Wednesday 30 June 2010

Learning and Relearning How to Use Internet Sites


Blogger's new design button has been challenging. Slowly one by one I'm changing my 70+ blogs over to the new format. Social networking has become so complicated and labor intensive that I really feel sorry for people just joining the Internet. I'm still learning new stuff every day. Each new site has it's new challenges. I recently joined Tumblr and I was so lost on there I had to ask for help in the Etsy chatroom. One of the unsung great parts of Etsy chat is it's full of creative minds and most are more than willing to jump in and tell you how they made an ad, or made a Facebook fan page or how to design your banner. Of course not all advice is good, so you have to filter through it, but it's free. So I got my Tumblr going pretty well.

Etsy now has a button you can push each time you list a new item that dumps it right onto Facebook. Such a time saver. I used it today when I posted a new black scarf.

Hubpages has changed a lot so I'm relearning how to use it. When a site redesigns major elements you have to relearn all over again.

My biggest worry right now is this computer is running out of memory. The guy fixing my 'good' computer basically stole it as I haven't heard from him in almost 2 years and he doesn't return emails or phone calls. I say we should just go to his house and bang on his door, but he's my boyfriend's friend and he doesn't want to alienate him. I guess when you can build a computer from scratch you forget that some of us can't. And it's a major inconvenience and loss of revenue if someone else is holding your computer hostage. I don't even know if it's fixed or not. I just know he ordered about $200 worth of parts. You'd think he'd want to get paid for those at least, wouldn't you?

Ah well, I didn't mean for this to be a rant. If you are fixing something for someone, be kind and get it done in a timely manner or give it back.

Thursday 10 June 2010

Now How Do I Change My Font Color?

I thought I should change the font color on my paragraph headings. Only with the new format features I don't know how. Gone is the old 'customize' button, which is what I would have clicked on to find the 'font' buttons. I've poked around and haven't found them yet and sure don't want to risk losing my custom backgrounds. All bets are off now with the new and improved templates. Past advice isn't going to work now, is it? I'll keep looking.

New Templates Just Added To Blogger

After I posted this to one of my writer's blogs, I realized it really belongs here because it's about changing your templates on Blogger. So without further ado, I'm reposting it here:

I was really frustrated last week when I tried to tweak my Google AdSense widgets on some of my blogs. I got error messages on the blogs I was editing as well as on a new blog I created. I tried to resolve the issue by searching for answers on Google and on the help pages of Blogger and AdSense to no avail. So I crossed my fingers and hoped it was one of those issues that would fix itself if I just stopped mucking around with it.

Happily today I was greeted on Blogger by a pop-up window announcing new template software. It's been so hard to create decent original templates on Blogger. And I'm guessing that implementing that new feature was the thing that was mucking up Adsense on my blogs because today it's all working just fine. All the blogs I edited have the Adsense ads showing up again, and even the new blog is showing the ad boxes.

I've played around some with the new template features. So far it's been confusing. I did test out a few of the designs but still don't know if it will let me add my own photos to the backgrounds like Twitter and other sites do. So I still have a lot to check out. Please don't try it on your favorite blog that you've soaked hours into. Make a new blog or use one of your experimental blogs to test drive the new features.