Category: Blogging

How I created the header for my blog

I once read that bloggers love to write about blogging. Yikes. I don’t want to do that . . . but I want to save people the headaches I went through teaching myself this stuff!

The idea for the heading

I imitated the header from Mark Waltz’s blog. Mark was involved in retail before entering pastoring and wrote the book entitled First Impressions: Creating Wow Experiences at Your Church . This spring I went with some of my students to Mark’s First Impressions workshop at Granger Community Church). I deduce from all of this that he should also be good at creating a good first impression with your website!

I got the picture of the coffee cup from stock.xchng which has quality photos for free.

How I created the header in XnView:

I basically forged three photos (one of the coffee cup, one a black rectangle, and one of me) into one photo using the free photo editor XnView. (I don’t have PhotoShop but I would like to though if you want to send me the money). Here is the XnView link to download it from download.com which is the very best, most reputable place to download free software.

In XnView, I used their tools "Tools . . . Create Panorama" to forge the three photos together. Then I did Image . . .Convert to Colours . . . 32 Colours (Adaptive) to help blur the colours together so that the black looks seamless. It also gives a brushed look.

Then I did "Image . . . Resize" to 8 inches long (or 576 pixels long).

Then I did "Image . . . Add Text" and added a word or phrase at a time.

July 28, 2006
Why I redesigned my blog

I added the explanations to the right about how to use this blog after talking with various people who are new to blogging and therefore gave me the honest "the emperor has no clothes" feedback that

a) they thought my old Blogger site looked better and was simpler and less busy and

b) that they had no idea what a blog was for and that all the features are confusing. What the heck are categories?

Therefore I tried to make sure there is more "white space" and tried to think "less is more" in designing. One thing I got rid of was the second picture of me on the same page. (See below middle snapshot). My wife thought it was definitely too much and when your wife says that . . . 🙂 She hasn’t looked at the new site and I’m not holding my breath. I think she has read under 5 posts ever. She is interested in the subject matter. (She has her MDiv, has pastored, and also teaches Christian ministry at Taylor). She simply would rather talk to live human beings than read blogs. Can you believe that? 🙂

Here are printscreen ("prt sc") snapshots of the the three versions: old, initial typepad, present.

July 27, 2006
Viewing My Blog in Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer

Internet Browsers:

I still usually use Internet Explorer as my internet browser but most experts say that the (free for download) Mozilla Firefox is much better once you get used to it. So I’m trying to get used to it. I don’t like how it displays my Taylor webmail (this is predictable because it is "Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access" created by Microsoft which also created Internet Explorer) so I don’t think I’ll totally switch. There is also a new Internet Explorer 7 that you can download for free I think that is in "beta" or testing mode.

Site Redesign:

I redesigned this blog this week. It looks quite a bit different. When I tried to open the site with Mozilla Firefox, it still showed the old website. The reason is that Mozilla Firefox stores the basics of your website in its memory and just reloads the new content.

For it to show correctly I had to go into Mozilla Firefox and go to Tools . . . Options . . . Privacy . . . Cache . . . Clear Cache Now. When I reloaded the site then, it worked great. The new one looks like this:

July 26, 2006