My new web site/blog - RV-Dreams Community Forum

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

My new web site/blog

Raytronx · RV-Dreams Family Member

Good luck with the new site Linda. I know how time consuming they can be. smile

One piece of advice on the look is I would ditch the tiled background, it is really distracting to the reader. IMHO

Other wise looks like a good start.

Cheers Ray

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Thank you for the feedback, I was working on this, I really do not like the "tile" but I can not seem to get rid of it. hmm I have since fixed it to a hopefully soothing solid 'blue'. aww

Lucky Mike · RV-Dreams Family Member

I like!!!!...........................wish I could get off my butt to put the effort in................nice job Linda!!

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Thank you Lucky Mike!

It does - and will - continue to take a lot of work, but I am enjoying the learning process. Hope you will check back in from time to time to see my progress - or my goof ups - LOL smile

Racerguy · RV-Dreams Family Member

Great site Linda...have it bookmarked.

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Thanks so much Racerguy! That's a great compliment biggrin

bigboomer · RV-Dreams Family Member

Ann,

Good Luck on the new site....will definitely be adding to our favorites to follow....and it is about time!

Thank you and GOD Bless,

Les

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Thank you so much BigBoomer! I really do appreciate the support

Terry and Jo · RV-Dreams Family Member

Linda,

Now that you have your blog started, you might consider also putting your blog link into the signature area of your profile. That way, each time that you make a comment, your blog link will be available to all, especially if you refer to something that you wrote. Just be sure and set the link to "Open in a New Window" so that we can navigate back and forth between your blog and your comment on the forums.

Congratulations on the blog. I hope you do a lot better than I have, as I've not been very good lately about writing anything.

Terry

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Thanks Terry & Jo,

I have added the link to my signature (hopefully correctly).

I hope to be able to keep up writing on it for friends, family and RVers to see; I am not on Face Book, so I hope to use this instead.

I really appreciate your feedback smile

Terry and Jo · RV-Dreams Family Member

It does work right now. As a moderator, I have "permissions" that most forum participants don't have, so I was able to go into your signature and make your link open in a new window. One does that by using the "Target" field in the window for setting the links to be active. The "Target" field allows one to choose "Open in a New Window" and that is the correct format.

Terry

Rosie RV Thumper and Dog Dog · RV-Dreams Family Member

Linda,
I love your blog concept. I started a blog just before we went full time several months ago and am still learning but stick with it and it will grow and amaze you. It is so rewarding when you get good comments from readers. There are so many of us out here who are very conservative but seldom heard because those who are not have such a huge loud speaker, the media. I added a link to your blog to the blogroll on our blog http://robandmeinourlittlerv.blogspot.com/
Best of luck and keep up the good work on behalf of our great nation.

-- Edited by Rosie RV Thumper and Dog Dog on Tuesday 26th of February 2013 08:29:57 AM

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Thanks guys, I appreciate it!

I just realized my first mistake: I put this under "Forum Member Non-Rving Blogs" ----> I think not! It certainly is about RVing! LOL!

Terry and Jo · RV-Dreams Family Member

Ann4now wrote:
Thanks guys, I appreciate it!
I just realized my first mistake: I put this under "Forum Member Non-Rving Blogs" ----> I think not! It certainly is about RVing! LOL!

Heh....

....I just corrected that minor mistake.

Terry

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Thanks Terry & Jo, I appreciate that easy? fix. biggrin

Terry and Jo · RV-Dreams Family Member

Ann4now wrote:
Thanks Terry & Jo, I appreciate that easy? fix.

Yep. An easy fix. Three mouse clicks and it's done.

I'll also keep an eye on your blog. Take a look at my forum profile and you will see that I've described myself as a Christian and a conservative. The only difference is that on my blog I do get political at times.

Terry

Hina · RV-Dreams Family Member

Nice beginning, as an InfoWarrior and a webmaster with like 10 blogs, I appreciate your work. biggrin If you need advice on plugins or autoblogging, let me know.

cejones4210 · RV-Dreams Family Member

Love it! You have a new follower. Keep it up!

Hina · RV-Dreams Family Member

Hi Linda, I'm working on one of my blogs now; lock down your comments, only allow comments with approval, and from registered users; a handy plugin is "delete pending comments" for when the SEO comment bots hit you; you may find dozens of wierd comments, all with links. Those are from other websites trying to sneak links onto blogs to get higher search engine rankings (which does not work anyways) http://www.nkuttler.de/wordpress/delete-pending-comments/

Another one I like is SEO Ultimate, it can add a lot, such as description headers, a place to insert banners, autolinking keywords, etc: http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/wordpress-seo/

NextScripts social network autoposter (does Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Tumblr, Blogger, etc automatically) http://www.nextscripts.com/social-networks-auto-poster-for-wordpress

Contact form: http://contactform7.com/ Some Wordpress blogs are difficult to get a contact form working.

And Simple AdSense insertion: http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com Wordpress blogs will sometimes screw up codes, such as Pay Pal buttons, You Tube videos, Skype, etc, and this one will protect those, and keep them working.

Edit by moderator: Activated links. Terry

-- Edited by Terry and Jo on Wednesday 27th of February 2013 08:32:29 PM

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Hina, thank you so much!

Learning those plugins I must say is quite the challenge, but its also fun exploring them. I think it took me a whole day to figure out the twitter feed!

It's good to know you are here. Thanks for your support.

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Candy and Dave,

Thanks for the following smile

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Hi Hina,

I was wondering if you do, and what you use to encrypt photos on your web sites? Is it wise to do so, especially if you want to sell photos?

There is so much information on this stuff, it is I must say, overwhelming to a newbie to my own website confuse

Thank you in advance ~ or anyone else on the forum ~ for your advise smile

Terry and Jo · RV-Dreams Family Member

Linda,

I can't answer your question as to encrypting one's photos, but I do have a word of caution. Even if the photos are encrypted, someone can "steal" the photo off of your site. The thief will not likely have an image with good resolution, but they can use a $50 program called "Snag-It" to highlight your photo, or any other portion of your website, and save it in a choice of various file formats.

When I was writing the instructions for posting links into forum posts, I used Snag-It to get the sections of the screen that I wanted and made them into jpg files for posting into the instructions.

Terry

folivier · RV-Dreams Family Member

Wow, so will Snag-it grab a photo from a flash site?

Hina · RV-Dreams Family Member

I don't know about encrypting, but watermarking a photo for sale is common. You could do that with a transparent layer in Photoshop. Then the photo thats paid for is the original, unwatermarked. I have some new stock photos I uploaded, that had the description already "built in" so I assumed it was encrypted. This might be a question for a pro photographer.

Terry and Jo · RV-Dreams Family Member

folivier wrote:
Wow, so will Snag-it grab a photo from a flash site?

Forest and Cindy,

I'm going to say "yes," but with a possible conditions that not all Flash type sites would be subject to capture. I don't know what attributes Flash may have that would defeat Snag-It's capabilities.

I've just captured an image of something from a static (non-moving) "flash" website and got an image of the web page.

http://wechoosethemoon.org/

This next one was taken from a flash site where the image on the screen "scrolls" left or right as one moves the mouse cursor. After I "activated" the Snag-It capture button, I could move over the "screen" and the image did not scroll on the website any more.

http://scruffs-game.com/

Oh, and I've noticed that the Scruffs need an RV.

This next one was taken from a site where some images on the home page operated in a "slideshow." I was afraid that the image that one would want to get would change before one could "capture" the image wanted. I was pleased to see that once that Snag-It is activated for capture, the slide show paused. With this one, I did a quick capture and didn't just choose the image area, but since the slideshow stops, one would likely be able to just highlight just what one wanted to capture.

http://www.testemale-photos.com/

Now, none of these images seem to be really great with regards to resolution, although I had to resize each of them to fit on the forum page.

Terry

nightsky · RV-Dreams Family Member

Terry, it almost looks like it grabs screenshots of your computer minus the frame of the browser? Hmmm. I have some photos on Smugmug, right click is disabled, and you can't click and drag them off to the desktop. I wonder if Snag-it can capture them? If you wouldn't mind checking, the site is www.nightsky.smugmug.com.

Smugmug is very nice, I use it to store photos because there is unlimited storage. Almost all of my albums are hidden at this point and not searchable by Google. My daughter shoots professionally and uploads her RAW files but what is visible on the website is low resolution until someone buys them. She of course has all the metadata and copyright/ contact info embedded in each photo using Lightroom.

Terry and Jo · RV-Dreams Family Member

Caryn,

Snag-It will allow one to highlight any portion of or all of an image or whatever is showing on the screen.

This first image is a small portion of the desktop background on my computer at the moment.

Now, the full image of one of yours:

This is but part of that same image:

Part of yet another of your images:

So, the answer to your question is "YES, Snag-it can get it." I've not worked with it, but there is something similar as a part of Windows 7. See below for an image done with "Snipping Tool" in Windows Accessories.

All of the above images from your Smugmug are roughly 66k or less in file size.

Terry

nightsky · RV-Dreams Family Member

Thanks Terry, I'm ok with that. The actual photos on Smugmug are between 3 and 8 MB in size, just the previews are low res and small. There's no way to stop someone from using a program like Snag-It or just doing a screen print and getting photos, so I wanted to make sure that they are small enough that they can't be used for much of anything, can't be enlarged without getting too pixel-y. Plus my copyright info is in the EXIF data of each one.

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

So.... if I am interpreting all the techy-speak, there is no real way to stop others from using photos you put on your web/blog?

That is good to know. I appreciate all of the response and conversation on this :)

Lucky Mike · RV-Dreams Family Member

Ann its tough to stop them but as caryn said in an earlier post , watermarking or encoding your photos will stop most from using for profit

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Hi all,
The new web/blog site is going well....but oh my SPAM for the comments. I get to approve & mark the comments as spam, but that seems like that is all I am doing! Any tips on how to stop them or is this just part of the web/blog life? :/

Hope everyone is doing okay.

Hina · RV-Dreams Family Member

Get the "Delete all pending comments" plugin. Wham, bam, all in the trash!

My newest blog is also getting "Scrapeboxed" (that's the blog comment bot spammers use) so I need to also install a captcha plugin that throws up those scrampled letters or makes you add numbers to verify you are a real person.

Hina · RV-Dreams Family Member

Delete Pending Comments: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/delete-pending-comments/

Captcha for WP: http://wordpress.org/search/captcha

LibertyLinda · RV-Dreams Family Member

Thank you so much Hina!

I will check these out right now biggrin