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!
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!!
Oct 31
Soooo…
First I went hunting for a host and dug around the internet. There were tons of people with lists of what people that were the best Top 10 web hosting companies…and that list changed with every site I went to. So then I decided to search for any site that had issues or problems. [...] [...more]
Posted: under Blogging, Dreamweaver, ICDSoft, WebDesign, WordPress.
Soooo…
First I went hunting for a host and dug around the internet. There were tons of people with lists of what people that were the best Top 10 web hosting companies…and that list changed with every site I went to. So then I decided to search for any site that had issues or problems. I typed “reviews” after each hosting site that I researched.
Then I came across BestHostingRatings and really liked it! I had already reviewed other sites and this one had comments from people that seemed legit. Plus I had already looked at the one I was most interested in, and it had a lot of comments on it.
I chose ICDSoft, and then got my domain at NameCheap since it offered to place their company information in front of my personal information to keep my address and info private in WhoIs. ICDSoft didn’t offer that, but that’s okay. NameCheap calls it the WhoIsGuard. Though I’m sure there are probably other ways for people to get your information, I figure the more deterrents you have, the better. Everything was completed and done on September 12, 2008.
Soooo
I’m learning html and a bit of css while trying to design a website without paying someone else to do it for me. I was going to use a webdesigner for my webiste (Deana Zhollis) but got pointed to some templates. And I found one for like $30.00 and it was fairly easy to play around with at TheTemplateStore. The other thing is that I have a friend who I could borrow software to help me out with all of the design, otherwise the software to configure a website like this template would have cost me over $1,000 to buy them all. But updating the template was lots of hours and hours of fun. No. Really. I enjoyed figuring out GIMP, Dreamweaver, Swish and Adobe Fireworks. Lots of fun. But what I didn’t like, and what was NOT fun, was Movable Type!
I wanted to have a blog, even though I barely write online, but I’ve heard time and again, that it would help generate people to your site.
Which is what I want to do for my self-published book.
So on to researching free blog sites, and I came across Movable Type, which some people really loved. What I didn’t know was that those people who love it so much were Web Designers.
I worked hours and days trying to upload that sucker onto my host site, even with the help of my host IT at ICDSoft, who basically told me (after I tried to fix something they had already fixed out of the kindness of their hearts) that I was on my own and to start over. I don’t blame them. The stupid thing was horrible! A nightmare!
And then…HURRAY!…it was working. So then, to play around with it. The fun part, right? Wrong! You basically need to be a Web Designer (which, like I said before, I didn’t know) just to maneuver around in that thing! I can’t do a simply thing like move my columns around, cause I need to know more css than I do!
So I decided to scratch the Movable Type project and find another software where I can have a blog. I looked into WordPress, but before trying to install a “very easy” program as so many have already suggested, I still didn’t see if it would be as easy as it was designing my website with the template I bought from TheTemplateStore.com for $30 bucks.
On to looking at Blogger. Can I put in on my host site? Yes, they say. I can FTP the page. But they didn’t tell you it had to be a STANDARD TEMPLATE! What if I wanted to add some neat things to my blog site, to make it look pretty and different? Nope. Standard. And If I wanted to tweak the darn thing, I would need to know more of HTML than I do. PLUS I can’t delete my account, but I can put in bogus information in it and decide to never sign on to it again. So there’s another Blogger profile out there, no website, but just sitting on a server.
Sigh…
WhatToDo..WhatToDo..WhatToDo..WhatToDo..???
I went back online and did more research and found out that Word Press has things called “themes.” And then found a youtube presentation on how easy it was to implement one. Will it work? Back to downloading…
This time, downloading wasn’t so bad. It claims 5 minutes to do everything, but it still took some doing…about 15-20 minutes for me. If I hadn’t done the Movable Type, I would have never known how to setup my database. Then on to themes. Did some research and found one that I liked, and played around with it. It wouldn’t work with my widgets and columns, so I guess it wasn’t designed right. On to more templates/skins. Found another one. Not as fun as the first one, but it worked. Now to editting it to fit my needs. Very nice! Just like using the Dreamweaver template. Fun. Easy to figure out. A FUN to figure out, which is most important, and now I have to go along with everyone else who simply enjoyes Word Press!
However, I did read that because it’s popular, it’s subjected to lots of spam and hacks and bad people who just want to spoil the fun. So I went on to finding security stuff for it which told me about .htaccess files. Some of them worked, others just got in the way. Again. I’m not that familiar with web design and stuff, so the few things I was able to add and update, I only can hope they’re deterrents.
So, I’ll just cross my fingers and hope for the best on that.
Back to learning more on Word Press
…And having fun!