Jan 03
So, This ENTIRE time, I just thought people weren’t visiting my blog, and I was just posting away on my monthly way thinking that maybe later on I would start getting some visits. Well someone emailed me after I posted my Lightning Source PDF horror (he took that extra little step to go to [...] [...more]
Posted: under WebDesign, WordPress.
So, This ENTIRE time, I just thought people weren’t visiting my blog, and I was just posting away on my monthly way thinking that maybe later on I would start getting some visits. Well someone emailed me after I posted my Lightning Source PDF horror (he took that extra little step to go to my book website and used my Contact Page), and told me that he couldn’t leave a comment. I was like, “What?” So, sure enough, there was this stupid error talking about cookies and java scripts and such. If I got that error after writing a comment, I was just leave too and wouldn’t be bother with it. Who wants to bother with fixing your cookies and java stuff. Well it took me a few hours and I figure out that one of my plug-ins was being blocked by .htaccess, which I had used for additional security.
DUH!!
I was wondering why my Counter plug-in never worked either. Well, needless to say, I think I solved my problem…I think. 
We’ll see if this fixes things and I may see some responses in the year 2010.
Hopefully this doesn’t open up that onslaught of SPAM that I was trying to prevent.
The things your learn as you go.
Until Next time!
Oct 26
MY THREE BOOKS ARE UP AND RUNNING!!
Between nursing and diaper changes, I finally got three books ready to sell on Amazon.com and Mobipocket. The 2nd and 3rd books didn’t take very long at all to get on Amazon and Mobipocket; so I guess that once you have one (1) book up and going, everything [...] [...more]
Posted: under Self Publish Progress, WebDesign.
MY THREE BOOKS ARE UP AND RUNNING!!
Between nursing and diaper changes, I finally got three books ready to sell on Amazon.com and Mobipocket. The 2nd and 3rd books didn’t take very long at all to get on Amazon and Mobipocket; so I guess that once you have one (1) book up and going, everything else takes less than five (5) days. I uploaded my books on a Monday and it was on Amazon by Friday.
HURRAY!!!! Irid and Ruby, Flesh & Heart are on the move!!
So now for the next step–Marketing Online.
I’ve been doing some research and I’ve decided to do New Press Releases at prlog.org and prweb.com. I’m not quite sure how they work, but I figure I would write up a press release and post them anyway. There’s also my college alumni magazine I can post into as well. I’ve already stated my progress on my Facebook as well. I’m sure there’s more out there to do and I’ll research on how to do it. I did take a business course on online businesses, so I’ll go back through my notes on that as well to see the other advertisements I can do.
I’ve added meta tags to my webpage. Meta tags are information inserted in the heading of a web page to tell a browser what your page is all about. It’s more html stuff I learned about in my online business class. Not sure it will help, but decided to see what will happen anyway.
So, once I’ve done with my research on every possible way I can market online, I’ll be posting it here.
And darn! I missed another month (September). I tell ya. Being a parent ain’t no joke. I just don’t have as much time as I use to, to do things. I can see the fun and the not so fun of being a parent, but I’m definitely going to find the time to do what I have always dreamed of doing.
Well…back to nursing. Until next time!!
Apr 12
BUSINESS CARDS
I went to VistaPrint and made some business cards and some postcards with the image of my book cover on it. It came out very, very well. I like them. I put an image of me on the back of the business card with the words “Thank You.” I saw that on [...] [...more]
Posted: under Self Publish Progress, WordPress.
BUSINESS CARDS
I went to VistaPrint and made some business cards and some postcards with the image of my book cover on it. It came out very, very well. I like them. I put an image of me on the back of the business card with the words “Thank You.” I saw that on one of my husband’s old business cards, and I thought that was a pretty nice idea.
I got the postcards so I can sign them and send them out to relatives who want me to sign their books, but they live in different states. It just costs a lot to ship books back and forth; so my mom suggested this idea where I can write a nice thingy on a postcard, mail that out, and then whenever I actually see my relative, I’ll sign the book. They can place the postcard in the book in the mean time.
WORD PRESS HEADER
Man! That took forever to just change the header for my blogsite!
STEP 1:
First I tried to make some kind of background image to lay (or is it lie) my book cover on. I took parts of the book’s cover and kept copy/pasting it over and over using the program PAINT (standard in MicroSoft).
I look at several ways of doing this backdrop.
1) I tried recreating the sky, but it just look like plaid.
2) Then I tried to just do simply stars that looked random. It was o…k….
3) Then I just went for plain, but it was just not the right background…
So none of them would do (I sound like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. LOL!!) None of them looked right with the book cover. So I decided just have plain ole Black.
STEP 2:
So then I went to WordPress on how to update the default theme and its header. Not easy for me at all. I tried replacing the image “kubrickheader.jpg” with my image, but first you had to upload your image. And where might that be? I had no idea. So, I decided to upload it to my Folder: wordpress\wp-content\themes\default. And I used my Dreamweaver to upload just that file. Well that got it working, but it still had the stupid blue background because my image, I guess, wasn’t big enough. At least I got the “display:none;” to work to get the Title and Subtitle out of the image.
Here’s where I put it in Word Press APPEARANCE > EDITOR > STYLESHEETS CSS.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ h1 {display:none;
@@ font-size: 4em;
@@ text-align: center;
@@ }
@@
@@
@@
@@ Headerimg .description {display:none;
@@ font-size: 1.2em;
@@ text-align: center;
@@ }
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
STEP 3:
But I still couldn’t get that darn blue area out of the way. So I went back to my metamorph_tropicforest theme, took a look at it and decided to change the “header.jpg” name to an image I just created with PAINT.
I renamed the orginal “header.jpg” to
STEP 4:
So THEN I had to resize my “header.jpg” to be exactly 791 X 182. I used PAINT using IMAGE >ATTRIBUTES and resized a blank canvas, and then pasted my book cover, which expanded the length, but not the width. I just grabbed a side of my book cover image and on the PAINT bottom corner, it tells you, while you resizing, what size it’s making it. So I made sure it was 182 and then squeezed it to coordinate the image so that it wouldn’t look so stretchy.
FINALLY DONE:
So I uploaded the images and it looks okay. My book cover looks pretty small, but it’s up there. Resizing the images to match existing images that was use in the theme, was much easier than trying to figure out the default theme for me. I had to re-edit the metamorph_tropicforest Stylesheet to take out the title and subtitle that was going over my header like this..
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@@ }
@@ #logo a {display:none;
@@ text-decoration: none;
@@ text-transform: lowercase;
@@ font-style: italic;
@@ font-size: 18px;
@@ color: #ffffff;
@@ }
@@ #logo H2
@@ {display:none;
@@ font-size: 12px;
@@ color: #ffffff;
@@ }
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
So there you have it! I’m done. So, yeah, the book cover is too small, and I couldn’t get it “Just Right” like Goldilocks, but it will do.
Till Next time!!