Mia’s Mar Vista News is a labor of love and mild sociopathy originally created in the mid-1980s and updated haphazardly when I have the time, energy, and inspiration.
I have been studiously neglecting it, while still paying for hosting, for more than a decade. Possibly two. The need to promote the Double Trouble Adventure book series inspired me practice my CPR on it. The entire site used to be managed in a now dead tool, Adobe GoLive. The prospect of rebuilding was daunting, but it turns out in 20 years, easier tools have been developed. Imagine that.
This site is based in WordPress and hosted, as it always has been, on Earthlink. Image editing and other design are done using the Affinity Suite, a lower cost alternative to Adobe’s classic design tools.
The computer most used is a 2011 Mac Server with an I7 chip, 16gb of RAM, and two 750gb SATA disks.
Video for the News used to be shot with a Sony digital video camera, uploaded to a G4 dual that used to be the hottest thing around. All editing was done in iMovie and exported to QuickTime. More recent video is shot with various iPhones and edited in iPhoto right on the phone, or on a 2018 Macbook Pro.
Digital still photos were taken over the years with four digital cameras: an Olympus 340, a Canon S110 digital Elf, a Sony prosumer with kick-ass zoom and resolution, and most recently a Nikon DS5100 with various lenses, and, of course, various iPhones. Non-digital photos were taken with a Nikonos 35MM underwater camera and a stately old Zeis Icon 35MM SLR. Prints were scanned on various scanners including a Canon flatbed and an HP multifunction laser printer/scanner. Photo retouching used to be done in Adobe Photoshop, mostly on the Macs but some on a Windows PC. Since 2020 it is done in Affinity Photo.
Logos and other graphics were created in Adobe Illustrator and converted to GIF format either directly or via Photoshop.
Mia's Mar Vista News 