Secondhand Links

I'm happy to tell you, if you are a Mary Engelbreit fan, that MaryEngelbreit.com offers desktop wallpapers.  Some are not terribly crisp in quality, but we can overlook that this time.  There are about 37 wallpapers unless my counting was off, and screensavers, coloring pages, crafts, and recipes as well.

You can Tour ME Studios, shop for Mother's Day specials, learn more about Mary, sign up for the newsletter, and check out ME Kids which is full of color and fun.

Be sure to visit Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion which is as she says, Inspiration for the Art of Life.

I love the simple, casual look of this Reversible Shoulder Bag pattern from Beth at Lula Louise.  You'll find complete pattern and sewing instructions.  The pattern can be scaled down to make a fun little bag with a shorter shoulder strap.  She also has compiled a list of free patterns for knitted market bags.

Here is another shoulder bag tutorial from tiny happy.  The Lindie Bag from Craft Apple.  Cheap & Easy Fabric Grocery Bags from Wisdom of the Moon.  And a whole page full of pattern links at Henrietta's Handbags & Purse Patterns which makes me listing more links kind of silly. 

Windows Live Writer is a blog publishing tool. It does not take the place of blogging programs like Blogger or WordPress, it enhances your blogging experience by making posting to your blog fun, fast, and easy.

Windows Live Writer: If you click on this thumbnail, you'll see better what the application looks like once you've installed and begun to use it. There is a horizontal toolbar full of functions (which you can see below) and also a vertical sidebar which shows your Drafts, Recently Posted, and a list of Inserts which enhance the ease and writing of your posts.

Adding your blog: Once WLW is installed, you will have to integrate your existing blog with WLW by clicking on and then Add Weblog Account and clicking through the various stages. If you have more than one blog, you will do this each time you want to add a blog.

Update Style: In the tab you can choose Web Preview so that you will be able to see what your post will look like when it is published online. If you want to be able to do this, you will need to update the visual style of your blog as shown at the left. This is where WLW downloads all the pretty parts of your blog. In the course of updating, allow it to post a temporary post which will be deleted automatically. It is possible the post won't be deleted automatically. In that case, you will be notified and it is a simple matter of deleting the post manually. If this process does not seem to work and you get an error message that states that the style template used for editing your weblog posts could not be downloaded check this help/FAQ page. One common reason could be that you are posting to a blog you have chosen to keep private. When using Blogger, if you change permissions for a moment to be viewed by anybody, update your weblog style, and then change the permissions back, that may be all that is stopping the update download.

Writing posts: If you do post to more than one blog, choose the blog you want to compose your post in from the button where all your blogs are listed. Generally, I like that the style of my blog is integrated so I don't have to choose the font or font size unless there is a visual reason. This makes everything look unified on your blog and incidentally was what drew me to WLW in the first place. Pre-Blogger and pre-Broadband, I was in the habit of composing my posts in Notepad. When I began to use Blogger I would copy and paste my Notepad post into the Blogger Post Editor (the wysiwyg editor), but the published result was frequently not pleasing from a formatting standpoint. Conversely, publishing through WLW yields a very polished result. In the tab, WLW allows for font size and color choices as well as text and photo alignment. And if you are anal retentive (a person deemed to be overly obsessed with minor details) in this area as I am , you can tweak things more fully in HTML mode from the tab.

Saving posts: One of the best things about WLW is that you can save your post as a Local Draft which just keeps it safely tucked away for further writing at a later time. You can find it easily in the right hand sidebar under Drafts or from the button in the toolbar which houses all your Drafts and Recently Posted posts from all of your blogs. You can also save it as a draft online: Post Draft to Weblog. This might come in handy if you are working on a different computer later on and want to finish a post. This would mean that you had WLW installed on that computer as well as having your blog account added. Click on , choose the post, and WLW will call up your post from your Weblog online.

Inserting links: There is an additional plugin for this, but I have not tried it as inserting links seems pretty quick and straightforward already. One really nice thing is the Glossary Entry you'll find when you click on the button. You can choose links you use frequently so they can be inserted with one click rather than always typing or pasting the URL. Links are added beforehand by clicking on the button and then Options... where you will find the Link Glossary. Here you can add, edit, or delete URLs.

Inserting images: There are really quite a lot of settings you can fiddle with when inserting an image so I think I might make a separate post about that.

You have the option, when clicking on the Insert Picture button, to insert an image from your computer or a "Picture From Web." In the sidebar to the right you have Layout choices which include settings for alignment and margins. You can also choose to have a drop shadow or Photopaper which gives your photo the white-bordered Polaroid look. You'll also be able to link the photo, of course, and this is where you can choose the size you would like to display in your post while linking to either a URL or the source picture which can be the original size or various other sizes as well. There are other photo effects such as black and white, sepia tone, and rotation.

Insert features: Here you can see all the features you are able to insert, along with some plug-ins I've added. Instead of Insert Tags, for Blogger you can add "labels" at the bottom of the WLW window. To see what I mean, click on the first thumbnail of this post and look at the drop down area in the lower left bottom corner. Insert a smiley is the Smiley Plugin 2.0. Because I always use the smiley plugin, I don't find myself using the Insert Spaces Emoticon anymore but you might like to check it out. Insert Symbol Plugin is useful for adding symbols like the degree sign which I use a lot because I am forever blogging about the weather. And Insert Polaroid Picture is another plug-in. That might seem redundant as there is already the Polaroid feature as one of the borders, but this is necessary if you want to "tilt" your photos. Great plug-in! Click on Add a Plug-in... for more.

When you are done with your post, simply hit the button.

One more tip: if you do use more than one computer for blogging, you can find your draft posts in C:\Documents and Settings\Select Owner\My Documents\My Weblog Posts. In that location, look in the Drafts Folder and locate your draft post. Save it to a flash drive. When you transfer it to the other computer, put it into the Drafts Folder on that computer in the same location. When you open up WLW, click on the button and you should see your post in there in Drafts.

How-to back up your blog posts: You can also save all the posts in the Recent Posts folder (from the above location) to have a record or a back up of your blog posts. You will have to have WLW to open them though. I think.

I hope this post gives you a great idea of what's in store for you should you decide to give Windows Live Writer a try!

Have you tried the smiley plugin for Windows Live Writer?  It makes adding smileys or other tiny graphics to your blog entries so quick and easy.  This is by far my favorite plugin.

The fabulous part of this little plugin is that you can add custom smileys, your favorites, or delete the ones that you know you'll never use.  Though I wish I could rename the tabs so that I could use one for say, weather icons, or mood icons, it is a wonderfully functioning plugin.  Here are two great places for mini smileys and icons.  Free Icons Web and Free Icons Download.  Have fun and go crazy!

When I first used Blogger some time ago, I liked the ease of dragging the page elements in the edit layout, but I didn't realize you could do anything beyond that. I thought it was limited to "what you see is what you get." It's amazing how wrong that assumption was! Over time and with the ease of searching through blogger tip blogs, we now have a wealth of help in tweaking our blogs and making them almost all we hoped for them to be. I am really thankful for these people who not only figure these things out but share their information. It's easy for you to search out something specific on your own, but some things I hadn't even thought of trying to find, like this one:

How to get rid of the "showing posts with label . . ." message box.

I have always wished I could do away with the little boxed message that occurs above a post when you click on a label. You know, this one:

If you click on Archives up at the top of this blog, all posts show up but without the above message box. I wanted to be able to have it this way on my other blogs, so I typed "showing posts with label" into Google today and found this site: The Real Blogger Status. Happily, I now know how to get rid of the message. Not only that, it was very easy.

How to add a horizontal bar of navigational links to your blog

Unless your template provides for this already, this is a nice element to add to your blog if for no other reason than to free up sidebar space. I found this tweak at Split Decisionz and it was also very easy. It simply involves editing your template to give you page elements in the Layout where there were none before and then adding links HTML style to the new page element.

* Additional note: At first I didn't think it would work for me. My links ended up showing up at the top inside the header graphic instead of below it. But I realized this was because of my blog header. When I installed and edited my template (for another blog), I had typed my blog header graphic into my template manually instead of inserting it into the page element for the header as usual. So this tweak wasn't recognizing that there was a blog header graphic. I used her instruction to add a page element to the "content-wrapper" instead which is beneath the block of text she refers to. If this should also be the case for you, find the block of text in the box below where you will just change the showaddelement from no to yes (in red). This adds a page element below the header area but above the rest of the blog. Incidentally, you could use this area for something other than navigational links.

How to remove the border around the graphics in your posts

I was just going to mention briefly how to do this, but Split Decisionz has a very nicely written up instruction for removing this annoying little border or how to use this border to your advantage if you'd like by changing the way it looks or making it a different color, etc.

Look for subsequent posts showcasing Blogger tips links.

Our winter was severe this year, and now overlong.  Spring is just barely making noises so I've needed some visual cheeriness while waiting for the warmth of the sun.  I found a fun way!  I've got a few different blogs in my Google Reader that bring me to places I would never find myself.  One such place, How About Orange, is featured on Apartment Therapy, though not the blog, the couple. [Jessica & Alex's Simple Modern On a Budget]  Oh this was so fun for me!  There are just fabulous House Tours where you'll get to see slide shows of photographed rooms like you see below. 

You'll also find interesting posts, shopping guides by major city, lots of interesting links to go on your own bunny trails, and like sub-sites of Apartment Therapy called: the kitchn, ohdeedoh (home.design.children), Unplggd (smarter homes.fewer wires), and re-nest (abundant design for green homes) which might have some good cleaning info in the archives like Soften Sheets with Baking Soda.  But the main thing is, they all have House Tours.

I haven't been surfing much these days, but did follow a few "bunny trails" recently.  I love when one site leads to another and another.  I also love pink and brown so this site, Pink Loves Brown, caught my eye.  She has the cutest pocket mirrors and other things too, like magnets, pins & brooches, and paper goods.