PINTEREST - how to move items you saved to the wrong board

Have you ever saved something to Pinterest and realised you pinned it to the wrong board? I know I have, and it's so annoying!

Here's the easy way to move the item to the correct board the EASY way!

Hope this helps!

BLOGGING FOR BEGINNERS: HOW TO LABEL YOUR POSTS

Added 30 Jan 3013:
I've had an email about the new template layout and labelling. So here you are - hope this helps!
 

Adding lables with the new dashboard layouts

You still need to add the Label widget in your sidebar, but you'll now be able to update labels on old posts by Updating rather than republishing.

NOTE - some of the suggestions below may help, but you'll find a lot now out of date.
 
I've had a query on how to label your blog posts - and why you'd want to!

HOW?
Easy peasy - just go to Design > Page Elements view and follow the two pix below.

Click on 'Add a Gadget', select the 'Labels' widget and add it right into your sidebar. That's it!
Make selections to fine tune your widget to how YOU want it (see below).

WHY?
Because it helps people can find particular items easily, without having to scroll through post after post after post, trying to find that item that caught their eye a while ago.

For example: you saw an ATC, and want to see more of them. If the link under the post has a label, eg: ATC, then you just click on it and a whole page of ATCs appear, as if by magic. Blogger shows every post with an ATC label, in one scrollable page. Brilliant!

HOW IT WORKS:

Label your posts in the little white 'Labels' box, just under your posting area. Just type them in, but make sure you separate each one with a comma, or you'll have one very long continuous one!

If you already typed some labels, they'll be saved. So no need to separate these with a comma.

You'll see all the labels show under that post when you've published it.

And here's how those labels under the post translate to that widget in the sidebar.

HOW DO I EDIT MY LABELS?  I'VE GOT TOO MANY!

This is so easy to do - when I started, I labelled everything in sight! Now I've got so many that it's confusing. Here's what you do:

Go to Edit Posts view, and you will see all those labels in the left column. Blogger tells you here how to edit multiple labels at once, so you can relabel, unlabel, a whole bunch of posts all in one go!

Hope this helps!

MORE FUN WITH PICMONKEY and a VIDEO TUTORIAL

PicMonkey's landing page - as you can see, it's free free fee!

I've decided PicMonkey - a free online image editor - is the greatest thing since sliced bread! When you look at what I've done here... all I can say is that it would probably take me the best part of a day to reproduce all these effects, when it's taken me around 20 minutes to do BOTH pictures!

Image from the Windows 'Sample Pictures' folder (which came with my  Windows 7)
Size is 1024 x 768 pixels, 606 KB

After I played around in PicMonkey. Saved at 1092 x 796 pixels, 775 KB

Not hard at all - I just played around with all the special effects! The ticket came in the Overlays > Labels section in the sidebar. Click on an image, hold down the shift key and you can tweak the horizontal or vertical as desired. Click on the image and drag the points at the corners to resize the entire image.

Image from Life is Beautiful on Tumblr: size 500 x 500 px, 189 KB

The finished result: 610 x 719px, 84.6 KB

Another image

Image from Life is Beautiful on Tumblr, size 400 x 287 px, 25.7 KB - pretty low resolution

The finished result - you can tell I like that italic font. Size is 356 x 419px, 44.4 KB

TWO SHORT VIDEOS I've made, showing what I did and how I did it. Just to give you a few ideas.






Showing the final tweaks and finished result:

Original image from Life Is Beautiful on Tumblr

SIZE MATTERS - oh, yes, it does!

Mamarog left a comment on my original PicMonkey post, asking whether you save your PicMonkey at a large size when you save, ready to download back to your computer. Yes you can!If you upload at a large size, you can save as a thumbnail, medium size or large size (there's a choice of three sizes, all with names - see above). 

Common sense suggests:

If you upload a smaller size, like the tumblr image, then I'd advise you save at small or medium in case of pixellation (which can look very cool... if it's what works with that particular image...). Just look at the captions under the pictures to see the original and saved sizes. As you only have 3 choices, they won't be exactly the identical size, but near enough not to matter. The largest size (Russell) is a high enough resolution for excellent results when printing.

I hope this helps, and you'll have fun with this wonderful programme!

HOW TO MOVE YOUR BLOG FROM WORDPRESS.ORG TO BLOGGER

Pic from Heidi - and I've lost the link to her blog! Waaaah!

 Well, you would hardly believe it... but I've just moved 1stFloorFlat back with Blogger again!

I really have tried - over several months in fact - but just cannot get along with WordPress.org, the self-hosted form Word Press (and as I found out, very very different from wordpress.com). The .com one was difficult enough... but wp.org is a whole new ballgame. I had to download everything - even a spam checker! All the standard stuff is built in with Blogger, TypePad, Tumblr and WordPress. com, so it was rather a shock. And difficult enough to even get the blog installed - I had to have help from my hosting service because it was totally beyond me!

WordPress is very different in feel and approach, and I seriously think is more for computer buffs rather than someone who just wants to write a few posts and share some art work, like we do. So it's a big relief to be back on Blogger - I feel more comfortable already.

So... how do you go back to Blogger? There is not much help out there - I Googled over a period of weeks, off and on, before I found the essential links.

Step 1: Export your WordPress.org blog

This is the ONLY LINK out there that works - thank you David Haimes, from the bottom of my heart! (Read his full post - carefully!)

This isn't even as simple as you would think - if you also have pages, and possibly a landing page, don't even attempt to click the Download All button when you try to export your blog. This is because you can't import your blog in one step - and if it's too large, the process will fail immediately.

Choose the Posts option only, and set the dates of the posts you want to transfer.

The conversion process (see Step 2) can only handle a maximum of 1MB - so you may need to split your downloads into smaller chunks (say a year's worth of posts at a time. If that's still too large, try 6 months' worth of posts).

Now save the xml file to your desktop.


Step 2: Convert your WordPress.org files 

Wordpress2Blogger conversion tool

This is the ONLY LINK that will convert your files into a format Blogger will recognise. You absolutely cannot skip this step!

• Click on the link and then Browse for that xml file you just placed on your desktop.
• Press the Convert button and wait... and wait... and wait....
•  Dowload the converted 'Blogger-export' file to your desktop.

Step 3: Go to Blogger and import your new file

You now have a 'Blogger-Export' file on your desktop, and this is the one you will import into Blogger.

Go to your Dashboard, then Settings. You'll find this link in 'Basic' - the very first tab.

Go to your Dashboard > Settings and the very first item you will see, under the very first tab, is the link to click to import your blog.

Browse for that 'Blogger-Export' file, fill in the two word verification prompts, hit the Import button and wait (fingers and toes crossed). You have the option to click 'Publish' immediately, or let your posts save to Draft. I'd say to take the second option as your picture sizes may be all over the place (mine were all enormous - stretching over and beyond the sidebar) and any captions may need editing - with mine, the computer code showed. So that was a lot of cut&pasting, to have them show at the correct size and underneath my images. You may also have to put in labels.

My own blog was pretty big (I've been blogging since 2008) and I decided not to upload the earliest stuff as most of it isn't relevant any more, as Blogger has changed so much.

Even so, I still had to download from WordPress in several separate sections, then convert that section, import it into Blogger, then go and do the same for the next section. Not difficult, as I now had the correct links - but very time consuming. And nerve wracking... my web server reset itself, right in the middle, and I had to start over again. Anyway, job done! Whew!

ADDENDUM 6th NOVEMBER 

Sara Wittenberg had a real problem in that her transfer wasn't showing, in spite of repeating my steps above several times. Well, I'm happy to say all is well - do read her comments below (5th and 6th November). 

Sara says:

... try it, wait 24 hours to see if they appear before trying again. Now I'm going through and deleting all the duplicates!

So all's well that ends well. I know from experience that sometimes major changes (whether Blogger, Yahoo, WordPress etc) sometimes seem to take a full working day to take effect. I wonder whether everything is scheduled to happen at midnight or something, lol.

PICMONKEY - GREAT FREE PHOTO PROGRAMME

The 'before' - photo copyright The Socher Team

The 'after' - photo effects by me, using PicMonkey

PicMonkey - it's free, it's easy and you do all your editing online! Magic!

Anne of El Milagro Studio , who is a total angel, sent me this fabulous link for PicMonkey. As we know, Google has gotten rid of PicNik, and this programme replaces it - and is a thousand times better in my opinion! Here's how: just follow the thumbnails in order (click for full size) and don't forget to click the green 'Apply' button.

Fun, huh?

HOW TO SAVE YOUR BLOGGER TEMPLATE

Copyright-free image from Tack-o-Rama

This is something you should do every time you think about making any changes to your blog, and also something you should do anyway from time to time, as a safeguard against computer crashes etc (save to a disc or an external hard drive.

It's as easy as 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... just follow the pictures!

Hope this gives you peace of mind!

UPDATE - REGISTRY CLEANER

TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS!

I posted some time ago about Digeus Registry Cleaner (no affil. etc, just a very happy customer) and have found they have just released a brand new version. Here's my old review.

Go here to try out the latest version: Digeus Registry Cleaner

What it actually does is speed up your computer by cleaning errors in your Windows. It removes the junk that accumulates in your Windows Registry, fixes Windows errors which results in speeding up your computer.

Which I am even happier with! Quicker, slicker - it took seconds to find a frightening amount of invalid bits and pieces (I now have a new computer and my old model of Registry Cleaner wasn't compatible with Windows 7) and eradicate them.

The computer is now skipping around like a newborn lamb - much faster and smoother!

Don't forget to regularly do your DiskClean and Defragmentation as well (weekly is best) and combine with the Registry Cleaner at least once a month for optimum performance.

Hope this helps!

SIMPLE TEMPLATE - GREYED SIGNATURE AREA

Linda at Favoritspot has just emailed me with a problem - Blogger has changed some code again - sometimes I wish they wouldn't be quite so 'helpful'!

What they have done now is tweak the code in the Simple template to make the post comments section grey, so it stands out. You'll see this at the bottom of each post, where it says 'Posted by', 'Comments', 'Links to this post' etc. Which is great if it's what you want... but not so good if you have your signature there, for example.

I've used a test signature - Home - to save me writing one specially, and you can see it's against a grey background. This is because it's a png file, so the background is transparent. If it was a jpg, it would have a white box around it, like Linda's.

Here's a very simple tweak to make things look right again.

Do a Preview first, then if you are happy click the orange button 'Save Template'.

Result!

HOW TO FIND THE BACKGROUND COLOUR OF YOUR POSTING AREA

Firefox and Google Chrome users simply need to install this add-on, Colorzilla. This has an eyedropper tool so you can find out what the colour code is called.

Alternatively, here's a link for a web-safe colour chart. Scroll down and you'll see all the colours listed.

Two things to be aware of when entering the code:

1. Make sure you put a hash mark before the colour code: #
2. Colours have six digits/letters

You'll see every colour listed has the colour names in the top of each box, including the # mark, so all you have to do is copy&paste the code where I showed you.

I hope this helps!

MOVE YOUR SIDEBAR WIDGETS

Easy peasy!