The One with the Friendly Reminder

http://www.etsy.com/shop/WhitfieldAwesome, y'all (because my goal for this year is to make more from Etsy than I pay in fees - a.k.a. the big time)

Cold turkey. That's what I went all over this blog (and my other blog). I didn't do that thing that bloggers do: write a post about how life is just so much that they need a break. I just didn't feel like writing. Didn't feel like illustrating. Didn't feel like sharing. So I didn't. 

Monday, as I waved my blow dryer about my head with one hand and readied a print of Mr. President Bill Clinton for shipment to Seattle with the other, I remembered: Oh yeah, I like being creative in ways that don't involve a scope of work or a security deposit or clients who fancy themselves designers. I like doing things I like to do and I haven't done them in months. 

So thanks, A., in Seattle, for the reminder. 

 The reminder that:

• I need to pay my Etsy bill. 
• I have a master plan. I want to write and illustrate humorous children's books. Hopefully this will lead to mild success and a demand for handmade character plushies. I'll hire wacky family members to produce said plushies and soon A&E will make reality television stars of us. After a good five season run, I'll have enough TV money to feel comfortable with the risk of opening a small food stand. I have the place picked out already. It's near the bike trail and downtown (convenient considering I'll become the type of concerned citizen who bandies about phrases like -downtown revitalization-). American dream.
• Maybe a few folks besides my mom and those two people who hate me actually look at my stuff once in a while. (Let's not pretend that public blogs are all about introspection and views don't matter...no two people do not groan when bloggers pretend things like that.)
• I really liked blogging. I want to do it again.

P.S. I accidentally typed "The One with the Friendly Reindeer" as the title of this post. What is on my mind?

HTML Basics for Bloggers #2: Let's Talk About Fonts, Baby

Visual editors are the bees knees. But there will come a time in your blogging life, if there has not already, that a line will appear out of nowhere or an image just won't align. It's like head lice at summer camp, there's no escaping it. Might as well learn a little bit about HTML. Each week in July, I'll be offering up a quickie lesson. Today, we're looking at fonts. 

Remember, tags go around text you wish to modify and almost always come in pairs, a beginning and an end: <tag>change this, yo</tag>. In the case of fonts, you use span tags and they look like this: <span style="color: #ff00ff; font-size: 16px;">The quick brown fox was, like, quick and brown.</span> You may add three elements to your <span> tag to change text: color, font-size and font-family.

Color: <span style="color: #ff00ff;"></span>See that crazy code? That's a hex color value. You may use the color value or color name. Google hex color values or html color names to find the code/name for more colors than you will ever need.

Font-size: <span style="font-size: 16px;"></span> I prefer to use pixels to set my font size. You can use other things like ems or xx-small through xx-large, but pixels are the standard for monitors (i.e. less likely to look wonky on some monitors).

Font-family: <span style="font-family: geneva;"></span> Be careful here. If a font is not installed on the viewers computer, the font will be substituted. It's best to stick to common fonts (or turn your text into an image if you wanna be fancy). You can also use a font stack <span style="font-family: geneva, arial, helvetica;"></span>. In this stack, if the viewer does not have geneva installed, arial will be used.

You can put all three elements together in one span tag! In your HTML editor, it would look like this: <span style="color: #ff00ff; font-size: 16px; font-family: geneva;">quick brown fox</span>. The span tag would make the text look like this in your visual editor: quick brown fox. 

Wanna change part of a sentence? You can! It will look something like this:
The quick brown fox was, <span style="color: #ff00ff; font-size: 16px;">like,</span> quick and brown.

Notice how the tags are put together in each example? Equal signs, quotation marks, semi-colons. These are required. <span style="color: #ff00ff; font-size: 16px; font-family: geneva;">don't forget to close it</span>.

Clear as mud? Start a new post. Open it in your HTML editor and play. Switch back and forth between HTMlL and visual to see how your code affects your post. You can always delete it without publishing. Don't be skerd. 

HTML Basics Sponsored by Whatever is Lovely & Noble. Stop by and say hi!

HTML Basics for Bloggers #1: Bees & Head Lice

I'm super late with this post. There will be two HTML posts this week to make up for the lack there of last week. Please forgive me.

Visual editors are the bees knees. But there will come a time in your blogging life, if there has not already, that a line will appear out of nowhere or an image just won't align. It's like head lice at summer camp, there's no escaping it. Might as well learn a little bit about HTML. Each week in July, I'll be offering up a quickie lesson. Today, we're looking at basic tags.

Tags go around text you wish to modify and almost always come in pairs, a beginning and an end: <tag>change this, yo</tag>. Give these a try...

• <strong>bold</strong>
• <em>italic</em>
• <u>underline</u>
• <s>strikethrough</s>
• ^{superscripts¹} 
• _{subscripts₁} 
• <p>paragraph</p> don't want it left aligned? try <p align="center"> or <p align="right">
• <blockquote>might wanna use this for quotes or whatev</blockquote>
• <br /> single line break
• <hr> horizontal line
• <h1>headline</h1> (h1-h6 available with 1 being largest and 6 being smallest)
• <a href=“http://url.com”>Link to a site on the innerwebs.</a> (<a href="http"//url.com" target="_blank" will open it in a new page!)
• <a href="mailto:emailaddress@provider.com">email link</a>

Here's a HTML/WYSIWYG splitscreen. (Click to view larger.)

In upcoming lessons, we'll look at images, lists, tables, changing fonts, troubleshooting and more! Any requests?

HTML Basics Sponsored by Whatever is Lovely & Noble. Stop by and say hi!

Touché Tuesday Advice Column: Blogging

Need some Whitfield Awesome advice (about anything)? Fill out this form.

[Warning: This is a fairly serious post. If all this seriousness gets to you, please take a Yoda break and come back later to finish up.]

Dear Jen,
Would you ever consider doing guest posts on other peoples blogs? If so, would you post with an assigned topic, or would you only write about a topic you came up with yourself.
All the Best,
Guest Blogger, Interwebs USA

Dear Guest,
I have been giving serious thought to jumping on the guest blogging bandwagon lately. I would absolutely consider guesting on other blogs and I think it would be a fun challenge to write about an assigned topic. 

I have also been thinking about asking others to guest on my blog. I lean towards creating a list of suggested topics for guest posters. For example, if I wrote a food blog and Lola, the avid sweat sock blogger, wanted to guest post, I'd ask Lola to write about a favorite recipe or a food review and a brief intro to her sweat sock blog rather than a full on sweat sock assault. Why? Because I expect certain things from the blogs I love. Sometimes, I find it a bit annoying when I read a favorite blog with a totally off the wall guest post. I don't want to do that to my readers.
♥Jen

Dear Jen,
Here's a serious one for you. I want to know your feelings about blogging while on vacation. Do you/would you do it? Would you schedule blogs to post while you are away so your readers don't go hungry? Or do you just wait until you're back from vacation and recap?

I like to schedule posts ahead of time, but don't always have time to catch up and get ahead blogging. It's a bummer, cause I don't want my readers to think I've just left them high and dry. Maybe I just need to sit down one day and plug away at 'back up posts' that I can store for use during these times. I did that when I first started blogging, and it seemed to work well.
Sincerely, Kacey

Dear Kacey,
While I am not completely opposed to vacation blogging, I am a fan of pre-scheduling posts. I think vacations are for relaxing, having fun and enjoying your family or friends (or enjoying being away from them - no judgement). I tend to rise and shine before my fellow vacationers and take a bit of time to myself. If I were to blog while away, this would be the time to do it.

I try and outline a general plan for posts on a monthly basis. I just get out a calendar and make notes on it (use post its so you can move them around). I usually don't write the posts until the day before/day of. If I know that I will be really busy or out-of-town, I will write the posts the weekend before. And of course there is wiggle room to add posts when interesting things pop up.

When I first started blogging, I read (on a very successful blog) that you should never apologize to your readers. I disagree. If there comes a time that you feel that you have left your readers high and dry, own up to it. And wow them with a great post. They realize that you don't sit behind a keyboard twenty-four hours a day. They'll forgive you. And owning up to it shows that you are still human. 

I really like your idea of back-up posts! I think I'll add that to my blogging goals. 
♥ Jen

Bloggers, what are your thoughts on guest posting and vacation blogging?