I was Blogtipped! Yaaee!

I just realised that I was blogtipped by Easton from BusinessBlogwire for this month! Wheeeee!! Thanks Easton! Its a great encouragement for me! Haha… (and that’s what made me post a second update to revert my goals to 10 goals per week).

What is Blog Tipping? Here’s it!

Blogtipping Day is the first day of each month. To go blogtipping, simply publish a blog post where you identify three bloggers and give each one three compliments and one helpful tip. You’ll pleasantly surprise them while helping your readers discover blogs and blogging tips

Yeah, and its really a pleasant surprise! I’m gonna start Blog Tipping next month too! (The yellow logo reminds me of the Barnyard movie!)

So, I should keep my voice, keep my goals, and keep my screen shots! Great! I’ve also worked on making the permalinks to comments more visible and linking to my profile more visible too!

Doing screen shots quickly

Maybe I’d answer to the screen shots part - how do I do it?

I’d say I do my best to post an image for every post - unless I’m in a rush. I get my images from Stock.XCHNG, where many of them come free. The thing is… sometimes the images are just there to spice up the post, it doesn’t even have to be related to the post (but I’d do my best to pick one that is related).

Also for photographs, I just use my camera phone - and then Bluetooth transfer it over to my laptop, where I work on the image. Clean and simple. Remember that now camera phones have up to 2 or 3 megapixels, which is overkill! I just need a image width of max 400px! Anything greater and it may mess up my nice blog layout.

I realise what deterred me from posting images previously in my other blogs was the loading time of Adobe Photoshop! Frankly, photoshop is a wonderful software, but I guess I use only 5% of its features 90% of the time (resizing, cropping, adjusting brightness etc.), so, what I did was to get faster loading image editing software like Paint.NET, and I made it the default editor for my images.

Paint.NET loads fairly quickly, and is quite powerful.

So what I’d do to do a screenshot, for example:

1. Go to the website, hit Print-Screen
2. Fire up Paint.NET
3. Create a new document
4. Paste the picture, expanding the canvas if necessary (Ctrl-V)
5. Use the marquee tool to select the part of the screenshot I want to focus, and crop (Ctrl-Shift-X) if necessary.
6. Resize the picture (Ctrl-R), and adjust the size to fit your blog
7. Save the file (Ctrl-S), normally as JPEG quality 60
8. Rename the file (F2) to a keyword rich name (helps in SEO)
9. Get it up to my blog in the WordPress admin console!

Its a couple of steps, but I’d like to say I’m very much in to using shortcut keys… so much that I get labelled as a shortcut freak, so maybe that makes a big difference in the speed I do things.

And… urgh, of course, no sleep. Its 5:16am as I’m editing this… and no, I have not slept yet. Its hard work!

Oh… I realise a lot of blogs don’t have smilies :)… I love smilies! Smilies give me my personal voice!