Need a new Twitter background? TwitterPatterns has lots of cute patterns, instructions on how to use and a nice clean design overall. I’m thinking of giving up my trademark brown (like I have a trademark on the the colour brown) for their cute Argyle designs.
Over time many of us like to change the look and feel of our blogs and websites and it is important that the most recent version of our site is being indexed by popular sites such as Alexa, a traffic ranking stats site that many people use to find new sites of interest. This will ensure that your website is up to date both on Alexa’s stat pages, but also on services that use Alexa Site Thumbnail Service. I went to Alexa’s site recently and for some reason it was showing a very outdated version of my blog’s screen shot. Updating it is pretty easy by one of two means:
1. Go to http://www.alexa.com/data/details/contact_info?url=http://yoursite.com - changing the yoursite.com to the exact web address of your blog or shop. Once there you will see the current thumbnail that Alexa has on file for you. If it is out of date, click the link below the thumbnail that says “Update Thumbnail Image of….” and your image will be updated in a few days to 1 week.
2. If the above URL has been changed and is no longer working, and if you have the Alexa toolbar installed on your browser, you can do the above by simply surfing to your site and clicking the “iInfo” tab. On the dropdown menu choose “More Site Info” and on the page that loads scroll to the bottom to the link labeled “Correct errors and omissions in this listing.” This will bring you to the info edit page I mentioned in the first method. This method is actually preferred because the direct link I listed above may change in the future if Alexa ever does a site re-org.
Making sure your Alexa Image is up to date is part of a healthy site maintenance and keeps your most recent brand image in the eyes of your readers! Plus it’s annoying to see that old image pop up in different places.
For those of us that like to share our favorite treasuries from Etsy, web applications or useful websites with our readers on our blog, Kwout is an online service that will save much time and sanity for you. It allows you to take a screenshot of a particular webpage, crop the page as needed and post it to flickr, mail to an inbox or post anywhere as an embeddable code. The advantage is that this is all done from your browser with no need to save the screenshot to your desktop, or use an image editor to crop the area you want.
Easy to use, just add the little bookmarklet to your browser, and click when needed. Scroll to the bottom of the Kwout main page and chose one of the two bookmarklets (depending on if you would like the screenshot to open in a new window or not when you use it) and drag it to your bookmarks toolbar (or right click and “bookmark this link”). There is also a handy Firefox Extension, if you’re big into those.
When you are on a website you would like to get a screenshot of, go to your bookmarks and chose Kwout. You will then be shown a picture of the webpage with instructions on how to crop to your liking. Once you hit “cut out” you will be taken to the next page of configurable options and posting instructions.
Then post your cropped image. Couldn’t be easier!
I forgot to blog about it, but a little while ago I added a wimpy player to this site on the right sidebar, mostly for the purpose of being able to access some music and audiobooks of mine over the web, but also to share with you some music and stories I listen to as I create. “What’s your creative soundtrack” is a popular question in art forums, so I thought I’d show rather than tell. You can listen to the files on your own computer via this site as you work, and I’ll be uploading more soon. I think I’ll concentrate on the audiobooks for now since I am kind of on n audiobook kick right now. I have several full, unabridged books now in the library - just scroll down to the player (the little iPod thingy) and navigate like a real iPod.
If you want to get your own, it is a simple script with a very reasonable price and it’s super-easy to install, skin and upload music. No, they aren’t paying me to write that, I just like the player.
I used my burgeoning skills in Photoshop to make a few buttons for anyone who wants to link to either the Etsy Sellers Blog List or The Etsy Canadian Shops List, to add a bit of colour to your beautiful blogs and help promote the lists to encourage people to add their shops and blogs. If you look to the right (yup, right there on the sidebar -> See it?) there is a link under the main navigation that says “Link to Us” where you can pick up the buttons for yourself. I plan on adding text boxes with the exact code to add to your site to make it easy to link, but for now you can just save the pictures (right click, choose “Save Image As”) and use that to link to the pages. Contact me if you need help adding the link to your site.
If you would like a different colour button, or a different size to match your blog, just contact me as well and I will whip something up for you.
I know you’re there. I see you on my feedburner, can list you on my sitemeter. I know you’re reading this and I would love to hear your thoughts through your comments, so I have added two new plugins to this blog to help encourage some comment-love from you all.
CommentLuv is a cool little plugin that I have activated but have not had the chance to try out yet (because no one has left a comment since I activated it an hour ago) that will list the title of your latest blog post under your comment by grabbing it from your feed. This adds a little free advertising for your blog when others read my comments and if they see something interesting they can click on the title and be taken right to your site! Cool eh? You can opt out of this when you leave a comment, if you like.
NoFollowFree is a controversial plugin that I have installed nonetheless that removes the “no follow” attribute from the link to your blog you provide in your comments. Not sure what all that means? the No Follow attribute prevents the link to your blog that you leave in comments being added to the list of incoming links for your site (like the ones used to calculate you Google or Alexa page rank, or your Technorati authority). It is controversial because one could theoretically inflate their link score by leaving a ton of comments, but I have included it because if you leave me a comment I think you should get a tiny reward and besides, I don’t think any of my subscribers would try to inflate their score, and I would un-approve your comments if I thought you were. Like the activist group says: “Fight Spam, not bloggers.”
So here is some incentive for you lurkers to leave a thought or two! And yes, I am guilty of lurking too, but I am working on it! I plan on leaving a bunch of comments in future to help share the love.
The web is daunting and sometimes it feels like everyone knows the lingo but you. Along my travels I have solved a few mysteries and found the places to go for answers when a new mystery finds me.
To pass on the love I am starting a new series on Sixth & Elm for the questions everyone else seems to take for granted and you are too intimidated to ask. No question is too simple since, really, this stuff isn’t intuitive and you just have to learn by experience. Feel free to leave new questions in the comments or contact me directly if you want to remain anonymous (I won’t put your name, so no worries about looking “silly”).
The question in this series is from a question asked of me via the contact form on this site, and I thank you for asking it.
1. Why do people not put the “@” in their email address when listing it on a website? For example: sixthandelm(AT)gmail.com or sixthandelm(AT)gmail(DOT)com.
“Bots,” or computer-automated searchers can scan webpages for things that look like email addresses (usually looking for the “@” that gives an email away) to add to spam lists so to be safe many webpage authors will code their emails so that people can understand it, but computers looking for addresses to spam cannot. Another solution is to make their email address into a picture in photoshop so that bots scanning text only cannot read it. I have no idea which pages are safe or when it is okay to use an email address in the correct form so I just use the (AT) format for everything, including listing my email on profiles for facebook, flickr or etsy.
This may not apply to many of you, but for anyone like me who needs to use line drawings for templates for woodburning (or stenciling, or etching, or painting, or colouring books), Photoshopsupport.com has a very good published tutorial on turning your photos or coloured illustrations into line drawings in Photoshop. This makes a much nicer template than simply turning the photos black and white since that method usually produces grey areas I can’t reproduce.
The tutorial goes into detail and includes explanations on what you are doing on each step, but here’s a summary for those of us who love keyboard shortcuts and need a reminder:
I have been having a lot of fun this week totally re-building my site. No, That’s not even partially true. It’s been hell. The site has been up and down, I have not been able to post and I have learned a lot about re-building databases, errors about “headers already sent,” incompatible plug-ins and general installation errors. And since Wonderday is fast approaching, Adam dear has not had time to cut up and code the beautiful site he made for me, so I have been theme-less as well.
So, after weeks of searching for a pretty pre-fab theme that wasn’t too cutesy I found a website called scribblescratch and a modified theme called “striped flowers” that I modified even more. I actually really like the result and will probably keep it up until the summer, when Adam has a chance to get to the new design. Not all the pages are up yet and the Sourcebook is temporarily down, the categories are messed up and the link list is incomplete, but the blog is up and running and I am working on the rest, so stay tuned.
Let me know what you think of the new design, or anything you’d like to see on the site, or hear more about in the posts. On a way cuter note, Chuki is sleeping beside me as I write this and he s snoring very loudly for such a little critter.
So , you might have noticed the blog is a bit… themeless, lately. The foliage theme that I loved so dearly, sadly, relies on the wordpress plugin “Ultimate Tag Warrior” which is not supported by the most recent version of wordpress, so the site was broken for a few days. In the interim I have loaded this nice simple theme called “Very Plain Text,” which is very simple indeed. But do not despair (in case your mental welfare is somehow linked to the health of my website) because I thought ahead and planned for this and married myself a brilliant web designer, who is working diligently (when he’s bored, anyways) on a brand new theme designed just for Sixth & Elm. Here’s a hint of what’s to come, but I don’t want to give too much away… you’ll just have to wait and see!
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