Entries Tagged 'Blogging' ↓

On January 5th, 2012, I gave birth to my beautiful son William after a perfect labour. The pregnancy was difficult due to hyperemesis gravidarum (upchucking every day the entire pregnancy) but it ended the moment he came out and things have been amazing ever since.

I haven’t felt this great in a long time although I could use a few more hours of sleep! Every moment of sickness throughout the pregnancy was worth it now that I can hold my new baby in my arms. My health issues that I was struggling with prior to the pregnancy have virtually disappeared so we’ve decided our William is a healer baby!

His daddy is a healer too. He took care of me so well and never complained once even though he had to do a lot of disgusting things like empty my “puke bowl” every day. I was too sick to even make it to the bathroom. He rubbed my feet, brought me meals in bed, made me laugh and told me I was beautiful every day even though I felt like death. I’ve never felt so blessed.

Now that I’m feeling better I’m gradually getting back into a routine and doing more things that I haven’t been able to do in almost a year. I thought posting to this blog could be one of those things. I’ve missed it terribly and I have so many things I’d like to write about.

It will be slow going because I rarely have two free hands to type with but I’ll do my best. In the meantime, I’ll be spending most of my time holding my new little one and enjoying every single nanosecond of it!

My boyfriend and I were driving to his mom’s house the other day when a strong urge to blog came over me. I doubt there are many bloggers out there who don’t know what I’m talking about. I knew that if I didn’t get those words out of my head, they would fade away into the obscurity that is my brain and never return so I wrote those literary mofo’s down on a scrap of paper with a pen that was almost out of ink.

I’m notorious for being way behind the times. I think I was the second last person in town to own a cell phone. I was definitely the last person in town to figure out how to text properly. This brings me to my question – how do you blog when you’re not at home? Do you use your cell phone? Do you drink gallons of coffee while you blog at a cafe? Do you talk into a voice recorder and type it out when you get home?

Or do you write on scraps of paper or napkins with an old linty pen like me?

I’d like to find a more efficient way of doing it, so please tell me how you do it!

I’ve been meaning to create video for this blog for years and now I can finally say I achieved that goal!

This is something that I get asked a lot about from my clients so I’ve created a really quick tutorial for anyone who wants to add an image into their WordPress sidebar. This tutorial gits ‘er done without using an FTP program and without having any knowledge of HTML.

The sound quality is fairly poopy but I promise the next video will be better.

Add an Image to Your WordPress Sidebar

If you have any questions, please leave a comment!

Since I first started blogging, I’ve written my blog posts in Notepad. Notepad is a text editor that comes with Windows. You’ll find it in Accessories. (If you use it regularly, you can “Pin” it to your Start Menu for quick access.)

At first, I used to write my posts in Notepad because I could save them to my computer easily and it was much quicker to open up Notepad than it was a heavy word processor like MS Word. At the time, my computer was a POS.

Now, I use Notepad because it is a text editor, not a word processor. When copying it into the WordPress editor, it doesn’t bring a bunch of messed up code along with it like word processors do.

I’ve had many clients who use different word processors to write their blog posts only to find that after they paste it into WordPress and publish it, their blog looks all kinds of messed up.

When I go into the Edit Post page, it’s a nightmare. Open tags everywhere! One client of mine had over 50 posts like that. It’s extremely time consuming to clean it all up so it’s best to avoid that problem right from the beginning.

Here’s what it looks like in the Visual tab:

And here’s what that nasty piece of work looks like in the HTML tab:

See all that weird code in there? We don’t want that.

If you are using Microsoft Word (not to be confused with Works) and you would like to continue using it to write your blog posts in it, please use the “Paste from Word” button in your WordPress editor.

Just click on the “Kitchen Sink” button:

And hit the “Paste from Word” button:

I would still recommend using Notepad however because I’m one of those untrusting types of people and I think that Word will still sneak in a few open tags.

What is an open tag?

Any time you format text you’re using tags. Let’s take the bold tag for example. To bold the following sentence, the HTML code would look like this:

<strong>I’m a bold sentence.</strong>

The <strong> tag is the open tag, and the </strong> tag is the closing tag.

If you don’t close a word or sentence with the </strong> tag, the rest of your text will end up bold. This won’t look very cool on your blog.

So there you have it. That’s my opinion about writing blog posts in word processors and why I cringe just thinking about it.

I wanted to point out a couple resources that two of my excellent readers recommended in the hopes that they will be useful to you.

Chris from AB Web Design says the best tool he has found for color sampling is Pixie. It’s a tiny little program that tells you what the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values are for a particular color. You simply hold your mouse over the color you want.

I do this a lot of times when I see a color in a photo or on a website that I love. Now, instead of opening up Fireworks (which takes an eternity on my piece of crap machine) to find out what the hex value is, I can open up Pixie instantly and find out. Very handy.

Jack from ZedProMarketing.com uses Treepad. I haven’t used it too much yet but I can see it’s like Notepad (for keeping text files) but with a lot more features. Plus it is a much smaller program than OpenOffice or MS Office so it’s much easier to load and keep running while you’re working on other things.

For bloggers and/or web designers who have computers that are lacking in speed and memory (like mine!), these two programs are great options. Thanks for the recommendations guys!