We Scour the Web, so You Don't Have To!
B&P reader Anthony (A L N) and his family were traveling from Kenai Alaska back to Idaho on Thursday and stopped in for a quick visit with our own Bella who lives in British Columbia. Both look very dapper in their B&P shirts. (dapper? I haven’t used that word in decades)
Bella and Anthony. (Bella is on the left)
I just wanted to cover a couple of things about the changes here at B&P in the last couple of days.
Images in comments
This seems to be working well except people are not adhering to the 100K size request. These large pictures are going to eat up my band width and cause me problems. You can’t just take a picture from your camera and upload it. Right-click on your photo and look at it’s properties. If it’s size is larger than 100KB then it’s too large. You need to resize the picture to make it smaller.
There are many graphic programs that will do this and you probably have one on your computer. If not there are many online options you can use.
Many downloadable programs can be found here. I happen to think Picasa, a free program from Google, is a great graphics organizational program that will also resize photos (although it’s not as intuitive as it could be).
I use Snagit, but it’s not free. It is a GREAT screen capture utility that is very easy to use. It allows you to capture anything on screen, resize it, edit it, add text and different effects (like the image above). I’ve tried other capture software in the past but Snagit is the one I like best. It costs $49.95, but if you do much with graphics it’s a good value. They also have a free trial so you can try it out.
A couple people have asked about the plugin is that does this. Apparently it’s brand new. It’s called Comment Image and it’s a free WordPress plugin. It does exactly what you’d expect. I hope future releases will allow the user (me) to select the maximum size of photos uploaded. You can make a donation to it’s author if you like it, which I plan to do.
PLEASE resize your images before you post them into a comment.
Twitter
I have been trying to get a plugin to work that will allow B&P posts to automatically upload into my Twitter page. The first plugin didn’t work at all for me. The second one I tried last night appears to be working, but all it does is say there is a new post. It doesn’t even give the title of the post. I’m hoping to find something that will do more than that. So, if you have any suggestions, I’m open to them.
A couple people suggested I try Facebook instead of Twitter. I don’t know much about either one to make an intelligent decision. In all honesty, I’m not even sure why I want to try to merge into one of these services in the first place.
I signed up on twitter.
I’m trying to have all the posts automatically sent to the twitter account.
My twitter username is 1bitsandpieces
Follow Bits & Pieces on twitter
Update: We may not be all a twitter. After activating the plugin I couldn’t access B&P. So I deactivated the plugin. I’ll try it again later and see if it’s still a problem. I want to be able to automatically send the B&P posts to twitter. I might have to look for a different plugin.
I’ve added a plugin that will allow readers to add a picture to their comments. At the bottom of the comment window is a Browse button. Click on it to locate the picture you want to send. Type your comment and press the Submit Comment button. It will display a thumbnail picture of your image with your comment. Click that thumbnail image to see the picture.
Here are some guidelines:
Let’s see how this goes for a trial period. If it gets out of hand I’ll stop it.
I’ve added a picture to the first comment so you can see how they look.
The incomparable Miss Cellania is celebrating the 4th blogiversary of her site MissCellania.com.
She also writes for sites like Neatorama, YesButNoButYes, Mental Floss and Geeks Are Sexy. And she gets paid to do that. (What am I doing wrong?)
She was also featured on ABC TV News.
If it weren’t for her site and ones like it, B&P might not be here. She just passed the 2 million hit mark also.
She’s one of my favorites. Congratulations Miss Cellania!
Mike F writes that Grog’s history lesson got him to thinking about having B&P readers come up with some plausible stories.
Here is Mike’s story on how Bits & Pieces came to be:
When Jon Cohen was a young man he met a fellow soldier, Bob, who had been stationed in Australia so he decided to take a visit there once he retired from the military to see his old friend. They had been kicking around the idea of starting up a website for fun stuff but his friend’s wife was opposed to it. The woman, whose name is Mali, thought owning a website would be paramount to inviting all sorts of hacker attacks and identity theft and millions of spam mail a day!
Jon and his friend had wanted users of the site to send in their favorite photos of hot women they knew, or saw on the net, and the original name of the site was going to be “Pieces of Ate”. Well, again Mali thought that was a bad idea, and the two men were at wit’s end to find some way to get a website going and at the same time get Bob’s wife onboard with the project.
As it turns out, they found a computer expert to assure Mali it was safe to operate a website. They tested the site and she used her phobia to create the first user account, which was Bitscared, because she was more than a bit scared of what might happen if they opened up the site. Her fears of hacker attacks were proved unfounded but she was adamant about the name, “Pieces of Ate” was not going to be used. Finally, Bob and Jon decided to incorporate Mali’s name into the name, and “Bits and Pieces” was born.
And that my friends is not how Bits & Pieces began.
Can you guys do any better?
As talked about I’ve created a new website. It’s Bits of Wisdom. and it’s located at http://BitsOfWisdom.org
It doesn’t have too many posts on it but it’ll grow. I’m sure I won’t post as many things to it every day, but I hope to add something almost every day.
The stuff you’ll find on Bits of Wisdom will be things that one might gain some knowledge from or learn a coping skill or just a clever quote that makes a difference to someone. There will be a little humor too, but nothing too risque. I’d like for it to be more family friendly.
I’m hoping the loyal readers of B&P will contribute stories, quoted or advice to the site.
It still needs quite a bit of work before I’ll feel it’s suitable. I’ve created a few header logos that will appear randomly when the page loads. I really don’t have a particular style in mind for the header, so if anyone wants to create one to add to the mix, I’d appreciate it. the size is 150 pixels by 1440 pixels. The content needs to be centered in that space and not go wall to wall.
Also, I’m not sure that the tagline will stay what it is now, but maybe.
Anyway, wander on over to Bits of Wisdom and take a look. I’m open to suggestions from you guys. Send any ideas to [email protected]
Thanks for always being there!
