order to get authenticated and use Twitter Tools. It’s super easy to get it registered, you jut have to go to Twitter Developers and register your website as an app. Note: To do this, you have to be logged in your Twitter account. You just have to fill out this form:

Registration form for your app.

You can even upload a little avatar for your website. Once you fill out this form, Twitter will provide you with some keys that you will need to authenticate your Twitter Tools. Once you fill in the appropriate data in the Twitter Tools form, you will be able to tweet from your blog as “vía -blogname-”.

That’s it! It’s super easy and takes literally 3 minutes to set up. I love this new feature, it makes me so happy to see my tweets come from my blog (when I want to use it to Tweet, which you can set up as well) and to see my posts get published in Twitter automatically in the format I like. If you have a WordPress blog, you should really give this a shot.

Now, I’m on the lookout for the perfect Facebook plugin. I’ll report my findings when I do.

Kisses,

Julie.

I used to process my images in Photoshop, nothing fancy just colour adjustments and maybe a little bit of healing brush. However one day Alekz told me about this awesome program and I just had to get it!

Enter Adobe Photoshop Lightroom!

Lightroom is like a super simplified version of Photoshop, it work  exclusively for post-processing pictures and it is a dream come true for those, who like me, don’t have the patience or the skills to deal with Photoshop.

Yup, it is as awesome as it looks like.

Lightroom has 5 different working modes:

1. Library
2. Develop
3. Slide show
4. Print
5. Web

The one in the picture above is the Library Mode where you can see all your pictures. In my case I have all my pictures shown, but usually when you import pictures you only see the ones from that import, not all of them.

With Lightroom, I just pop my camera or SD card into my computer and it imports all the pictures and arranges them into folders that are organized by year, then month and then day. You can modify this set up but, I like it because I can find my pictures in a jiffy.

Also with the Library Mode you can export your modified pictures into a different folder and keep your original files as well. Did I mention that it shrinks the file size of the picture as well? Seriously, a 3 MB picture ends up as a 345 kB file, which is awesome for web and for keeping your bandwidth usage low.

With the Develop mode you do the actual tweaking and processing.

Before getting funky with the presets

On the left side of the screen, you will find a thumb of the current picture, a menu with loads of presets (Presets are pre-defined actions that will process your images, like changing the colours, giving them more contrast and so on. Lightroom has a lot of them installed by default but there are websites that have loads of them available for free download like Preset Pond), and a history menu to undo changes.

The right side of the screen is for advanced user I think. It does a whole lot of stuff like tweaking the colours, editing red eyes, getting rid of blemishes, cropping images. I really haven’t used it a lot because the presets do what I want them to do, so I don’t need to touch that part.

Here, I already used a preset called Bad Ass Film on my picture, however, since my cursor was hovering on another preset, I can preview it on the thumbnail on the left side panel. How cool is that?

I really haven’t used the other modes, but I just found out that the print mode does cool stuff as well. It has templates to print your images in different ways, from single images to greeting card styles. I liked this one:

If I had colour ink, I would totally print that :D.

So yeah, the big secret about my images is that I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I found at deviantART this super easy, no-nonsense tutorial on how to download, install and use presets in Lightroom and you can also find a lot of other presets free for download.

How do you process your images? Do you use Photoshop? Picknik? Or another program, maybe GIMP?

Kisses,

Julie.

My first class is at the Business School and it was with freshmen. I was the “oldest” (I mean oldest in the context that they are in their first year while I’m leaving this December), the girl sitting next to me was really nice and we got along nicely, my teacher looked scary at first but I hear that she is super nice. The class itself sounds really boring but I can bear with it :D.

After that, I made my way to the Lab, said hi to my peeps and my professors, we shared some jokes and then I went to class. This class is my favourite of the semester, it is called Programming for Mobile Devices and I’m super happy with it. We are only 3 people in the class (my friends C, H and myself), the mood is super laid back and I’m really excited about the subject, plus our professor is cool and knows loads about it. I’m excited to program in Java again.

Class ended and I went to get tea with R, we have different classes at the lab (there are 3 simultaneous classes in the different rooms we have available) and we agreed to get tea so that he could tell me about his trip to Israel, Syria, Jordan and Greece. We talked until I had to go back home where I passed out and slept until it was time to go back to college.

Just so you know, I’m a super lucky girl because I only go to college Mondays and Wednesdays :DDD. I had two other classes that were so boring, I want to erase them from my mind. I just need to mention that my boots did save my feet from getting all wet on Monday :D.

This is what I wore on Tuesday (my final schedule was defined on Tuesday night):

Yup, heavily post-processed cell phone pic :D.

• Stripped grey top from H&M
• Turquoise cardigan from H&M
• Skinny jeans from Pull and Bear
• Pink chuck Taylors from Converse
• “don” necklace from Arely
• Grey headband stolen from my sister

On my nails I’m wearing violet/magenta nail polish from Bissu:

Believe it or not this heavily processed image portrays how the nailpolish looks IRL, not like the pictures on my nail polish post do

Make up was:

• Concealer
• Mineral powder foundation
• Pink Guerlain lipstick
• Soft gray mineral eyeshadow
• MAC mascara

Wow, this post processing makes me look incredibly white. My skin is more like light caramel, so my foundation has a lot of yellow undertones to keep it looking even. Also, I love hot pink lipstick :D.

Just for fun this is how I’m wearing my toenails:

Sky blue (barely noticeable) on the left and Maxwell Studio purple on the right.

And a close up of my Converse shoes, they are my favourite pair!

I got my feet wet yesterday because I decided to wear my gladiator sandals and it hailed at school (when I got there it was sunny, hence why I decided to leave my boots at the car). The parking lot got flooded and I drive for an hour and half to get home. I hate the rain! It makes everything more chaotic traffic-wise, and the roads get full of holes and stuff.

I’m going to do a post about my post-processing experiments and reveal the secrets behind this pictures (all taken with my Samsung Jack).

Once I get the hang of my school routine (waking up at 5 to make it in time for 7 am class is not my thing anymore), I’ll get back to blogging as often as I usually do.

Kisses,

Julie.

Still, I love beauty products and one of the things I love above everything (including bright pink lipstick) is nail polish!

I’m a nail biter (I know, nasty habit to have). Luckily, I’m starting to stop doing it (I couldn’t help myself while watching Inception though) and can stop long enough to get my nails kinda longish. My nails take eons to grow (even when I don’t bite them off) so instead of getting french manicures and whatnot I cover them in bright colours.

Such as these:

Not as extensive as others but these work for me

These are my neutrals, blue gray (I’m almost out), grey, a sparkly gray (it’s actually super cool glitter) and white (which I don’t wear that much). sorry for the blurry cell phone pic, but my camera is dead.

My blues and green. I actually don’t like how the green looks on it’s own so I combine it with the dark blue to make a weird mermaid colour. Also the blue looks fantastic on, like sky blue or robin’s egg.

These two actually have more red in them than it looks like here. The one on the left is a vivid violet/magenta and the one on the right looks like the background colour on Maxwell Studio (it’s our “corporate” colour). I didn’t like that the right one takes like 3 – 4 coats to look like it is in the bottle. My other nail polishes (all from Bissu) take one or two coats to look as they do in the bottle.

My pinks! The first one is a dark sparkly pink (I’m almost out as well), the middle one is more like a barbie pink and the last one is a fab neon pink. I need to get more ASAP.

Here is my black nail polish (it has a super shiny finish), my gloss and my dryer (the best dryer ever! Works like a charm)

And that’s it. It may not look like other MASSIVE collections from other beauty blogger, but in a household that only buys french manicure kits it’s quite a lot. I also buy loads of little bottles, I have an explanation for it. I hate when I buy a bottle of nail polish and I never really wear it and then it becomes all thick and unwearable and I have a huge bottle of product that I can’t really use. With the little bottles I have no problems, because I wear them all before they get all dried up and I can stock on them if I want. Also they are much cheaper than regular bottles and last just as long (I swear and I change my nail polish a lot!) and they don’t take as much space as big bottles do.

I really like the Bissu brand. It’s the best I’ve ever come across (plus it is a Mexican brand, so far, the dryer is the only product that I’ve bought from them that is not made in Mexico). They have tons of colours and they apply like a charm. You can look at their colour range and other products in their web shop.

When I get hold of a camera (or enough light for my webcam) I’ll show you how they look on my nails they areally are fabulous.

Kisses,

Julie.

All the nail polish has been bought by me, I’m not getting paid in any shape or form for this post.

I suggested Concrete5 because our website is mostly informative and there are no constant updates to it. I do not know how Concrete5 would fend as a blog. I will always say that the best blogging platform is WordPress. Anyways, Concrete5 has some cool features and making themes for it is a breeze. I loved that about it.

Then I started experimenting with Blogger. To be honest, I’ve never done anything to it except change the colors with the Design options and putting a header image. I just toyed with the CSS of the Minima template (my favourite blogger template, and as I found out… super easy to play with). I’m not planning on going back to Blogger (God forbid), but it is handy to know how it works in case I have to make a template. Here are the results of my experiments, I totally based it off my website just to see if I could do it.

Also I have some random webcam pictures:

Cupcake lipgloss, I can’t open the one with the strawberry though :/

Business Cards!!! I think that I’ll change my cell phone again so that I can take better pictures

I’ll show you my nailpolish collection tomorrow. It’s become a little more extensive than I thought it was.

Kisses,

Julie.