Stretch Your Mind And Body » Blogging

Plug-in Developer Thank You Day

Connie — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:14:10 +0000

I am a bit late with this post, but it is never too late to practise some gratitude. Recently the number of available word-press plug-ins has reached 4000. A plug-in is a bit of code that makes it possible for your blog to do all sorts of nifty things. We have mentioned them in our radio shows and Charly has written a post or two about them.

This huge number of plug-ins means a lot of people have spent a lot of hours writing those plug-ins and made them available for our use. Matt (or Matthew) Mullenweg (the creator of wordpress) suggested to make January 28th an official “thank you day” for plug-in developers.

One idea is to actually go to the developer’s site and leave a nice comment and tell them that you are using their plug-in. Some developers have PayPal accounts and if you feel abundant you might want to make a small donation to your favourite developer’s account.

I had never put much thought into who actually created wordpress itself, what sort of person is actually behind this amazing tool that has opened up the web and the world to so many people. So I did some research and found Matt’s blog where he wrote a page about himself. Here is an excerpt:

“The website says WordPress is “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform” but more importantly WordPress is a part of who I am. Like eating, breathing, music, I can’t not work on WordPress. The project touches a lot of people, something I’ve recently begun to appreciate. I consider myself very lucky to be able to work on something I love so much.”

Curious to read more? Here is a link to Matt’s blog: http://ma.tt/about/

Maybe we should send Matt a message of gratitude as well……

Till next time,

Connie and Charly

from

http://www.stretchyourmindandbody.com

Using Images On Your Website or Blog

Charly Leetham — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:55:37 +0000

Image by Patrick Q via Flickr

In todays Stretch Your Mind And Body Blog Talk Radio show, Connie and I discussed using images on your blog and website.

With the technology available for digital cameras now, the quality and size of images that we are downloading to our computer are amazing. I know that from my digital camera, the images are 600 dpi (dots per inch) and about 2500 pixels wide. To put that in perspective, 2500 pixels wide is approx. 17 cm. That is one, very large photo.

If you were to display an image that size on your blog or website – you would more than likely only see a portion of the corner of the photo on your screen! Not to mention how long it would take to load.

As a result, it is often necessary to resize images to be ‘web friendly’.

The standard computer monitor displays 72 dpi and will generally display an image 640 px wide by 480 px high nicely. Anything larger may prove problematic.

Let me share some terminology.

DPI or Dots Per Inch – Imagine a piece of paper that is 1 inch wide. In that 1 inch, there are 72 dots which can be any color (including white). What picture is shown on that piece of paper depends on which dots are what color, but there will only ever be 72 dots per inch of paper. This is known as 72 dpi. If, in that same 1 inch piece, there are 600 dots – this is known as 600 dpi. Of course, 600 dpi will give a much better picture than 72 dpi.

Pixel – one of those dots, can also be called a Pixel.

The higher the dpi, the larger the file size. The larger the physical image, the larger the file size.

This is simply because the information to ‘make’ that image display has been saved digitally.

The issue becomes that when you are using images on a website or blog, you don’t need the higher resolution of 300 or 600 dpi and the image should be something less than 640 px by 480 px to ensure it will all show on the screen and allow text to display as well.

As a result, it is often necessary to resize the image. The question is how. In todays show, I shared three ways to do this:

Microsoft Office Picture Manager – will allow you to resize and compress an image very easily
Adobe Photoshop – may be overkill and prove to expensive, but if you’re doing lots of image manipulation it is a great tool
GIMP – a free open source image manipulation package that offers many of the same functions Photoshop does (see http://gimp.org)
Online Image Resizers – cool tools online. I recently tested http://www.ezresize.com/ with great success

Connie also mentioned that the software that comes with your Digital Camera may have image manipulation capabilities – so these are well worth checking out.

Connie also asked about ’situating’ an image in a paragraph so that the text wrapped around the image. This is generally quite easy to do – instead of trying to describe this though I’m going to recommend that you view the video at my How To Videos Central free membership – it will be much easier. This video also shows you how to use GIMP to resize an image. You will need to register to view the video – but it is completely free.

View: How To Format An Image To Be Web Friendly

Recommended Blogging PlugIns

Charly Leetham — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:37:23 +0000

In our Stretch Your Mind And Body Blog Talk Radio segment last week, Connie asked me about the PlugIns I would recommend for a basic blog setup. There are a LOT that I would recommend, so I thought it would be best to detail them here, with their links….. (I’ve also linked last weeks show at the bottom of this post, so you can hear what we really discussed).

So here they are, grouped by function:

Audio / Visual

1 Pixel Out Audio Player

An excellent Wordpress Plug-In that inserts an audio player right into your post. Completely customizable so that you can match your blog theme.

MightySeek Podpress

To syndicate your audio content, use a Podcasting plug-in to send your audios to Podcast directories (including iTunes). An excellent way to increase the reach of your content.

Social Bookmarking & Commenting

Comment Luv

A cool little plug-in that will find the last post of the commentor and display it near their comment.

Live Comment Preview

Allows commentors the chance to edit their comment for a predefined time after submitting.

Share-This

Allows site visitors to bookmark your site to their favorite bookmarking or social networking site!

Tweet This

Allows visitors to tweet your post on Twitter

Post Ratings

Get your visitors to rate your posts!

Subscribe To Comments

Commentors can subscribe when they comment on your post and receive updates when other comments are added.

Blog Management

All In One SEO Pack

Make your blog more SEO friendly.

Configurable Tag Cloud

Add a Tag Cloud to your blog – configurable text sizes and colors.

Site Map Generator

Make your blog userfriendly – automatically produce a site map quickly and easily

One Click PlugIn Updater

Quickly and easily add plugins and themes automatically to your blog. No more FTP!

Exec-PHP

Be able to execute PHP code in your blog posts.

Firestats

Statistics monitoring for your blog

Feedburner Feedsmith

Use Feedburner to increase the reach of your RSS feeds

Page Link Manager

Select which pages appear in your page navigation

Redirection

Add redirection links to your blog

Tag Management

Tagalize It

Technorati Tags

Enjoy these plug-ins – please let me know how they go.

For videos on how to use many of these plug-ins visit How To Videos Central Blog