I love having my friend's blogs handy on my sidebar so I can just jump over and see if and what they have recently posted. But a while back Blogger (grrrrr) went screwy and stopped letting me put up picture buttons. I tried everything, which is a very complicated series of steps, to get a button made for Wanda at Exuberant Color and then finally gave up.
But yesterday I got an email from Brenda Smith over at Serendipity Patchwork. She needed me to change the code of her button on my blog, for security reasons, or somethin'. In doing so I took advantage of her vast geekiness to complain about my button problems. She had the solution of course and here it is.
To begin with, one must have a picture small enough to fit in the sidebar. I have no idea how small is small and even a good idea how to shrink a big one. I dink around in Photoshop and MS Paint and sometimes it works. Luckily I got a good picture off of Wanda's site. Then one must post the picture online and get a url for it. Click on any picture in a blog and you will get a new page with a url in the menu bar. These are frequently ten miles long worth of code which Blogger decidedly does not like. In order to make this work Brenda says take that code over to Tinyurl.com and paste in and voila they change it miraculously into a tiny url which Blogger likes!
There is more code involved, but really if you are a geek you already know how to do this and if you are not, you are about to fall asleep reading this entry.
Wanda at age 3 or 4. Could she be any cuter?
So now I have two new buttons for my two newest faves, Wanda and my niece Glory, aged 12 going on 24.
Glory in all her Gloriness, aged 11For my next trick, I will perform the breakfast eating ritual...
PS: uh oh...Warning Will Robinson, Danger Danger. No oven needed pizza!!! Can Armageddon be far behind?
Hi,Mel.
ReplyDeleteI check your blog first thing every morning (at work). It's a great start to the day. This morning I visited Glory's blog--she's a chip off the old auntie, I would say. How absolutely charming she is! I hope she loves Tennessee!
I am thrilled that you put Glory's button on your sidebar, and I'm sure she will be, too. Let Peggy and anyone else who visits your blog feel free to leave their lovely comments. You have parental consent.
ReplyDeleteMel, you crack me up. I wish I could just come over and we could make ourselves a pizza -- and have a glass of wine, of course.
ReplyDeleteSo pleased I could help!
ReplyDeleteSide bars are typically range from 140-200 pixels wide (with or without "padding") so if you make your button image up to 150 pixels wide, you are usually pretty safe. In Photoshop Elements, you can go to the Image>Resize>Image Size function and set the size for the width and "constrain proportions" so that the rest of the image is rescaled. One thing I did notice is that when you put your image through all those url conversion procedures (or maybe it's just Picasa) it ends up slightly smaller than the original but that's not big deal.
Now I have gone and changed my template to the new layout offered by blogger, and all my pictures are gone. So this blog entry makes no sense anymore. Sorry for the confusion.
ReplyDeleteMelody