I wondered what to do for this challenge, but then it came to me as I accomplished something for my blog. In a way it was a celebration ... well, at least to me it was. I created this blog back in 2008 prior to my trip to Turkey as a way to document it and so that friends and family could follow along. Over the past 6 years (can't believe it's been 6 years since Turkey) I've changed the template, layout, and colours for this blog always trying to achieve a more personal look because I am always envious of great some blogs look. For many months, I tried to figure out how to put social media icons on my blog and successfully added them in Tangerine Tango, Pantone's Color of the Year for 2012.
These sites provided great tips, instructions and code which I used to create my icons.
First, I went on the hunt for free icons and true to Pam's (diy Design Fanatic) post, there are tons of free social media icons and some can be found on Pinterest. I liked how Pam used Pantone's Fall 2012 line/design for her icons. However, I didn't want something that looked like her icons and to be honest with you, I was not a fan of the dotted circle icon. I Google "Pantone tango tangerine social media icons" and found various images and chose one to use. Once a style was selected, they were saved on a local desktop and resized to a size that looked good on my blog, then they were uploaded to Picasa photo album that is open to the public. I remembered I had to do this in Chrome because Google changed something and you couldn't upload or get the embedded link from Firefox or Safari. I already had a "Follow Me" gadget in Blogger Layouts and removed what ever was in there and entered the following code (see image below) and an embedded link for each icon.
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| Follow Me Gadget with Code to link to images |
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| Social Media Icons in Tangerine Tango |
At some point after G+ was released, users were prompted to use their G+ profile for their Blogger profile instead of having two separate profiles. Some people prefer to have separate profiles and other choose to have one profile because it's less maintenance. I don't remember when exactly but I switched from two separate profiles to my G+ profile for both G+ and for this blog. Now this put a "G+ Follow" button on my blog and in or around the "About Me" gadget and I couldn't get rid of it until I found instructions on a web page that has since been removed. I will try to find the link and add it to this post.
Earlier in this post I mentioned a Website called "Code it Pretty" by Marie Mosley, and Marie provides codes and tutorials to help people like me customize their blogs. I recently saw one of her tutorials on adding a signature to your blog posts. I thought it was pretty nifty and decided to try it. I created a signature using the A Beautiful Mess APP, resized the image and uploaded it to Picasa. Once again, I couldn't use Safari or Firefox to upload the image, I had to use Chrome. Why Google are you being so difficult? Once my signature was uploaded it changed the background from white to grey and I was stumped why it was doing this. I commented on Marie's post and she replied that it's a "feature" of Picasa's auto-enhance. She also provided a link to a tutorial with directions for turning it off. I followed the instructions in the tutorial and turned off the auto-enhance "feature" and voila the background went back to normal.
Next, I couldn't find the "Link to this Photo" option since Google transition to G+. I scoured the Internet and found a Google Page about Picasa photos and there were numerous complaints how people could no longer do the things they used to do once Google switched the pictures from Picasa to G+ Photos. Someone commented on this page that you can see this "Link to this Photo" option if you link to your old Picasa Album folder and provided a link: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1
Finally, I was back on track and returned to Marie's tutorial and followed her instructions and used her code for my blog. This code displays my signature image at the bottom of all of my posts, both on my home page and on individual post pages. I decided I didn't want my signature on the bottom of my posts on my home page and used Marie's additional instructions to use Blogger's conditional tags to display my signature on post pages only. WooHoo! It worked! If you click on the link for one of my titles, you will see this signature at the bottom of each post page. It will probably change it at some point to something smaller or completely different. The point is is that I did it. This was an accomplishment for me and I did a mini-celebration when I first saw it on the page.
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| 31 Day Photo Challenge - Day 27 - Celebration (final picture) |
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