creative little daisy

My blog got a makeover

It's something I've wanted to do for a while,  just haven't had the time to sit at the computer for several hours straight, and that's what it took. Hours. I'm sure the little tweaks I made could have been knocked out in no time by someone who actually knows what they are doing. I am not that someone.

At one point considered paying someone to do it for me and even contacted a couple of  blog designers. It turns out they don't design for typepad blogs. When I started Creative Little Daisy in 2006, many of the blogs I read were on the typepad platform and those that were with blogger seemed to complain of frequent problems. The typepad bloggers weren't complaining about blog issues and they had nice looking blogs, so I went with Typepad.  Knowing absolutely nothing about blogging, other than how to read one, I jumped in blindly, fumbling my way around. In the past few years, there has been a shift. The number of blogs using blogger far exceeds typepad blogs (those that I read). If you google search anything to do with blog design tips or tutorials, you will find most are aimed at a blogger supported blog. That made the task of giving CLD a face lift a little more challenging, not impossible, just more challenging.

By now, y'all know, I love a good challenge, right?

What I really wanted was to streamline things. My sidebar was beginning to be a jumbled mess of various  links and buttons. I wanted a set of icons that matched and were pretty, making it easy to subscribe to CLD and find my facebook, pinterest, email... Finding the icons was easy. There are many sources for free downloadable icons, but clueless me didn't know what to do with them, how to get them on my blog. Then I found this that led me to this. Pretty buttons and easy to understand instructions for installing them. I had a little time on my hands, so I got down to business. It would have been very cut and dry except, like I mentioned before, I have a typepad blog, so I'm not one of the cool kids. The steps are a little different, but I was able to install the icons.  Here are some instructions for inserting images in your sidebar if you have typepad.

All was good, except that the pretty new icons made the rest of the blog look bla. One thing led to another and then another. You know how that goes. By the time I called it quits, because I was too cross-eyed to see anymore, I added the buttons, made a new sidebar image, a new header and new navigation bar. I also changed the colors.

I not going to go into great detail about what I did, because I would probably just embarrass myself. Most of you probably know these things already, but if you have specific questions, ask and I'll try my best to answer.
I did want to provide a link for the tutorials and tips that I found very helpful.

First, I would like to thank The Academy {snicker, it sounds like I'm making an acceptance speech} Not that Academy, this Academy for providing the free social media icons and Kira for providing the easy to understand instructions for getting those buttons on my side bar.

I wanted a cohesive and coordinated look and found the Instant Eyedropper tool very helpful. An icon is installed in your system tray that allows you to determine the HTML color code of any object on your screen.

The blog header and the navigation bar graphics were created in Picnik.

I used these instructions for adding the images to my navigation bar.

I think that's about it. It was a fun challenge and a way to get creative without getting paint in my hair, for a change.

In the middle of the information super highway driving a tractor

That's what I feel like sometimes. I just can not keep up. I guess it doesn't help that every little bit I know about blogging has been self taught. I'm not a very good teacher. I'm a good worker, but not a good teacher.

So, apparently Google Friends Connect is going bye-bye. I'm not even sure if I should be upset.  See, I told you I'm darn near clueless. I don't want to loose any friends, not friends who read my blog and I also don't want to loose the blogs I've subscribed to. I use Google Reader, will my GFC subscriptions no longer be updated? Clueless I tell you.

Why does Google have to be all sneaky in trying to make folks try Google +?  Another learning curve I have to navigate. Folks, I'm not getting younger. I'm not nearly as sharp as I once was. Not that I was ever the sharpest tool in the shed.

So, can anyone enlighten me? What do I need to do to assure we can all still be friends?  BFFs.

While googling around to try to find some answers, unsuccessfully btw, I came across a suggestion to check out Bloglovin. First I'd heard of it, but I'm going to try it out.

Anyway, I guess I'm going to have to devote some time to tweaking the blog a bit. It looks like a dinosaur in this world of sleek and sophisticated blogs. I need to streamline things, remove some things, add some. Lord help me, my head hurts thinking about it. I guess the GFC gadget will be the first to go. If you are following me through GFC and would like to continue reading my sporadic and semi interesting ramblings, please follow me through... oh I don't know,  some other method. There's a Blogloving button over there on the left, there's also a button that lets you follow through a reader of your choice.  I added the Google + badge, but I'm mad at Google for starting this whole mess to begin with. I'm mad at Picnik too. I'm mad and pouting.

Now, aren't you glad you checked in here today for all this positivity? You are welcome. Now I'm off to take some motrin and  demo work on this blog. Can't I just spray paint it?

I think I got the comment thing figured out

I'm dangerous behind the wheel of this blog, I tell ya. No license, no proper teaching... I just feel my way around blindly and hope for the best. 

I'm probably not telling you anything you didn't already know, but just in case, I'll share what I did.  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me first catch you up. A couple of posts back, I asked a question about responding to comments. I like the interactive nature of responding right there in the comment section, as I've seen done on other blogs. Many times a response to one person may answer another person's question. The only reservation I had about replying this way was that it would require the person commenting to check back to see if I have responded.  I suspected there was something in typepad's settings that would allow the responses to appear in the comments section but also be emailed to the commenter.  I suspected right, and here's how to make it happen.

From the dashboard in Typepad,  under the "manage my blogs"  heading on the right side of the screen, select "settings", on the next screen on the left side of the page select "comments". Scroll down to the bottom of the page and there is an option to enable Typepad Connect comments. Select that. Then you can choose from options about how the comments are displayed (threaded or not). Save your changes.

That's it.

Now if you get email notification of comments, the email will look a little different. When you select "reply" your response will be emailed and will also appear in your comments directly under the original comment.   You can still reply privately by clicking on the email link in the comment notification email.

Hope that makes sense.

Rainy Saturday

I've just been tinkering with the blog design this rainy Saturday morning.  I'm not at all knowledgeable when it comes to such things, I just wing it and do lots of google searching. Excuse the off-centeredness, I'm trying to figure out this whole custom css stuff. If you know of any good sites with tips for typepad users, I'd love to hear about them or if you can tell me how to center my photos in this main column. I changed to a fluid pixel format for the main column, but I'd like the photos to be centered.

I also added one of those google friend connect widgets. I may leave it or it may be gone. For some reason it makes me nervous.  I'm not so sure I like the whole counting aspect. Will I feel bad if I only have 1 person sign up to be my friend? Will I be judged by the number of friends I have. It's too much pressure. Like highschool all over again.

Anywho, that's what I'm up to this morning. Piddling on a quiet, rainy, Halloween Saurday.

Typepad, we have a problem...

I assume it's a Typepad issue. Blog feeds seem to be all crossed up this morning. No, I haven't completely changed the theme of my blog. I only hope the blog that got crossed up with mine wasn't offensive. Anyone know what's going on?

Got SPAM?

For some reason Yahoo considers mail sent via my gmail account SPAM. I'm not sure why or if they are the only one, but if you feel like I should have returned an email and failed to do so, take a look in the spam folder.

Does anyone know if something on my end causes this, or is it just yahoo and gmail not playing nicely?