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!!
Nov 05
The suspense is finally over and now we have to wait and see, and hope, what can be accomplished.
President-elect Barack Obama.
Man! It was quiet at the office today. Houston, Texas. I could feel the intensity of negative and positive swirling in the air. What can people say? What can people not say?
We [...] [...more]
Posted: under Blogging.
The suspense is finally over and now we have to wait and see, and hope, what can be accomplished.
President-elect Barack Obama.
Man! It was quiet at the office today. Houston, Texas. I could feel the intensity of negative and positive swirling in the air. What can people say? What can people not say?
We shall see…for he will be our President…too.
Nov 02
I wanted to put out there a list of sites that really, really helped me with my website. I’m a beginner HTML person, and I can get around with a few things here and there, but I needed a lot of help. I designed my first website from scratch using Dreamweaver to get a [...] [...more]
Posted: under WebDesign.
I wanted to put out there a list of sites that really, really helped me with my website. I’m a beginner HTML person, and I can get around with a few things here and there, but I needed a lot of help. I designed my first website from scratch using Dreamweaver to get a basic idea of designing one, but it didn’t quite look professional enough. So I bought a $30 template from TheTemplateStore and updated it for my new site and I’m really loving it.
Here’s my old website: http://www.oldsite.zhollis.com
And here’s my new one: http://www.zhollis.com
I mentioned before, for my new website, that I used Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Fireworks and Swish, which all together can cost over $1,000. I had a friend who I borrowed from, though you can get a trial version of Swish. However, my old website, I just picked up a basic design at oswd. Also at a template store, not at the one I used but anyone that sells templates, they can provide you with websites with programming that you can update yourself without having to buy stuff like Dreamweaver. You simply look at the templates that use CSS based layouts. But if you can find a Free Template to update, I would go that route.
CSS - Yeah. That was a new one for me too. What is it? Well basically, if you have like hyperlinks on all your different pages and you wanted to update the look of all of them without having to update every…single…page, you would put a “class” next to every hyperlink, and in the css coding, you can change the color, or what happens if someone hovers their mouse over a hyperlink, in the CSS code that styles your hyperlinks…and it updates all of your pages at once! Pretty cool thing, but you have to know CSS to use it.
I go here to find out the basics of CSS – Introduction to CSS
So on to my list of useful tools….
++++++++++++++
Free web tools to help you design your website.
I use Dreamweaver, but if you want to save some money, here are some free software to help you design your page.
NVU
Hot Dog
Coffee Cup
Free photo editor – GIMP
This was great for me to use. Especially for those pictures where you want to cut out an image and have it floating on top of another image, like your personal photo. I wanted the background to be transparent, where the background of the picture doesn’t have to be a specific color like white or black, because this might not blend in very well with the background of your website. What I’ve learned is that .jpg .bmp .gif can’t have transparent backgrounds–but .png can. GIMP help me put these images, like this one 
on my site.
HTML – The easy way to understand it.
I use this site all the time to help me figure out what a string of commands mean.
Introduction to HTML
Neat Scripts to add to your website.
I didn’t use any of them, but with my first website, without a template, I was trying to figure out how to do those neat DropDown Menus that are on some sites these days and I found the code at this EarthWeb site
The actual code for the drop down is here:
How to Make a “Contact Us” Form
I really needed help on creating my own form, and the basic HTML site, though it helped with some things about forms, didn’t quite help with HOW to get the information from the form to my email box. PHP Tutorial: Writing Your First PHP script: Feedback Form Script, help me SO SO much. It helped me understand how to get it working and the little bitty things that you have to know like the position of certain strings in the “mail” section and how you want it to look in your personal email. When I change my website to a template, I had to redo my form, and I completely forgot how I got it working. I came back here, did my refresher course, and BOOM…done.
Dealing with Bots
Bots are those robots, or automatic programs sent out by people who spam your email, website, “contact us” page and comments areas. So you know those images in a box where you have to type the characters of the image before hitting the submit button for a form, and the image changes each time you use it? Those can help out with thos nasty little bots. I found reCAPTCH on some Author websites and I was like, “Hey, where they get that?” With some research I found it and it’s just something to help out with those party pooper Spammers. It was a bit complicated to install and the directions on the actual site doesn’t help much at all for us basic HTML users, but this site helped me out A LOT and helped me get it up and running. Installing eCAPTCHA with PHP
Photo Slideshow
My first slideshow on my old website, I used a
Slideshow on Homepage with JavaScript. I couldn’t blend in the background though, yet it was very useful. For my new website, I learned Swish.
That’s about it. All the information dumping I could put on here that helped me. Whew! Hope it helps you out with your next web adventure.