DIY
do it your own damn self
4 Steps to Having Social Media Icons That Match Your Theme
Installing Theme Consistent Social Media Icons
As promised in my last post Don’t Just Share Your Posts, Share Your Blog, here are the instructions to installing your social media icons that fit your theme.
Step 1 Find the icons you’d like to use or make them.
These icons can basically be any picture you want, however, I suggest if you use your own pictures, be sure it’s easy to tell that they are icons and not just pretty pictures. Google search Free Social Media Icons and you’ll find lots of results for pages listing awesome icons where you can visit that site and download them for free. Once you’ve downloaded the package of icons, I suggest going through it and grabbing the ones you want and dropping them into another folder. I’m using icons found on http://webtreats.mysitemyway.com/tag/icons/ for the example below.
Step 2 Adjust the Size of the Icons
Use your favorite editing application to scale the icons. If you don’t own an application that does so, www.pixlr.com does a great job. The size of your icons are based on how many icons you’ll be using, how many rows you want to have and the width of your sidebar. If your sidebar is 200 pixels wide and you’re adding 4 icons per row, divide the 200 by 4 and you get 50 pixels per icon. Majority of these icons come with transparent space around them. Keep that space! Creates a nice even gap between the icons.
Crop those icons to 50×50, leaving a bit of area around them and save to a new folder. I named mine “cropped”.
Directing Your Custom Domain URL To Your Blogspot (Blogger) Blog
The choice to buy a custom domain name
But I have a URL, it’s www.afterbedtimeblog.blogspot.com. Why the heck should I pay for a domain name and yearly registration, when I’m getting it for free from Blogger? What are you trying to do V? Make money from an affiliate link? Do I look like I have money to burn? DO I look like I come here for you to sell me crap?
Well, here’s a couple of reasons.
www.afterbedtimeblog.com sounds a heck of a lot cooler than www.afterbedtimeblog.blogspot.com.
Your traffic stats, is your traffic, not Blogger’s and will travel with you if you leave Blogger.
Having your own URL adds professionalism to your site.
Registering your URL encourages commitment to your blog by nudging you to be committed because you’ve invested money in it.
Purchasing a domain name
You have the option of buying your URL through Google, which makes setup easy as pie, but if you decide to choose your own 3rd part registrar, you’re more likely to get a better price when purchasing and registering for a few years. I suggest Godaddy.com (affiliate link). I didn’t originally buy the name for my site through them, I bought mine through Google and I had a heck of a time trying to renew it, so I moved it to GoDaddy. I’ve also set up new accounts for others using GoDaddy (before I got my affiliate link) and it’s quick, easy, affordable and they offer REAL SUPPORT, which may not seem necessary at this stage, but if you ever decide to move your blog away from blogspot and need extreme help redirecting to your new host, Godaddy’s a phone call away.
My Mac is Dead? No Freaking Way!
Warning: If you’re not a Mac user, you may find this extremely boring past the first paragraph. But, I’m going to write the boring post anyway, in hopes to help any other mom blogger (or any one for that matter) who’s low on funds and in fear of losing all the great stuff on their Mac, like family photos, music, your resume . . .
Several weeks ago my Mac died. This is one of the reasons my blogging went to shit – along with the fact that Network Solutions was offering me non-solutions, but that’s another post. Actually several posts. If interested in those posts, check them out here: Post One, Post Two and Post Three. Now, your Mac dieing is not easily acceptable to anyone, but for me personally it was a horrific nightmare. The kids’ pictures for the past few years was sitting on that thing. My latest wordpress theme design was sitting on that thing. All my newest iTunes purchases was sitting on that thing. My two external drives had been full for months with backed up photos, music, Merlin episodes and home movies. I was meaning to get a new external drive. One where I would have the space for a Time Machine backup. Hopefully 2tb, to back up everything and put the full external drives away for safe keeping. I was meaning to. I just hadn’t gotten around to spending the $100 to do so.
My Mac wasn’t dead-dead, as in no power. It would start-up but never stop rebooting or getting pass the horrific gray screen. I tried everything I could find on several websites, including terminal coding, nothing prevailed. I even spent $100 on Disk Warrior which in no way helped.
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