Blog Book

Way back in January of 2008 I printed my blog into a book. I used blurb. You can read about it here.  You downloaded a book software program, selected SLURP and you had a book.  I did not spend any time reformatting it.  I just ordered it and was done.  I love it!!!!  Then came early 2009 and it was time to print out my blog for 2008 --

Blurb was no longer supporting SLURP for bloggers. (although they do now -- it was just a temporary outage)  I tried several different things and after spending lots of time decided it was too much of a headache and time waster to finish it.  Some would not download pictures that were hosted on exterior sites.  Some would only do a couple posts at a time. 

Just a few weeks ago my friend told me about blog2print.  I was pretty sure I had looked at it 2 years ago.  Back then it seemed to struggle downloading more than 3 months at a time.  But not this time around.  It even downloads images hosted elsewhere (like photobucket or flickr).  (Although it will not do slideshows -- so I will probably do fewer slideshows from now on).  

They have definately improved the process.  You simply enter your blog address, tell it what dates you want the book to cover, choose the cover and in 2 minutes it is done.  It lets you choose whether to keep the formatting just like your blog or to condense it a little to save pages.  It looked awesome.  I ordered my 2008 book in under 10 minutes.  Then I ordered my 2009 book.  They came in the mail 4 days later.  I chose the soft cover option and the price includes shipping. 

I love them!!!!  So if you are looking for a great way to print your blog -- here is the link!

http://blog2print.sharedbook.com/blogworld/printmyblog/index.html

And here are my books!!!!

. . . still no computer

but at least it is the weekend and I have Trent's to use (as long as I can get him to stop working on it)

First, the blogging class was kind of crazy . . . we covered lots and lots of topics but so quickly I am not sure anyone could repeat them all at home -- I had a outline ready, but there were so many questions which led to so many questions and so on . . . I hope it helped. We covered the topic of feed readers (which I love to help me read blogs) and so as everyone was setting up theirs, they wanted to see if it was working. That meant someone had to post something new on their blog. So I quickly had everyone subscribe to my blog and then I posted a ridiculous post -- called just for ember (the other lady helping me do the class) to see if her feed reader was working. I fully intended to delete that post, but quickly forgot and then of course have not had a computer to use until now -- so I have not lost my mind -- the post was never intended to do anything except see if the feed reader was working for others.

Second, I really miss chick-fil-a. Tonight we were babysitting 2 little girls so their parents could have a night in the city with friends I figured I would make the kid friendly "chicken nuggets". But I gotta tell you -- with no fast food places within 20 minutes, and the fact that I hate most frozen chicken nuggets, I decided to look up the recipe for chick-fil-a chicken nuggets and make them myself. They were really good -- not quite as sweet as the real thing, but when you haven't had them in so long -- they were PERFECT. The kids devoured them too.

here is the recipe

1 cup flour
1 1/2 cups cracker powder (i took a bunch of saltines and blended them up)
2 tsp McKormick season all (i didn't have that so I used lawry's season salt)
1/4 tsp paprika

also the recipe stated that you should cube the chicken and soak it for 12 hours in 2 cups of cold water and 2 cubes of chicken boullion and 1/4 tsp of that same season salt which I did not have -- BUT that would have required planning ahead by more than 1 hour which I rarely do -- so even without doing that part they were still great -- and they might have tasted exactly the same as the real one if I had had exactly the same ingredients -- but my life is never exactly anything so oh well.

third, I put the 2 little girls to bed in the guest room. I had to lay with them for about 20 minutes. They finally fell asleep about 9:15. I head upstairs where Trent has been busy putting our kids to bed. This is the scene I found. All four kids on our bed with Trent. Superman Returns is on TV and all four kids are wide awake. . . and Trent is sound asleep. Do you think they might be working him a little too hard at good ole EY?

fourth, I SERIOUSLY MISS MY COMPUTER. I am in severe, severe, severe, withdrawal. Do you know how many times a day I think -- Oh, I'll just go google that -- or let me check their web page, or ???? It has not been shipped back yet -- that is the most info I can get off the status check. The estimated arrival date is feb 10 -- and that is 3 whole days away. I hope I make it.

fifth, I SERIOUSLY am so sick of winter. If you were to come here to CT you should be able to see a lot of people whose pants are on fire. You know, all the ones who told us about the mild winters and rare snowfall. They were so wrong. We have had 2 snow days, 1 early dismissal, and 3 delay starts. We have piles of snow where the snow plow clears the driveway that are as tall as me. What is worse is how everyone else in the world seems to be moving toward spring (all our houston friends and family are out washing cars in bathing suits and complaining about the heat -- and even our Utah family let us know that despite their snow, their tulips are budding.) I even planted tulips. And I went out to check on them. I can't even find them under all the snow.

sixth, I can't think of anything else -- so good night!

Q & A

where are we on the google ads:) as of 30 seconds ago I have made $66.41 so we are coming along.

what do you do with your other kids while you're being so productive? The kids are right there next to me ruining everything helping to decrease my productivity. For example, when I was working on Madelyn's curtains, threading the ribbon through the buttonholes, Madelyn and Adam were unwinding every other spool of ribbon I own. Or when I was doing stuff with paper (all the mod podge stuff) Madelyn was creating her own paper crafts right next to me and her's were, well. . . . award winning.

The strikethrough

I love making lists. I love crossing things off. I want to cross off things on my list of Madelyn's room spring cleaning. I can't figure it out. I tried one way, it did not work. I tried another and it did not work and now strike 3 and it works.

Here is how . . . type everything you want (crossed out words and not) then click on the edit HTML button and add these 3 characters directly in front of the word you want crossed out.

the open arrow < the letter s and the closed arrow >

all with no spaces in between

Then at the end of what you want crossed out you type these 4 characters.

the same open arrow < but this time with a backslash / and then an s and then a closed arrow >

again . . . NO SPACES.

Happy striking writing!

The Sixth Post of Christmas

I have a statcounter on my blog and I thought today I would tell you about it. First let me just say this. . .

I LOVE IT!

It is really amazing the things you can find out. For example it tracks for me how many page loads, unique visitors, and returning visitors I have everyday and I get a cool graph to look at.

I am cheap so I don't pay for it to store more than 500 entries, which means that a lot of the unique visitors are probably returning visitors, but it has been more than 500 page loads since they last visited so I don't have a record of it anymore. (Also, it blocks my ISP address, so that all of my visits don't skew the results.) On my actual blog, I report total visitors with a little counter. But there is so much more to statcounter than just this . . . OH SO MUCH MORE!!!!

For each individual visitor I can see this. . .

AMAZING huh??? I can see their city and state, I know if they are a MAC or PC user. I know how big their screen is. I can follow their navigation route and see exactly what they looked at and how long they looked at it. I can see what page referred them to my site and what page they left from my site. Check out this .. . . it is a map of all my recent visitors.

But my favorite tool of all is the keyword search info. This lets me know how people find my site using search engines and what they search for. Here is my keyword analysis for today . . .

Isn't that cool? 31 people found my site using search engines. Most of them searching for things related to Hannah Montana Cakes. If I were smart I would start selling them. I could probably sell 20 a day. But then I wouldn't have time to blog, so they will just have to make their own.

So, add a statcounter, you'll be glad!

The Fifth post of Christmas & the first CONTEST on my blog

Now some of you may have noticed that I added ads to my blog. I did it for 2 main reasons.

First I love the blog called pioneer woman that I told you about a couple posts ago -- and she has ads and she does contests and gives away great prizes. She commented that it was because she doesn't want to make money from her blog and it is funner to give it away. I started wondering if I could make any money so that I could give away prizes.

Second, I was just curious how they work, how much do you get for doing absolutely nothing at all.

It works like this, you put the ads on, and you get paid. They won't cut you a check until you have made $100. So this is the reason for the first contest. (It is also a shameless bid to generate comments from all 3 of my faithful readers) (Or maybe there are more of you out there????)

To enter the contest, simply predict the month and year in which I will get my first $100 check. To help you in selecting the time frame I will let you know that after 8 weeks of having ads on my blog I have earned a WHOPPING $2.75. (impressive isn't it???) Also I think you get paid about 20 cents per 500 page loads and about 20 cents per click on a link. (and I cannot click on them).

Now here is the fun part . . . the prize (which of course may be years away) will be $100. If no one guesses the month and year correctly then I will get to keep the money for some other contest which I have not thought of yet.

The Rules . . . Only 1 entry per person. All entries must be recieved before 2008.

The fourth post of Christmas

How to make a "screen shot". On my few most recent posts I have shown my actual computer screen as a picture on the post. It is pretty easy to do this and I will show you how. First you need to get your computer screen to look exactly like you want it to. Then, find the Print screen button on your keyboard. (mine is abbreviated prt sc). Sometimes you may have to hold down a shift key or a fn key as the print screen key may be shared with other keys. Push it. You will notice nothing at all happens.

Now go to your start menu. Click on start, or the window symbol. Choose All programs, then accessories, then paint. Once paint opens. Press ctrl V. And you should see your screen shot that you took above open into paint. You may then crop it to show only what you really want. When you have it done. Save it (make sure to save it as a .jpeg) and then it is a picture you can use on your blog or when showing someone how to do something. It is especially useful if you are ever teaching a class on computer programs or blogging. Some people need to actually see the screen to be able to understand.

Once in paint you can draw arrows, add text, change colors, spray paint graffiti and do whatever else you may want. The possibilities are endless. Check out what I did.

(also -- you can click on the picture to make it bigger)

The third post of Christmas

I must say a lot of you have asked how to make the photo collage that was on our Christmas letter. So here is how. First, you need the photo software PICASA. The good news is that it is free. It is great. It is easy. Click on Picasa and you can download it. Picasa is made by google. It's big strengths are that it searches constantly for new pictures on your computer (in fact it may even find ones you thought were long lost), it is easy to use, and it is super compatible with email (if you have a gmail account) and blogger (if you have a blogger blog). When you open picasa, it will search for all your photos and then look like this.
















You then select photos 1 at a time (making sure to edit and crop them how you want it). When selected they appear in the tray (the white space in the lower left of the screen). If you want to continue working with a photo you click on hold.



Now, here is the thing when doing a picture grid collage. They are square, and each photo in them will be square and so you need to crop each photo to be a square (if you don't do it, then the computer will do it for you and you may end up with the important parts cropped out). Don't worry though, one nice thing about picasa is that any edits do not change your original and you can always select "undo all edits" and get back to a standard size.



The other important thing about a square picture grid is that it holds 4 (2x2), 9(3x3), 16 (4x4), and 25 (5x5) photos (I am sure you can do more, but that is the biggest I have done. If you do not have enough photos to make the square complete it will duplicate photos to finish it off.



In this next screen shot, you will see 4 photos selected and then I clicked on collage, chose picture grid, and it made it.

















If you like the collage, hit create. If you need to change it, click cancel. Hope that helps! It really is very, very easy to do.

The second post of Christmas

As I was showing you yesterday, most blogs I follow I read as feeds. But there are some blogs that I like to keep up with but don't need to know the minute they post. They are the ones where if I have an extra minute or two I might check in to see what is new but since they are strangers to me I don't feel compelled to know things in real time.

1. The Pioneer Woman and The Pioneer Woman Cooks -- This is the kind of blog I want to have. She posts about all sorts of random things. She likes photography and shares lots of neat little photoshop tricks. She tells about life on a working cattle ranch. She tells about life with 4 kids. I can relate. But the really fun part of her blog is the "sister" site, the pioneer woman cooks. Now, I love to read cooking magazines and cookbooks, but honestly I rarely actually try very many of their recipes. At the pioneer woman cooks I have tried many, many, many of her recipes. I like to think of it as Recipes for dummies. Each recipe is accompanied by not one, not two, but 40 or 50 photos depicting every single step in each recipe. You always feel like you could actually cook them. My very favorites have been Marlboro Man Sandwhiches, Pasta primavera, and spicy shrimp.

2. Because I said so -- This is the blog of a stay at home mother of 6 in chicago. She writes well and reminds me of Erma Bombeck. She is funny. She gained a lot of notoriety by selling a pack of pokemon cards on ebay. Click on it and read the seller's description, you'll see why I like her blog. She has been made famous because of the ebay thing. She has a book contract, has been on Good Morning America, and this week NPR. But her wit and humor in the face of trying to raise 6 good kids is alive and well.

Enjoy!

The first post of Christmas

On the first post of Christmas . . . I am posting about all my blogging friends. I don't have a links list on my blog because I track everyone through feeds. What are feeds you ask???? Well most blogs have the ability to send out new posts as soon as they are posted to anyone interested. If a blog has that ability it has this symbol on it. If you click on it, it will bring up the "feed" version of that blog. This version has all the important stuff, like links, photos, and text, but omits all the graphic elements (backgrounds, music, etc . . . ). It will ask you if you want to subscribe to this feed. If you select Yes then it will appear in your feed list.

Where is my feed list? Well, In internet explorer there is a little yellow star in the upper left hand corner. It looks like this . . .

If you click on the star, it opens a drop down menu with three headings, favorites, feeds, and history. Favorites is all the sites you have bookmarked. Feeds is all the sites you have subscribed to their feed and history shows you all the sites your computer has visited. (This is how you can spy see where other users have been on the internet -- like to make sure your teen or spouse or child is visiting only acceptable things.) If you click on feeds it will show you your list . . . mine looks something like this. . .

When on this drop down list, you can right click on any of your feeds and select "refresh all" The feed burner will then go by everyone of your subscription feeds and see if anyone has updated them. If they have been updated they turn bold. That way you can see in 2 seconds who has or hasn't updated their blog and then you can click on them and read the updated portion. This saves a PHENOMENAL amount of time. You don't have to keep clicking on people to see if they have made any updates. You don't get sucked into the blogstalking time drain where you just keep clicking and reading and clicking and reading and before you know it you have wasted an entire hour (or several hours, or day).

Anyway it works well for me. I can keep up with everyone I want in a very very very short amount of time.

Labels

Well, it only took me an hour to go through all my posts and label them appropriately. As there got to be more and more stuff on my blog, I decided that I needed to use labels so that I can find the things I want to find. It makes it kind of fun to see in a "nutshell" all the things I write about and then read by category. And I highly recommend using labels from the beginning so you don't have to go through what I just did. And now i am frustrated because I cannot get the labels to show on the bottom row. I have gone to Customize, Blog posts, and selected labels and they are not showing up. Any ideas on why fellow bloggers???????

edit : thanks to google I searched and found a site which told me to go into edit HTML and select revert widgets to default and voila . . . now the labels are ever present.

My new blog

I have a group of friends who wanted to do a recipe exchange, and we decided to post the recipes online -- (I got the idea from someone else's blog -- a friend of a friend -- that was on their links list) You can check out the original one I saw and then you can check out our new one!

Going to try to use like a journal

I really want to use this more like a journal -- keeping track of all sorts of things like movies and books and other interesting info. . . So here goes.

Today, I went to the gym. I attended the 8:30 cardio class. Some days I tolerate the class, other days I enjoy it. Today the routine was quite boring. . . Then I took the Odyssey into get the hatch roof light checked and the coolant. My mom picked me up and we went to the Incredible Pizza Company. Today is their 1 year anniversary and so the buffet was free and everyone there got a 10 dollar gift card to the arcade/game area. They have go-Karts, bowling, putt putt, a kiddie area and more. I had not been there and was actually quite impressed. Trent and I had tried to take the kids there a while ago on a Saturday. It was packed and we never went in. The whole area outside was filled with rough looking teenagers just loitering around. We even commented that it seemed like a not very famliy friendly place. Several weeks later, I noticed they took out a full page ad in the paper where they announced new rules to maintain the family atmosphere. Everyone would now have to purchase food to enter and they had to adhere to a dress code. Apparently it worked! It was filled with families today and I am sure we will be back. Catherine really liked the bowling. It was with little balls that she could do. She even got a strike! Madelyn was funny, she wanted to ride on all the rides, but as soon as they started moving she was done.

After eating pizza and playing, we went and checked out a consignment furniture store at Richmond and Chimney Rock. They had all sorts of interesting pieces -- some I liked, some I laughed at. Then I called my friend, Christy Richards. She had brought a scrapbook to Enrichment last night that she was donating for auction at her daughter's school. It was incredible. . . a lot of the pages were sewn together with decorative stitches. I was amazed. She did it on her embroidery machine. I called my mom and told her all about it. My mom wanted to see it. So we went to Christy's home and looked at it. I think I am gonna have to try it out! She also told us about a cool die cut machine thing called a cricut. I have not seen it before, but it cuts out letters and things for you. It retails for 299 dollars, but she said she has seen it at hobby lobby for 200. Maybe my Mom will buy it! She also told me about club scrap. It is pretty cool too. It is a monthly mailout to you with all the supplies you could imagine along a theme. Each month is different.

We picked up the car and raced to get Julianne from school. She had a blue day! Yeah! We came home and our friends met us at the park in our neighborhood. It was a nice day! We had fun helping the girls learn to jumprope. After the disney movie Jump in, everyone wants to double dutch. We practiced turning and me, Deann, Jennifer and Andrea all attempted to jump into double dutch. We all failed. The girls stuck to single rope. Maybe next time.

We came home and while making dinner watched Cinderella III. The girls had watched it with Trent the night before, but I had not seen. It was quite good! Trent is working furiously trying to get things in place so he can take some time off for our move. I got an email from our super today saying that the carpet would be in tomorrow. Things are really progressing and we are so excited! Well, Adam was the first asleep and although it is only 9:18 p.m. is already awake. I better go help him out. Maybe I'll get to read tonight -- my current book is The Prize winner of Defiance Ohio. It is good.

In the Beginning . . .

Wow, I feel like I have entered the 21st century. My kids someday are gonna think I am so cool. As it stands now they are 6, 4, 2, and 2 months and don't know what a blog is. The question is how soon will they want their own blog?