Technical Difficulties

While we were in Florida I had computer access for just a half hour so I checked my blogs to see if I had any new comments. This blog came up fine however when I tried to look at Apple's Tree all of my posts had disappeared. I chalked it up to a very slow connection. When I was talking to my sister on Sunday she complained that she had been having trouble accessing both blogs.

Yesterday I was blog hopping and came upon this screen. Amanda's posts at A Tale of Two Ancestors were missing just like mine had been last week.


As I continued on through my reader I tried to access Mona's, Itawamba Connections and this time there was an error message. grrrrr


On Blogger's "Known Issues" page I found the following:


I checked just now and the issue is still unresolved. So know that I have been trying to visit and leave comments. Hopefully blogger will have this figured out shortly. I was able to comment this morning but the letters to type for word verification were MIA. This has happened with blogger off and on for as long as I can remember. Simply submit your comment and it will then bring up the letters for verification as if you had typed them wrong the first time.

On a happier note, I am loving the new followers widget. For awhile before, the "follow this blog" link was either broken or missing altogether so now I am able to add myself to blogs I missed before, even if I can't comment!

Do You Hulu?

We have basic cable, basic being about 10 channels and we rarely rent movies. So I was quite pleased to discover Hulu. They have full length movies, episodes of various shows and clips from other shows. They stream them to your computer in short segments so you will need a high speed internet connection. A whole lot of what they I have I can certainly live the rest of my lifetime without ever viewing but they have some things that I'm happy to be able to see. The movies do have commercials but they seem to be shorter than those on TV. Over vacation I watched A River Runs Through It and there was only one small section where the feed seemed to bunch up.

You can also use the embed feature to place things on your blog. I think this is quite funny. Enjoy!

Resizing Pictures

I consider myself a bit tech challenged so when I learn something new I like to pass it along. It is unusual for me to do two of these type posts so close together though!

I recently joined WeRelate to share some of my genealogy online. One of the features that I liked was the ability to share pictures. I ran into a glitch when I kept getting an error message that my images were too large. I tried the various programs that I have on my computer, all of which were free downloads and therefore lacking in features. I came up empty in an online search for information. Then I found something about how email programs resize pictures. I tried sending myself files as both attachments and as images and the image feature made them much smaller. (I used AIM mail) When viewed online you can't see any difference so I was set for WeRelate.

Today I was blog hopping and I came across this at Robin's Nesting Place and I had an "Oh, duh!" moment.

I posted on November 11, about my Picasa account. I had reached approximately 70% of my storage space in seven months and had duplicates of many pictures on Picasa. Annie in Austin, graciously looked at my blog to try to figure out my problem. She saw that my pictures were about 80% larger in pixels than those on her blog.

I am not as close to using up my 1g of free space at Picasa as Robin is but I have been concerned about having to pay for an account in the future. With three public and one private blog, all sharing the same Picasa account, I have to run out of space or start deleting pictures from older posts sooner or later. Her method of resizing pictures may work for you (and be sure to read the comments) so check out her post. I am not to the point where I plan to go back through all of my posts and change the pictures that I have already added but I will be smarter about uploading my pictures in the future.

After you email yourself the pictures that you want to post to resize them you have to save them again which is a real pain in the neck so decide what pictures you want to use before emailing them. To save them from your email, right click on a picture and chose "Save Image As." Make sure you insert a file name. I added "resized" to the end of the file names I chose so I can quickly tell which picture is which.

I will also be reusing pictures whenever possible. Sometimes I post the same picture on both a public blog and the private, family only blog. At Apple's Tree I use the same dividing bar over and over again and in the past I uploaded it for every post. The easiest way for me to reuse a picture is to go to the post where I used it before and go to edit post and then click on the Edit Html tab. Then I highlight and copy (Ctrl+C) the code for that picture and paste (Ctrl+V) it in the new post. This is much easier to do if you have multiple tabs or windows open. (I have had mixed results when using the url for the picture from Picasa but you may have better luck with that option than I have.)

I was a bit concerned that having pictures of different file sizes would make my slideshow look funny so I resized the first two pictures and included them. It made no difference in how they appear.

So does this really save enough space to be worthwhile? This first copy of the picture below takes up 785kb and the second one only 25kb!!!! I can't see any difference, can you?

If you have any other tips to make my free space at Picasa last longer please share them!

New Slideshow Option

Blogger has just added a new slideshow option to the page elements menu. I've played with it a little and I still prefer the Coolstuff option that I wrote about here. With this slideshow I can customize the size and make it a little bit bigger. On the other hand, with the page element option I don't get the black background, I have more options and it is very quick and easy to change. I have placed one of each type on my sidebar for comparison.

The new page element slideshow will let you display pictures from Flickr and Photobucket besides Picasa. You can show your own pictures or pick a key word. I picked Flickr with key word Christmas Tree.

If you want to use a specific feed you can do so very easily by typing in your user name if you have a Picasa album. When I typed in my user name with the Picasa option it then brought up a list of all my public albums. When I selected Flickr and put in my user name nothing happened. I had to chose the "Other" option and then open a new window so I could go to Flickr to get my feed address. When I clicked on the orange feed icon at the bottom of my picture page the url got cut off on my google page. To solve this I had to right click on the feed link and select copy and then paste it in the feed line. I also could not pick a single album, my feed includes all of my pictures so I could not show my garden pictures at Flickr without also showing my genealogy picures. Flickr works great for keyword display and if you wanted to select just certain pictures of your own you could give them all a very unique tag that no one else would use. I don't have a Photobucket account so I didn't try doing anything with a specific feed. The keyword option didn't work with "Christmas Tree" but did work with Sunset and Blue.

Play with it and share some of your favorite pictures.

When I redecorated for Christmas my purple widget with the feed from my genealogy blog just didn't look very good so I opted for the feed option from the page elements menu. It was very easy. It isn't great looking and you are limited to 5 posts but it does the job. I don't like that it doesn't provide a link to the main page but only to specific posts.

New G**gle Feature

Yesterday I went to work for a couple of hours but then had to leave for jury duty. I wasn't selected for the jury so today was my first full day cleaning buses. Eight hours scrubbing everything from the ceiling to the floor. Needless to say I was very tired when I got home. I thought I'd relax and catch up on some blogs.

I've mentioned before that I use my G**gle home page to manage my feeds. They recently added more tabs which I liked because I like to organize. Today, however, I was not in the mood for a change. There were extra x's to the right of each post. I clicked and the entire post appeared! So of course I had to check by clicking on one of my blogs. Humph! Only part of the post shows. I played with several. Mine and a couple of others only showed partial post but the rest show the entire post, one even showed the comments. Why some were different than others I have no idea. I went to another page and when I went back to my home page it looked like it always had, the new little x's were gone! And later they were back so I got some screen captures. I think this will be a great way to check quickly to see if the post is something I've already read or not. I also like that I can have two blogs open side by side. If blogger A post a picture of plant Z and blogger B posts a picture of the same or similar plant I can have them open side by side. It will also be great for working back and forth between genealogy blogs.

Click on pictures to enlarge

Favicon Madness

I made myself a cute little Favicon of a little apple to use one all three of my blogs. A Favicon is a little picture that sits at the left hand side of my blog address in your browser.

John asked me today why my Favicon had changed to the ebay icon!!!! I stopped what I was doing and brought up my blog and there at the top of the page was my cute little apple.

John and I use different browsers. In Firefox everything looks just fine. I opened an Internet Explorer window and was quite surprised that instead of my little apple the icon for the site Dandelife appears! A site I have only visited once to check it out.

I have no idea what bug is causing this or how to fix it so for now I'll ask you what icon you see at the top of the page right now?????? An Apple, Ebay, Dandelife or something else?

My New Toy

When my old computer died John set about finding me another. I admit I never would have even looked at this one because it is a tablet rather than a laptop but he found a great deal so I told him OK. I don't know if I'll ever use the screen to write on, I'm not even sure I know why I'd want to, but maybe some great use will present itself.

I spent the weekend moving my files from my old hard drive and everything seems to be working fine. John is going to add more ram so that it is a little faster. So far I am quite pleased.

Sickly Computer

My computer is ill and not expected to recover. A replacement has been ordered. Posts will be sporatic until it's arrival.

I've been very busy with projects at work. The bus is coming along very well but we need to raise a ton of money. Raffles and fundraisers are in in the works.

My car was finally finished today and looks good. John and Alex went and picked it up for me.

We finally had another warm day. Temps hit the 60's! Lots of melting going on along with worries about flooding.

The loggers have been working hard. I'm afraid that all they are going to leave are the locust trees that I hate. At least a couple of the big maples appear to be ours. I'm not sure exactly where the line is and with the snow still on the ground it's not posible to find the stakes right now.