Refreshing The Blog Design

You may have noticed over the last week or so that there has been lots of new changes on the blog visually speaking! While I am always tweaking things here and there I decided a few things really needed some attention this last week.

So here are some of the highlights and perhaps more importantly why I made them:

I shortened up the header to make a bit more space “above the fold” which basically means what you see when the page first loads. This enabled me to add our welcome message and still have our ads start “above the fold” which is a requirement for our new ad company.

designchange1

Then I added some new pretty social media buttons and pushed them up into the header image to save more valuable real estate on my sidebar.

I changed our photo from this one:

to our engagement photo. My reasoning is that you can’t actually tell what we look like in the old photo and we want to make people feel like they know who we are when they first arrive on the blog. You wouldn’t hang your head when you are introducing yourself to someone new would you?

Next big changes are going to be in the Category pages. These are the Food, Design, etc.

designchange2

If you scroll down a bit you will see

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Operation Get Organized

The last number of weeks have been a bit quiet around these parts and for that I apologize. Our house has been under a mission. A mission to regain our sanity and our composure in this thing called remodeling. I declared all out war on the clutter and am delighted to say that it has made a huge difference in the level of composure and cleanliness in our home.

We are still in process though and I am currently down with the flu so I can’t muster up the energy to get all the photos up on here today. Tomorrow I am hopeful will greet me with more of a human feeling and less of a “I’ve been run over by a Mac truck” sensation.

But since I have been basically bed ridden for a few days I have gotten to log some much needed redesign time on the blog.

I am completely self taught on this whole website building and photoshop thing which means that something that could take a pro an hour takes me six….or eight.

But I’ve really been wanting to rework the header on the blog and spruce up around here so I got to it.

This is what it used to look like remember?

before

Not terrible but nothing fabulous either. I love the grasscloth background so that definitely gets to stay.

I got to work on the header image because I knew it would give

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Flickr and WordPress: An Integrated Solution

WordpressFlickr

 

Flickr and WordPress can and should talk nice to each other. But they often don’t. Which is really a shame because they perfectly complement each other. WordPress is the ideal blogging platform and comes with built in image storage so lots of people ask us why we use an outside source?

Simply put its cheaper, more reliable and the loading times are improved.

At the small level of blogging you can get away with hosting your own images. Once your traffic begins to grow however you can quite literally spend 10′s of thousands of dollars a year in hosting bills for photos. Flickr costs $25 a year. Pretty easy decision.

Flickr has big servers and they are very very reliable. So we like them a lot, and they do a lot of things right. However, one feature that they have continually neglected for years, even with frequent and passionate appeal from their users, is to create a simple way to post multiple photos from flickr to a single wordpress post.

You can do it with a single photo per post but not for multiples. Which presents a huge challenge for bloggers. Blogs use pictures and lots of them in a single post. There have been lots of plugins created that have attempted to solve this and after testing dozens I gave up in frustration. Finally one worked, and then mysteriously stopped working a few months later.

I looked for any

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Flickr Photo Album Plugin 3.3 Fixes

Update: I now use a different plugin please see this post.

Geek Alert: If you aren’t a blogger don’t bother reading this :)

With the upgrade to WordPress 3.3 my well loved Flickr Photo Album Plugin abruptly stopped working.

To anyone who uses this plugin you know how much time savings it provides and with it broken I floundered for weeks and weeks.

I finally got some time to dig into the forums and others info to try to find a fix.

Here is what I discovered from my research:

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Picasa vs. Flicker

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picasa vs flickr

After just a short time of using WordPress I have discovered so many wonderful things….and some very useful….and some very odd things.

The topic for today is photo uploads. After waiting what seems eons to a 20-something-year-old (around two minutes) for one of my photos to upload to my blog, I sighed in exasperation saying “this is just not going to work.”

After a little digging on some of my favorite blogs I sighed again, this time in contentment and realized that they too do not upload their photos natively to WordPress.

I can see two reasons for this: 1) It takes forever 2) It’s gotta suck lots of server juice to host all of these photos

Realizing that I have a mediocre camera at the moment and that my pictures will greatly increase in size and volume as this blog continues I have begun my search for a photo host site.

My main points of interest (at the moment) are:

Flickr…..or…….Picasa

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