Awards and A How To video featuring lil ol' me

First of all I have some awards from the lovely and talented Jingle to share with you. She is the sweetest girl and the Queen of Awards if you ask me :) Here they are:

If you don't visit Ji already you are really missing out on a true angel. She is a wonderful poet and a beautiful person. Click here to visit her. 

Thank you so much for all my awards Ji! They are beautiful and I am honored ♥ 



Now, about the how to video I mentioned. I've talked quite a bit about memes and some of you know that I host my own meme on Saturday's on my blog Me & My Memes called Hooray for Saturday! that I've been posting every single Saturday for over a year now.

I really don't have any rules for my meme except one. That you link back to my blog. The blog that I post the meme on. There would be no point whatsoever to link back to one of my other blogs because the meme is only posted on the one I mentioned above. 


I only ask you to link back to me IF you are going to post your link in my MckLinky. I've even made it easy for you by posting the code for my button which AUTOMATICALLY links back to my blog for you on the Hooray for Saturday! post each week.

I really don't think it's too much to ask that you link back properly to me if you're going to add your link to my post. Truly I don't. 


I do understand that some of you may not understand how to get that code and put it into your post. That's what my video is of. Me showing you just how to do that :) 


I apologize in advance for the shaky video quality. I've been quite sick and my hands were, well, shaky. I still think it's good enough to share with you and hope it helps those of you with questions on how to add my button to your posts. 







I hope everyone has a great day...see you soon :)

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 :)

Using your photobucket pictures to add links

If you've spent any time looking at my sidebar, I'm sure you've seen this:

Stalk me here....lol








mommacow39
Today I'm going to tell you how I made it.

By now I'm sure you've realized that my favorite widget is the HTML/JavaScript widget. I use it often. Very often. And that's the widget I used to put these social network links on my sidebar. This is what I did:

1. First I needed the pictures. I used Photobucket (of course). If you don't have an account there yet, click here to get one. If you do have one, log into your account.

2. At the top of the page there is a place to search. It looks like this:

3. Put in what you want to find an image of....for example, when I found the picture I used for my Twitter link, I just put in "Twitter". It will give you the resulting pictures. When you find the one you want, click on it and then choose "copy to my album". You have to place your mouse over the picture to bring up the copy option. It looks like this when you do:

4. After you save it to your album, click on the picture to get the codes. This is what that looks like:

5. See where it says "HTML Code"? That's what you need. Copy it.

6. Go to your Blogger dashboard/Layout/Page Elements.

7. Add a Gadget/HTML/JavaScript.

8. Paste the code into the widget. It will look something like this (remember, the red symbols won't be there; I have to show them to show you the code):

(<)a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank">(<)img src="http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj57/mommacow39/twitter-1.png" border="0" alt="blog twitter">(<)/a>

9. Notice the section I have in purple. That's the part you're going to change (except for also taking out the red parenthesis). You are going to change it to the site you want to link to. So if I wanted to link that picture to my twitter account I would change the http://photobucket.com to http://twitter.com/katbrak and my code would now look like this:

(<)a href="http://twitter.com/katbrak" target="_blank">(<)img src="http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj57/mommacow39/twitter-1.png" border="0" alt="blog twitter">(<)/a>

10. When you have all the pictures/links you want on the widget, save it. Place it where you want it on your sidebar. Preview your blog and make sure it looks the way you want it to and then save it too.

That's it! You now have learned how to link Photobucket pictures to your sites. (By the way, you can click on any of the pictures in this post to visit me on my other sites...) Don't forget about the center code to make it look just the way you want it to...click here to learn how to do that if you missed it.

How to add links

If you've followed any of my blogs for any amount of time then you know that I love links. I link to other blogs, I link to websites I like, I link to stories I've read, I even put links in my comments sometimes.

Today I'd like to tell you two ways to improve your linky love.

The first is how to open your links in a new window. I always try to do this because I don't want people to lose my blog while they wander off to check out my links.

Say I want to link to my Happy At Home blog...

Go ahead, click it. I'll wait here...

Back? Yay! What I did was add a line to my HTML that makes that link open in a new window. After I highlighted the words "Happy At Home blog", I clicked the Link button up there on the top of this post. It looks like a world with a chain link over it. (I'm sure most of you know how to link things but I'm trying to write these tips as if you know NOTHING about this stuff...please ignore me if you already know what I'm talking about :D )

Then I went to the little tab that says Edit Html.

Where I added the link it looks like this:

Say I want to link to my (<)a href="http://katshappyathome.blogspot.com/">Happy At Home blog(<)/a>

*Remember that the red parenthesis are not a part of the code. I have to put them to show you the code.*

To make that link open in another page, I'm going to add the following code:

(there is a space here) target="_blank"

So now my code looks like this:

Say I want to link to my (<)a href="http://katshappyathome.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Happy At Home blog(<)/a>

Ta Da! Your link now opens in a new window and your original post is still open for people to go back to :)

The other linky love I wanted to show you today is how to put links into your comments. I'm sure you've seen people leave links in comments. Sometimes they leave links to their blogs so that you can find them. I like to use it to link back to a specific post, like if I gave you an award or something like that.

Here's my example comment:

Hi! I wanted to show off some of the new blogs I'm following. To see them click HERE.

Or you can visit me on any of my blogs. They are Happy At Home, This Crazy Adventure I Call Life, Blog Love and The Eat Food NOT Money Cookbook. Thanks!

Now I know that's a lot of links for one comment and I probably wouldn't put that many links in one comment BUT if I wanted to all I'd have to do is add the following code to each part I wanted links added to:

(<)a href="the URL I want to link to">The words I want linked(<)/a>

You notice I did NOT put the target="_blank" code. That's because most comment sections won't accept that HTML.

So the first line of my comment would look like this before it was published:

Hi! I wanted to show off some of the new blogs I'm following. To see them click (<)a href="http://katsbloglove.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-love.html">HERE(<)/a>

I suggest that when you add a link to a comment, you preview it before you publish it. Especially if you are commenting on a blog that uses comment moderation. That way you can make sure it looks right before it disappears. And don't forget to not include the red parenthesis!

That's about it for today :) Hopefully I'll see y'all tomorrow! Happy Friday everyone!