Windows Live Writer

I posted awhile back about enlarging photos and have since found a much better method for posting to your blog and loading pics . Windows Live Writer. All you need to do is get this downloaded onto your computer and you will be in blog heaven, loading pics faster than you can snap your fingers, editing, changing fonts quick and easy, and even moving your pics around at will. And you’ll wonder what took you so long to find this wonderful tool. I have to thank Joni, from Cote de Texas for turning me on to Windows Live Writer a few months ago. She nudged me over to it and I haven’t looked back.

No more changing codes to enlarge pics, no more loading pics in order so that they can still be clickable to enlarge. With Windows Live Writer, you can move things around as you wish before it gets published. You will love it! So, what are you waiting for, go here and download and start blogging. This is the screen from the Windows Live Writer site:

And come back and tell me how much you love it too. Be careful when you are downloading it to only choose the Windows Life Writer portion, you really don’t need the other Windows Live features. You will need to attach your blog to it once it’s loaded and then you’re good to go. The only glitch so far is that picture storage can sometimes cause an error message when you try to publish or save a post to your blog. When that happens, it may say error 500, which might mean that you are over your picture storage with Blogger and Picasa (where pics are stored). After 2 years of blogging, I just recently had to pay for a year of extra storage for my pics ($20 per year), but that’s what happens when you post lots of pics like I do. It’s worth it! I also recently got another error message and Joni helped me with that one. She suggests that you go in and rename the last album in your picture storage file and that takes care of the error. In case you don’t know where your picture storage area is in Picasa, click on Dashboard, then My Accounts, and then click on Picasa. That is where all your pics are automatically stored in Blogger.

So, this is a tip from me to you and I hope you new bloggers will take note and try it out. It will make your blog life SO much easier. I only wish I had started using it months ago.

While we’re talking about new bloggers, let me take this opportunity to give you a few other tips on blogging. Many of you have asked me over the months about better ways to get your blog out there. I really don’t have any great advice, except to be yourself, write about what you love, and go and visit lots of blogs and comment. Those blogs will get to know you the more you put yourself out there and then they’ll come back to see you too. I think the best thing I can tell anyone is to be yourself. Pure and simple, a real personality is your best asset. I have been blogging 2 years now and it’s only been by word of mouth and networking that my blog has grown to where it is now. I’ve never had a big feature or any sort of story that has promoted my blog all that much.

Another thing that really continues to be a pet peeve of mine and that I've mentioned before is the feature of Letter Verification on blogs and I continue to see it on a lot of new blogs. Some will argue with me on this one, but people, I’m here to tell you, you absolutely do NOT need to keep this feature turned on at your blog. If you feel the need for higher security or to control spam, then leave on Comment Moderation, which means you will moderate each and every comment before it hits your blog, but please, please, please turn off the Letter Verification thingy. It’s highly annoying to your readers and takes SO much longer for them to leave comments. You will not find any big blogs out there that have this feature, so please take that suggestion in the manner it is meant to be taken and consider turning it off. I’ve had a few problems over the last 2 years with some ugly spam at my blog, but it has been very sporadic and not enough to warrant me turning it on. I’ve had to turn on Moderate Comments one time only for just a couple of days. You have the power to delete any rude comments at your blog, so use it.

I see so many new blogs out there these days and I hope these suggestions will help many of you get your blogs going and growing!

Next Wednesday, I have a very exciting GIVEAWAY going on and I promise, you will not want to miss it. Some great things that you will ALL love!

Fa-La-La! and a Blog tip

Are you over all that food yet? We had a very festive day with lots of good food and time with family. There are 4 generations sitting at this table, Peter's daughter Stacey, Peter, his mom Barbara, and Grandma Eleanor. That's pretty neat! His two sons got busy with work and couldn't make the trip this time. All my food turned out great, how about yours?

I couldn't resist this cute set of oh-so-Christmasy kitchen towels at Homegoods recently. For $5, a great way to add a little punch in the kitchen this season. And the colors are perfect in my kitchen too. The Christmas boxes are now out of the attic and decorating is in full swing, so stay tuned for some fun. I'm starting with my foyer table and this year, the starring colors will be lime green and white!

Fa-La-La Ya'll!

We have a slightly important little football game today and I have just one thing to say about that....ROLL TIDE!

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BLOG TIP: How to Enlarge Pics

OK, here's a little tutorial on enlarging pics. If you didn't already know this little tidbit, it's best to load your pics first and then add your text. If you were wondering WHY your pics are not clickable for enlarging, then you've probably been dragging your pics around AFTER you have loaded them. You can't do that and keep them clickable. And to get large pics, here is all you do. When you are composing a new post, you'll see 2 tabs on your open post box, one for Edit Html and one for Compose. You mostly will use the Compose tab, but Edit Html comes in handy a lot too and you'll see why. Don't be scared of Html, it's your friend.

After you have uploaded your pics, click on the html tab. You will notice that each pic you uploaded will have a whole paragraph of text to identify it. I've found it's easier to go ahead and size those pics as soon as you upload them. Without any text in the way, you can easily identify where your pics are. You will need to count from the top if you are trying to enlarge only certain pics to make sure you are getting the right ones. There are 2 steps to enlarging pics this way. And you will need to change EACH and EVERY pic individually to enlarge them all, if you wish to do that. It sounds time consuming, but once you get the hang of it, it's not hard at all. You'll see lots of nonsense that won't make sense, but look for this in all the bits of text for each picture you load (STEP 1):

WIDTH: 300px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px;

or you will see something similar, just look for the WIDTH and HEIGHT part. You will need to TOTALLY delete that whole part, including CURSOR, all the way to the ;

It doesn't matter if your px numbers are a little different than mine, that's the part that needs to be deleted. Just highlight over it and hit delete.

(STEP 2) Then, look for a number like this in each pic's paragraph of text: /s400/

Change that 4 to an 8 and your pics will magically enlarge. Click on over to the Compose tab and you'll see it immediately. You can click back and forth as you are working on your post. Try it out in a practice post with a couple of pics at a time until you get the hang of it.

You will love it. Now, this takes a bit more time when you're composing, but it's totally worth it to me for those huge pics. You have to be careful if, like me, you have 3 columns on your blog. I usually don't enlarge my pics that are square, but only the ones that are taller (vertical) pics. I have to be careful that my pics don't run off the page, but the vertical ones work great being enlarged. Now, you can also enlarge your pics by clicking on each pic and dragging the handles on your pics in Compose mode and pulling your pics out and larger. I've been doing that the last couple of weeks since they messed up the other method, BUT I also noticed that when I manually drag the box and make it bigger that my pics were not clear (but grainy) and I was really frustrated with that. So, changing the code is the better method for clear and large pics!

You'll also notice that Blogger has changed the order that pics are loading. Don't know what to do about that, guess we'll just have to adjust and load them opposite of the old way. That part I can live with.

Try it out and you'll be hooked too!

Changing your Blog Background

(click to enlarge)


I've been asked by several people recently about how to change your blog background, so I thought I'd do a little tutorial for those who are interested. It's fun, easy and really changes the look of your blog, so give it a try. Believe me, I'm not a computer guru, so if I can do it you can too!


I went out online and found some fabric samples from different fabric sites online and then saved them to my computer. You can use any sort of picture, fabric samples, wallpaper samples, anything at all. It will repeat whatever picture pattern you choose, so you may have to play with it as some repeats don't look as good as others.


Once you save some pics to play with, this is how you do it. I learned this from someone else, but it’s really easy. I’ll paste a copy of my template here, so you can see exactly what I mean. See where it says “background” above in the template? That’s where you paste in the picture. You’ll need to save the pics to your computer. Then go to your layout & Add a Picture, just like you would add one to your sidebar. When the pic comes up in the box, don’t save it. Right click & look at Properties. Then highlight & save the Properties of the pic, that will give you the jpg info to paste here. Then go to your Edit HTML page, scroll down to where you see background like I’ve shown here. Then paste that jpg url inside the “ “. You can see mine is called Essence. It will begin with http and end with jpg. That’s all there is to it! Then just save it and your background will change to that pic.


If you run into any problems or have any questions, email me and I'll try to help! Hope you try it out.