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  Here's a story about racquetball which, if you'll bear with me, can help you become a better painter.   When I was a teenager, my mom worked at a health club.  I spent most of my after school time there.  So, I used to play racquetball a lot.      At some point, I had practiced enough that playing against friends, while fun, was no longer challenging.  The health club had a posted ranking of the top players.  There were four categories: A,B,C and D.  Each category had 10 players.  So player "A1" was the top ranked player and player "D10" was the bottom ranked [...]

  In this post, I'll show you how to post to Instagram from your desktop computer in the Chrome web browser.    Many artists have written us to say they'd like to use Instagram more, but that they hate having to do everything from their phone.  Especially when all their best images of their artworks reside on their desktop computer.   You can actually post to Instagram from a desktop, and you don't need to pay for some special third party app to do it.  The method I'm going to share here is free.    This method takes advantage of an undocumented little "hack" to post to [...]

  To be successful marketing your art on Instagram, you need engagement.  In this article we're going to give you an idea on how to jump start engagement on your account.   Engagement includes the following actions:  "Liking" posts, commenting on posts, following accounts, and frequency of posting.   Instagram rewards engagement.      If you want your artworks to be seen on Instagram, you need followers, you need people to like your posts, you need people to comment on your posts, and you need to post frequently.  Otherwise, you're simply building a historical record of images of your artworks....for yourself.     The big question most artists have at this [...]

  Are you struggling as an artist to understand how to make effective use of Instagram?  Read on.   First of all, unless you simply don't want to use social media as a way to market your artwork then you absolutely must start using Instagram.  It is currently, by far, the most important social media platform for visual artists.   After much reading, experimenting and observing of successful artists (and other Instagram power users), I've put together a complete strategy for visual artists who want to make the most of Instagram.   Instagram Content StrategyThe content strategy is tells you what to post.  This strategy is designed to [...]

On a Sunday afternoon in June, Google Cloud experienced a major five-hour outage.  Besides taking down many Google products, it took down huge swaths of the Internet partially or completely.  These services included Shopify, Snapchat, Discord, Vimeo, Apple iCloud, Nest AC controllers, and many other services.Why did Google's failure affect so many other services?  Because they depend upon Google Cloud.In software development, we often use the term "Dependencies."A dependency is a program or service upon which another program or service relies.  For example, our FASO image uploading system has several dependencies:  We use a service called FileStack to manage the uploader itself.  We then process the images with [...]