Here are some composition lessons learned from my recent photo challenge for getting great images for blog article.
First the basics
1 Read the manual — know your camera, learn what each button does, which the flash is, which the backlight, which is the timer is and how to control the zoom.
Yesterday afternoon, I was delighted to open my Inbox to find this glorious invitation to join the Google Music beta! Google Music is a cloud storage locker for music you already own. You must upload all your music to the Google servers to have Google then stream it back for you at your convenience. There is not currently a way to purchase music from Google and have it stored in your locker. The service is currently free, but you are limited to storing 20,000 songs. I clicked on the “Get Started” button to begin my musical Google journey!
When I attended graduate school at Columbia University in the City of New York in the late 1980’s, one of chits of living on the Morningside Heights Campus — believe it or not — was getting a phone number with a 212 Area Code. I know that may sound silly to some, but if you had a 212 phone number, that meant you lived in the exclusive borough of Manhattan, and you were desirable and important and to be envied by the rest of the world.
Continue reading → Tutorial: How to Get a 212 Area Code Phone Number
I am a big fan of pair networks web hosting, and today, I am an even bigger fan of pairNIC — the domain registration arm of pair. Ever since I’ve been on the internet, all of my domains have been registered with Network Solutions because, for many years, it was difficult to move your domains from one registrar to another — using an antiquated Ack-Back system was an invitation to make an irrevocable paper mistake — and only now is the domain transfer process more forgiving, but not necessarily easier, to make happen. I’m going to step you through the process of transferring your domain from Network Solutions (NetSol) to pairNIC because you will save a lot of money and hassle if you follow me.
Continue reading → How to Transfer a Domain from Network Solutions to pairNIC
Do you know About.me? I didn’t. I do know. About.me is a new website/social aggregator/homepage you create to connect things “About You.” I guess. I’m always sort of late to these burgeoning online enterprises, so when I read yesterday that About.me was sold to AOL for tons of money after only being live four days, I decided to hurry on over and grab a username and root around a bit to see what about the fuss was about and — http://about.me/boles — is now mine, along with all a bundled bucket of obnoxious TypeKit Fonts that still take forever to propagate and load on a page:
UPDATE: December 9, 2010
This morning, we removed the rotating headers from all 13 blogs in the Boles Blogs Network because calling all those remote images was significantly adding a lot of page load time for our articles. We’ve gone back to using a single header image for each blog hosted here on WordPress.com, and we hope you’ll notice, and appreciate, the speed gains. This tutorial is still valid as of this writing, so if you’re still interested in remotely serving called image headers for your blog, the information here should still be valid.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
After reading a keen blog post from Automattic’s Nick Momrik — concerning new default image headers for the WordPress.com Twenty Ten theme — I decided to see if I could get my Cutline Rotating Image Header Tutorial working with the new, default, Twenty Ten theme we are currently using for the Boles Blogs Network here on WordPress.com.
Continue reading → Twenty Ten Rotating Image Header Tutorial for WordPress.com
UPDATED: December 9, 2010
After six months of usage, I cancelled our yearly paid TypeKit account this morning and removed all the fonts from all 13 blogs in the Boles Blogs Network. I did this for two reasons. The first is because there is a niggly font rendering problem for iOS 4.2 devices like iPhone and iPad with some fonts that requires you to change how you publish a headline or your name, and you need to add Custom CSS to try to make the workaround work. I have no interest in sleuthing font solutions across 13 blogs for a service we pay to use. TypeKit should not have offered inferior font sets to customers that causes this sort of hassle. The second reason for TypeKit removal is that some of the font sets we were using were adding 100kb to over 225kb to page load times. That’s just too much cruft to load for too little aesthetic gain, and adding that to the iOS font problems we’ve been haggling over the last couple of days placed the final straw on our back that irretrievably broke our interest in supporting TypeKit on our blogs network.
UPDATED: July 4, 2010
I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to code Typekit Fonts into all 14 of my WordPress.com blogs to add some spectacle to the drama of this United Stage blog. The process isn’t simple or intuitive and since there really isn’t any step-by-step documentation that I could find to help me, I decided to help myself — and you — by constructing this Typekit walk through for the new default Twenty Ten theme. You start by going to Typekit.com and signing up for an account. This afternoon, I purchased the Portfolio option for $50.00USD a year because I have 14 blogs in need of fonting. If you have one blog, you should be able to get away using the free Trial plan — but you will have to wear a Typekit badge. You do not have to purchase the CSS upgrade on WordPress.com to get Typekit to work on your blog.
Continue reading → The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com
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