Uploading Photos to Your Blog

When uploading a photo to your blog, be sure that you had it resized specially if you are going to display just the thumbnail of the photo. In this manner you are saving a lot of web space. Another reason why you should resize your images before uploading them is because your blog will load faster. A blog that needs to display a 3.2MB photo will take more time to load compared to a blog that only needs to display a 150KB.

If you are afraid that your images will lose vividness and colors when resizing, then you are not using the right software. Photoshop is an excellent software. It has a more major purposes but it is also great for resizing photos. If you don’t have the budget for the software or if Photoshop is too complicated for you, there are other photo editing software in the net that that you can download for free. Don’t depend on Microsoft Office Picture Manager when to resizing your photos because is an awful software for this purpose.

The above photo is resized using Microsoft Office Picture Manager and below photo is resized using Photoshop.

Another Blog Coming Up!

I have a lot of blogs and at this point I realized that I can’t keep them all anymore. I am too busy with other things but I still like to blog. In fact, I want to start another blog (I’m crazy I know). I will leave or give away blogs that are doesn’t have their own domain like My Take on Things, Penny Wise, Digitally Designed, and The Last Thing I Am. That’s 4 blogs off my shoulders. BlogLeafs will stay but I plan to ask somebody to co-author this blog with me.

In exchange to these four blogs, I will start one blog. At first I wanted it to be about living here in Shanghai but I realized that it is a very broad topic and there is already My Pink Notes blog and Vienna Lopez blog that cover about my life in general including my life here in Shanghai so I narrowed it down to something else. The new blog will be about Shanghainese girls’ lifestyle and fashion. Why? Because they fascinate me so!

It’s still just a plan and I don’t have a concrete date to launch it yet but it will come. I already have a good collection of Shanghainese girls’ photos waiting to be uploaded and posted (wink*). Once my schedule start to loosen up a little bit and once I picked a good domain name, I will start it.

Adding an Email Subscription Link to Your Blog

Adding an Email Subscription link to your blog is a good way of giving your readers another preference on subscribing to your posts. In the previous entry, you’ve learned how to add an RSS link and how to create an account in Feedburner.com. If you haven’t, I suggest you read the previous entry first because for this topic, you will need your Feedburner account.

Here are the steps on how to create a “Subscribe to Posts via Email” link.

1. Log in to your Feedburner account.
2. Click on the feed title of the blog.
3. Go to “Publicize” tab.
4. On the side bar you’ll see “Email Subscription”, click on that
5. Select the language of your preference.
6. Feedburner will generate a code. You have to copy the code and paste it on the part or your blog where you want the “Email Subscription” link to appear.
7. You’re done.

Feedburner gives you two ways on how to install email subscription on your blog. First option is installing a subscription form which will be automatically uploaded when ever your blog is uploaded. Your readers can fill up this subscription for to them to receive email every time you update your blog. The second option is installing a code that will provide a link and when your readers will click on it, they will be prompted to enter their email address. Personally, I suggest that you take the second option because it is simpler and it doesn’t take so much space in your blog. You can neatly place the link on your sidebar.

Wanna Host Your Own Blog?

Are you ready to leave all those free blogging sites that are limiting your freedom as a blogger? Do you want to have a full control of your blog? Then get a web host plan.

It is not very expensive. And given the freedom you can have with your blog, it will be all worth it. There are a lot of web hosting choices to choose from and while contemplating about it, you might want to visit WebHostingChoice.com to learn about the guidelines in choosing the right web host plan for your blog.

Is Your Blog Spreading a Virus?

This blog and ViennaLopez.com have been hacked. Since I was not able to visit my blogs for several days, I don’t know when exactly these two blogs got the virus. I got back from my vacation yesterday and when I checked my blogs I learned thru my Kaspersky antivirus’ constant warnings that Blogleafs.com and ViennaLopez.com are spreading a Trojan Downloader virus. The virus is acquired by anybody who loads these two blogs.

I searched for possible causes why my blogs are spreading a virus and I also searched for fixes but I was not able to find answers. In the end, I decided to just re-install Wordpress. So what I did was I deleted all the WP files except the core files (ie, wp-content folder and its contents and wp-config.php) and uploaded a fresh new batch of the deleted files from the latest version of WP. And that did it. Now the virus is gone and my WP is upgraded. So if your blog is spreading a virus too, doing what I did (given that you have a WP blog) is an effective way to remove the virus.

My other blogs are virus free however; I decided to upgrade them as well. I guess WP 2.3.1 is vulnerable to hacks so it’s better to upgrade blogs that are running WP 2.3.1 to Wp2.3.3. I will be working on them tomorrow and hopefully I can finish them so I can resume blogging and doing sponsored posts on the following days.

Again, the virus is gone. Blogleafs.com is once again safe so you may visit it again sometimes without having to worry about getting a virus.