Showing posts with label Tech Tip. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tech Tip. Show all posts

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Tech Tip: Quotemaker

Once again, I chose to do the Quotemaker tech tip challenge.  I want to share Terry Pratchett quotes with people, since he is a wonderful author. The hardest part of these tech tips is choosing which quote to post.

This week I chose to use Pinstamatic.com.  This quote maker offered less versatility than  PosterGen Quote Generator, but  it's much simpler to use.  It has templates to chose from, so everyone looks good.  The templates also make it faster to use. With PosterGen you can chose really cool combinations, but you can also chose combinations that look really bad.  Not all colors go well together. 

Generated using Pinstamatic.com

Tech Tip: Quotemaker

This week I chose to play with  PosterGen Quote Generator. This tool gave me a large variety of different fonts to play with.  I have decided to chose a quote that goes well with my quotes widget, which of course means it's from Terry Pratchett.  I definitely think I will chose this challenge again to experiment with more quote maker tools, and keep Terry Pratchett quotes as my theme for this class.


Sunday, March 20, 2016

Tech Tip: Add the Weather to Your Sidebar

This week I added a weather widget to the sidebar of my blog.  Knowing the weather is useful.  I tried to find one from weather.gov (a website by NOAA) but was unable to find one.  I chose to use the one recommended in the tech tip assignment.

Wikimedia Commons

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Tech Tip: Website

This week I have setup the website for my storybook.  I will continue working on the look that my website has as the semester goes on, however I am happy with what I have done so far for the initial look of the page.

Screenshot of the current state of my website

Please visit "Carmen's Storybook" if you wish to check out my website.

Tech Tip : Add an HTML Box to Sidebar

Today I added an HTML Box to my sidebar.  One of the options listed in the assignment description was "share some words of wisdom."  I knew right away what I wanted to add.

My favorite author died less than a year ago on March 12, 2015.  This name was Terry Pratchett.  He is an absolutely brilliant writer, and his novels are full of great quotes.  These include funny quotes, puns, and very though provoking statements.  The HTML sidebar I created includes some great quotes from Terry Pratchett, keeping his words alive.  


Terry Pratchett - from Wikipedia

Tech Tip: Blogger Profile

This week I updated my blogger profile. 

Although blogging is a good way to interact with other people in an online class, it is not something I see myself doing in the future.  I am just not a blogger.  Because of this, I mostly configured my profile for class, and kept it short and simple. 

Silhouette : Flickr
I did want to include my profile in a widget as part of my blog, I wanted to profile to include a picture, and a very basic description that people can read quickly.  I not have a profile that does all of these things for me.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Tech Tip: Alphabetizing Numbers

As everybody in this class knows, we are required to label all of our blog posts with the corresponding week number. You may notice that the label widget shows all the labels in alphabetical order, which is very useful.  It uses the first character of the listed word and sorts them, then uses the second, third letter, etc. for tie breakers.  Well duh, that's how alphabetizing works, you may be wondering why I am telling your this.

Notice that it does the Exact same thing for numbers:

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3

Which is also fine, until you start getting into double digits.

Week 1
Week 10
Week 11
---
Week 15
Week 2
Week 3

1, 2, 3 ... 15 are not being processes as numbers, instead the characters themselves are being compared. Since the 1 is the fifth (or sixth if you count the space) character, it will compare the character '1' to the character '2', see that 1 comes first, and not look at the rest of the word. This causes Week 10 to come before Week

The quickest and easiest way to fix this is by adjusting your numbers.  Use Week 01 and Week 02 as your labels.  Then every week that starts with a 0, will come before every week that starts with a 1 in the digit, displaying as follows.  (Note, this will work for up to 99 numbers, which is more than plenty for this class).

Week 01
Week 02
Week 02
---
Week 09
Week 10
Week 11

Did I go into to much details?  I have no idea how familiar you guys are with stuff like this, so I tried to format this post in such a way that even people without any technology background can understand why the labels won't sort correctly. I will answer any questions in the comments, and feel free to drop random tech questions.

Enjoy the nerdy glasses from Pixabay

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Tech Tip: Google Timer

If you do not know what the google timer is, here is a link that explains it: Google Timer.  It's not a tool I was aware of, nor is it one I've used, but I am not at all surprised it exists.  There are two functions it can server while doing homework
  1. Set a time, and stay focused until it rings, so that you can take a short break.
  2. Set the timer during a break, to make sure you don't start browsing the web for the rest of the night.  (Admit it, we've all done it)
Now that you are here, feel free to take a one minute break from your homework (I assume you are here to get point commenting on peoples blogs) and watch this relaxing video by Natural Relaxation.

Tech Tip: YouTube in Blogger

Adding a video to Blogger is really easy, but in reality, adding a YouTube video is easy if you have access to the HTML code.  YouTube videos all have an embed function, which you can insert into any HTML code, not just Blogger. I used HTML code to modify the video below and make it bigger that the standard Blogger embedded video.  Enjoy a cooking video!

Normal Size:


Enlarged Size:


Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Tech Tip: Blogger Template

Most of my previous work with design has been with writing code to implement other people's designs, instead of creating my own design from pre-coded templates.

I decided a simple design would be best.  Busy backgrounds and color schemes can be distracting and overwhelming.  The trick to Creating a good design is to find a way to personalize your blog while still keeping it simple.

The blog design and background should not be the focus of the blog, because then the reader stops focusing on the content.  Often times the user will not even notice a really great interface design or template layout.  This is because everything is so intuitive that people don't have to think about things.  People tend to notice things that bother them much more quickly than things that impress them.  I decided to add green, which is my favorite color, into my template, as well as an image that I felt was pretty, simple, and non-intrusive.

There are other philosophies of thought, however simplicity is what seems to work best in my experience.

I hope this helped.  Good luck with any templates you chose to create in the future!