Oops!

Shark Bait made a point in a comment on my post about Snap Shots™ that I actually meant to make in my post and forgot. Oops! lol 

If you do NOT like the Snap Shots™ widget while you are visiting a blog you can disable it at the top of the Snap Shots™ screen. There is a little gear (a circle with spokes) and when you hover over it the option to disable is there. 

Thank you Shark Bait for reminding me! Have a great day everyone!

A few more symbols & another award!

Today I thought I'd tell you how to make a few more symbols and then I'm going to show you a beautiful award that I received from my friend Jingle ♥


For all these symbols you are going to hold down the ALT key and at the same time press the numbers on your keypad (the number pad on the right hand side of your keyboard; not the numbers above the letters):

Trademark: ALT 0153 makes ™

Registered: ALT 0174 makes ®

Cents: ALT 0162 makes ¢

Pretty cool stuff I think :) 

Now onto another cool thing! My friend Jingle gave me another award. What makes this award so special to me is that she made it herself! I think it's absolutely beautiful!!

Isn't that pretty?!! I just love it! Thank you so much Jingle! Click here to visit Jingle. You'll like her :) She's an awesome poet and a beautiful person ♥

Snap Shots™

I've added something new to all my blogs. Do you know what it is? Try putting your mouse over this --> One of my favorite places :)

Do you see the screen that opened and showed you a picture of the site that clicking the link I added will take you to? Isn't that neat?! That's Snap Shots™ at work! 

Snap Shots™ lets you see where the link is going to take you before you click on it. I just think that's awesome. What do you think? Do you want to add it to your site? Here's what you do:


1. Go here

2. At the top it says Publishers/Bloggers and immediately to the left of that it says Get Started. Click on that.

3. Enter your email address. An email will be sent to you. You'll need to verify your email address in order to access some of the stuff on the site but you can keep editing your site information before you do that if you want.

4. Customize

• Enter your blog URL
• Choose what color you want your Snap Shots™ box to be
• Under Advanced Settings choose what options you want your box to show. I only have Enable for External Links and Enable for Internal Links checked but all of the options have explanations next to them so you can decide what you want to show on your site. 
• Once you've verified your email address, you can also go under Snap Shares™ and decide what kind of ads to show on your box

5. Once you're happy with your settings click on Continue. It will take you to a page that lets you add the widget with one click. Once your blog layout page opens, place the Snap Shots™ widget where you want it and save your layout.

6. If it doesn't let you add with one click, copy the script code and go back to your blog layout. Add a gadget HTML/JavaScript and paste the code into it. Place it where you want it and save your layout.

You now have Snap Shots™ enabled on your blog! I think it's cool stuff :)

Thank you Jingle!

I got another award! Yay! Jingle gave me the Happy Blogger award :-) Here it is:

Isn't it pretty?! Thank you so much Jingle! I'm supposed to give it to 10 happy bloggers but you know what? I think....If you're happy then you KNOW you're happy and you should happily take this award for yourself! Please :) Thank you so much Jingle! You are so very sweet to think of me and that made me VERY happy!

Thank you Jennifer!

Jennifer over at My Crazy Life gave me an award! Yay! You know I looove awards! She said I get it because I always say she's soooo cute :-) Guess what? She is TOTALLY cute!! If you don't visit her you should! You'll think she's adorable too! Here's the award she gave me:

The rules and stuff...

I am supposed to tell you 7 things about myself and then pass it on to 15 other Beautiful Bloggers. I'm going to try to tell you 7 things that you don't already know about me...

1. I am an artist. I bet you didn't know this about me :-) I've been drawing since Elementary school and have drawn everything from the Campbell's Kids doing different sports activities for the gym that my mother was a P.E. teacher in to the Grim Reaper that was airbrushed onto someone's truck. 

2. I am super scared of birds. Like birds landing on me. My daughter had a cockatiel for many years and I was always freaked out when he was out of his cage. Snakes, mice, bugs and whatever other creepy crawlies you can think of don't bother me a bit but don't let a bird land on me!

3. I am THE. BIGGEST. STEPHEN. KING. FAN. EVER. but only of his books. I have read every single one of them and own over 30 of them. I can't stand to watch the movies though or any other scary movie. Seriously. Can NOT stand to watch them!

4. I love arrogant men but not in real life. My favorite men on T.V. are seriously, extremely arrogant...Simon from American Idol, Gordon Ramsey from Hell's Kitchen, Russell Hantz from this season and last season of Survivor. I'm warped. I am aware of this :)

5. I love playing pool. I suck at it royally but it's a lot of fun!

6. Speaking of pool....I prefer the ocean over any other place to swim. Second place is a lake. Then a pond. Then the tub. A pool is waaaaay down the list. The chemicals are not nice to me.

7. I have a photographic memory and can repeat movie lines word for word which is very irritating to the people watching the movie with me but I like it :-)

So now I'm supposed to name 15 beautiful bloggers....Have you seen my blog list?!?!?!? There are waaay more than 15 beautiful bloggers on it! Ok, I'll do my best...


In random order :)

1. Mary @ Work of the Poet because she is awesome! She always thinks of every single person and never misses a thing!

2. Sheila @ The Quintessential Magpie because she writes the sweetest stories, is impossible not to love and always makes me feel loved in her comments.

3. William @ William's Poetry because he is super nice and never fails to say something on everything I write even if it's just good post Kath :)

4. Amy @ Keeping up with the Schultz Family because she is a doll and her daughter Alyce is a doll and I consider her one of my good friends.

5. Doris @ Crocheting in Georgia because she is a dear. She's so kind and sweet and I am in love with her pooch Gizzy :-D

6. Shakira @ You Are Never Alone because she makes me feel like I am never alone ♥

7. Jenners @ Life with a Little One and More because she rocks! She always makes me laugh even when I don't think I have anything to laugh about.

8. Blue Violet (I was a good girl see?) @ A Nut in a Nutshell because she's my girl! She's always there to lift me up when I need a friend!

9. Joni @ Screaming for Chocolate because she's just like a sister to me. We've been through quite a bit of the same stuff and I relate to her.

10. Jess @ Aayden and Aaron's Mommy because she rocks the mommy world WHILE going to college. I am so impressed by that!

11. Terry @ A Canadian Blogger because she is sincere and a total sweetheart and she always makes me feel good with her comments.

12. Helen @ Random Musings because she is a wonderful, caring woman who makes my heart smile.

13. Britt @ Following the Path as a Thrifty Pagan because she is a good friend of mine who knows way too much about me and I have to bribe her every now and then to keep my secrets lol just playing...she knows I love her to bits!

14. Wendy @ Weight...What? because she is super funny and makes me have mental images of things that I never would have known about if it wasn't for her (I'm still seeing the bubble butt by the way...thanks!) :)


15. Susan @ Stop Calling Me That because her sarcasm and this-is-the-way-it-is-so-deal-with-it attitude make me scream with joy. Seriously. They do! She is awesomeness defined!


Now everyone reading this needs to visit everyone else so that you can see that I'm totally right in everything I said! And again, THANK YOU JENNIFER! You are so sweet! Oh yeah! And Jennifer has a cool beans blog button too! You know how much I love them :) So I'm going to show that off and then I'm going to hush. Have a great day everyone!

A little about scheduled posts

I'm not sure how many of you know this, but I do not write blog posts on Sundays. What? But you see posts from me on Sundays. How can that be? Scheduled posts is how. They can actually come in very handy...

Like over the past three days. All you've seen from me on any of my blogs (with the exception of one post on my Happy At Home blog where I told you I was sick) have been scheduled posts.

Those posts SHOULD have been my Sunday posts for the next three weeks but I have been very ill and so I used them as "other day" posts. Which was nice for me because I could still put a post up while I was too sick to even look at the computer and (hopefully) good for you because you had posts to read from me.

It's Saturday afternoon and I'm writing this post and I will schedule it for 8:00 a.m. tomorrow. Maybe if you follow more than one of my blogs you've wondered how I had 4 different posts published at the same time...this is how :)

I use the updated editor on Blogger. To schedule posts you just go under Post Options and click the circle by 'Scheduled at' and enter the time and date that you would like your post to appear on. It will say 'scheduled' next to your post under Edit Posts.


On the old editor on Blogger under Post Options there is a place that says 'Post date and time'. Just enter the time and date that you want your post to be published.

On any other platform I'm sorry, I can't help you. If you are using something else and would like to know how to schedule posts then leave me a comment and I'll do my best to find out how for you :)

Now I'm headed back to bed. Hopefully I will feel better by the time you read this and be back to posting as normal. Have a great Sunday everyone ♥

Top commentators widget*

Who leaves you the most comments? Do you want to show them off? The widget I'm going to tell you about today does just that! And the neatest thing to me is when you click on their name it will take you either to their blog (if they're not on Blogger) or to their Blogger profile so it lets other people find them too!

Do you want one? Yay! I knew you would :) Here's what you do:

1. Go here

2. Click on the blue button that says Add To Blogger. More than likely you should click on the first button. The second button is for people who have more than 5000 comments and most of us don't have that many. MOST of us....some of you do :) If you do then lucky you and click on the second button!

3. A window will open. You are going to customize your widget.


     a) Put in what you want the widget title to be. On this blog it says "Those that give me love...Top commentators..."

     b) Put your blog URL where it says "Customize widget"


     c) Choose how many commentators you want to show


     d) Put your name in the spot that says "Filter your name" unless you want your own comments to be counted


4. Click "Customize" at the bottom of that window


5. Click "Add Widget To My Blog". A separate page should open asking if you want to add the page element. Tell it yes.


You can move it where ever you'd like it to be on your page. Be sure to save it when you're done. Now you have a neat little top commentator widget on your blog :)









*UPDATE: I no longer have this widget on my sidebar because I've changed comment forms and it no longer works with my comments. To learn about my new comment form, please see the **Blog Tip** titled IntenseDebate comment form.  4/10/10

How to make the © symbol

I thought today I would just write a quick post and tell you how to make the copyright symbol. I know there are probably times you'd like to add it to something you wrote. 

There are several different ways to make that symbol. I'm going to tell you three.

1. Press and hold down the ALT key and on the keypad (the number pad on the right hand side of your keyboard...not the numbers above the letters) punch in 0169

This is the best way to do it if you want it somewhere you cannot edit the HTML (like in the title of this post)

2. When writing a post you can click on Edit HTML and add & copy ; with no spaces where you want the © symbol

3. When writing a post (or editing the HTML of anything for that matter...this goes for #2 too) click on Edit HTML and add & # 169 ; with no spaces where you want the © symbol

That's it :) Pretty cool huh?

Adding a watermark/signature to your photos

Beth at Beyond the Garden Gate asked me a great question the other day. She wanted to know how to put a watermark --in other words, your name or your blogs name-- on her photos. So that's what I'm going to tell you about today :)

There is a great online site that lets you add watermarks to your photos free of charge. Of course you can pay and upgrade to pro but you don't have to! The basic, free program is all you need. Here's what you do:

1. Go here 

2. Click on Upload Photo(s) and choose the photos you want to watermark. Your picture(s) will be listed under Uploaded Photos. A copy of the first picture will be in a square on the right hand side.

3. Click on Add Watermark. A menu will open up that will allow you to either add a text or an image watermark (I'll show you both here in a minute) plus the text font, color, size and angle. As you change things it will change on the picture to the right so you can see how it's looking. You can also move the watermark around on the picture by clicking the blue cross at the top of the watermark area on the picture on the right or make it larger by clicking the pink arrow and dragging it. On the text option you can also choose whether to have the words one time or tiled (I'm going to show you tiled)


4. Click on Process Photo(s) when you are happy with your watermark. In pink it will say Download Finished Photo(s). Click on that and your picture with a watermark will download


5. The picture is in a zip file. A box should open up that says What should (Firefox or IE or whatever browser you are using) do with this file? Tell it to open with Windows Explorer


6. It will open a window with a file that's named something weird like d77580f... Right click the zip folder and tell it Extract All:





7. A window will open that says Select Destination and Extract Files. Just hit next. Now your picture will open up. You can move it to your picture folder if you want.


Here's what the watermarked pictures look like using that program:


With tiled text:






With an image watermark:






Now....are you scared? Does that sound like too much trouble? Here's another way that's a little easier if it does...

1. Go to your Photobucket album. What? You don't have one yet?? As much as I've talked about how great it is there?? Shame on you! Get one now!

2. K? Are you there? Good. Upload the picture you want to watermark or choose one from your album.

3. Select Edit over the photo

4. When the editing section opens up there are tabs at the top over the photo you are editing. Choose Decorate

5. Choose Text

6. Place the box where you want the text on your photo. Choose your font and color and enter the text in the box that says Enter Text Here

7. NOW THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! Check the transparent box next to background. 

8. When you are happy with how it looks click on Apply

9. Under the photo choose Save A Copy

That's it :) Here's what that looks like (I did several different fonts and colors for you to see):











Now you can watermark your photos if you want to! I hope this helped you Beth and please ask anything else that you want to know!! That goes for all of you :) Have a great day everyone!

This one's for Doris ♥

The super sweet and dear friend of mine Doris over at Crocheting in Georgia was nice enough to answer my question yesterday so today I'm going to tell her how to do all the things she asked me about :D

1. Learn a foreign language...online even :)
2. Online harmonica lessons
3. Online piano lessons
4. Hot air ballooning
5. How to lose 100 pounds in a year

Go ahead, click the ones you want to learn! And when you're ready to take that hot air balloon ride Doris, I'm ready to go with you! Have a great day!

And Beth, tomorrows post is for you...all about watermarking your photos :)

Two new sites and a serious question

Today I'd like to share two new sites I'm following with you. They are:

• 2 Stews

• Beta Dad

Check them out if you have time. I think you'll like them. Now for the serious question....



What in the world do you want to know how to do????? Seriously. Tell me and I'll tell you. Please. Otherwise I'm just going to sit here twiddling my thumbs and wishing someone would leave a comment asking me how to do something!

Thank you Jingle

Jingle is someone that I'm just getting to know here in blogland but they are friends with a few of my other blog friends so I'm sure it won't take me long to love Jingle too :) 

Jingle was nice enough to leave me an award yesterday. Here it is:






Thank you Jingle for this award! Click here to visit Jingle and have a great day everyone!

Creative copyright for your blog

Y'all know that I do not mind sharing things with people. If I did then I wouldn't keep blogs. That's what you do on blogs is share things right? 

I don't even mind when you tell other people things that I've written in my blogs. As long as it's not in a gossipy that-stupid-girl-said-such-and-such kind of way. And as long as you don't take credit for it yourself and act like it's something you wrote. That makes me angry.

So imagine how irate I got when I was skimming through some recipes yesterday and came across one that looked familiar. Very familiar. As in mine. All the way down to my little :) that I sometimes add to things. My exact words copied and posted and told to be someone else's words. I was extremely hot. In a very bad way.

I emailed the person and told them that they stole my work. They said they had no idea that they should give me credit and apologized and my anger subsided. They've since linked my recipe back to me. Cool.

That got me thinking about copyrighting. I do have a copyright statement on the bottom of all my blogs but it's small. Here's what it looks like on this blog:



I decided that apparently that wasn't good enough so I went to the site Creative Commons and set up specific copyright pages for all my blogs. This is what that copyright looks like:



Like I said, I made one for each of my specific blogs and those links can be found at the top of each of my sidebars. To copy and use ANYTHING that I have on ANY of my blogs this is what you do:



1. Go to the post that you want to copy. Say you want to copy the last post I wrote here about the text site TextSpace. Click on the title of that post to get to that page.


2. Once you are there click on the copyright image at the top of the sidebar:




That will take you to a separate page that looks like this (the post you want to copy will still be open):



You can click on the picture to make it bigger.


3. Copy what you want to copy of my post and paste it into your post. 


4. Now go to the copyright page that opened in a new tab and copy the link that is in the square under "Attribution"





5. Go back to your post and paste that code under the section of post that you copied of mine.


Here's an example of what that will look like:

Do you want to be able to write quotes and have them be pretty? You can do that on this site. Here's a few examples:

Kathy Brakhage / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Notice how it says my name. If you click on that it will take you to the original post that you copied it from. If you click on the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 it will take you to the Creative Commons page that explains what you can and can not do with my work.

I would truly appreciate you using this if you use my work. I think it's only right. To me taking someone's work, be it photos, text or anything else they may post on their blogs, without their permission or knowledge is stealing. Don't do it! It's really simple to link to them. I've made it simpler (at least to me) to link to specific items. 

This works on whatever page or post you are on. The copyright script automatically links to that specific page or post so there's no need to edit anything. Just add it when you use something that someone else posted. Please. It's the right think to do.

If you'd like to add a Creative Commons copyright to your page this is what you do:


1. Go here


2. Choose "License" (it's on the right hand side)


3. Choose your options

• Allow commercial uses of your work? Yes means that people can use your work in a commercial way like for their advertising. No means they can only use your work for non-commercial ways. I always choose no but that's up to you.

• Allow modifications of your work? Yes means that people can change what you wrote. Yes, as long as others share alike means that they can change it as long as they keep the same copyright rules that you have on your work. No means that they have to post your work exactly like you posted it without changing anything. I always choose no to that too.

• Jurisdiction of your license Choose the country you reside in

Additional information

• Title of work The name of your blog

• Attribute work to name Your name

• Attribute work to URL Your blogs URL

• Source work URL If you used something from another place in your post put the URL to it in this space

4. Choose "Select a license"

5. Pick the icon that you want to you by clicking on the circle underneath it


6. Copy the HTML in the box below that

7. Go to your Blogger dashboard


8. Go to "Layout" and then "Page Elements" for the blog you just set up the copyright for

9. Add a gadget HTML/JavaScript and paste the code into it. Save.


10. Place it where you want it on your blog. Preview to make sure it looks right and then save.

Your page is now copyrighted. You may want to write a post informing people of the addition if you think they won't see it or know what it is for. That's up to you too :)

I'm going to link this post into my posts that I write on my other blogs today too so that everyone can read it....I hope they read it anyway. Maybe no more of my work will be stolen! I'm really hopin' that because I'd hate to be the mean person that goes crunk on people or gets them in trouble. Y'all know that's not me ♥

A cool text site

After my aggravation and ranting yesterday about unsatisfactory sites that claim to do all kinds of things that they can't do and to be experts on something that they actually know little about, I thought today I'd tell you about a site that DOES do what they claim. I think you'll like it. I know I do.

Oh, and I'm sorry for ranting yesterday. I am human and do get peeved at things that claim to make doing what I want easy and then don't. So, yes. I'm sorry. Now back to a cool site :)

Do you want to be able to write quotes and have them be pretty? You can do that on this site. Here's a few examples:

You can also do glitter text...

Blinkie text...

Animal print text...

Camouflage text...

Metallic text...

Text generators...

LCD Text Generator at TextSpace.net

And cute little pictures with text...

I totally know you want to do this now! Here's what you do:

1. Go here

2. Choose the text style you want. Just click on the one you choose.

3. In the blue box put the words you want to pretty up. You can also choose colors, patterns, text size and on the moving text how fast or slow you want it to be. Click on "Make my text"



4. It will show you what your text looks like. If you like it then choose "Get the codes!"

5. Copy the "Code for webpages/blogs/profiles"

6. If you want to put the picture/text onto your blog page then add it to a gadget HTML/JavaScript under Layout/Page Elements. You can put the (<)center(>) code before their code and (<) /center(>) after their code to make it centered. You can also put the code target="_blank" after their website name in the HTML if you want it to open to their page in a different window. That's up to you.

7. If you want to put the code into a post just paste in into your post on the Edit HTML tab at the top of your editor. You can add the same codes that I told you about in #6

I think this is a lot of fun and if you like stuff like this you'll love this site! Happy Saturday everyone ♥