NaBloPoMo Badges – April 2008

Although I am not on the blogroll for April (the theme is “Letters”), I have made some badges for the month anyway!

Download away!

Note:
Feel free to use them on your blog but please download and save them to your server first (do not hotlink from this website). If you’ve used these badges, do link back to NaBloPoMo website, I’m sure Eden will appreciate it. See instructions and other badges at the NaBloPoMo site.

You don’t have to link back to me (although I’d greatly appreciate it ♥) but I’d love to see these being used on your blog, so drop me a comment if you do, and I’ll pay your site a visit. :)

Tutorials
Adding Badges using Blogger
Adding Badges using WordPress

Tutorial: Colourful Dotted Lines in Photoshop

Previously, we learnt how to customise a brush to create dotted lines in Adobe Photoshop. Today I’ll show you a how to customise your brush further to create multi-coloured dotted lines.

Create a dotted brush or select a dotted brush you’ve saved earlier from the Tool Preset.
On your Brush Palette, check the Color Dynamics box (Giant Cursor 1).
Then set the Foreground/Background Jitter to 100% (Giant Cursor 2).
Lower values will result in the foreground colour being used more than the background colour.

Use the color picker to select two contrasting colors.

Try placing letters over bigger brushes for a different look.
The dots work nicely for name labels and scrapbooking.
Here are examples using names from my Favourite Names List.

Tutorial: Creating Dotted Lines Using Photoshop

In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to customize a brush in Adobe® Photoshop® to create dotted lines.

There are a total of 8 images (about 150kb), not including the masthead, in this tutorial.

Step 1

Select the Brush tool from your tools palette, alternatively, just type “B” on your keyboard.
If the tools palette is not visible, go to the menubar and click Window > Tools.

[Read more....]

Tutorial: Adding Badges Using WordPress

If you use WordPress for blogging, this tutorial will guide you in adding a badge (or any image in general) for NaBloPoMo to your sidebar.

Q. How do you add an image to the sidebar in WordPress?
A. By adding a Text widget. (I know, how counter-intuitive!)

Before that
Have you uploaded the image to your server? If you haven’t, please follow this tutorial.

Step 1
Go to “Presentation” > “Widgets” page.
Find the “Text Widgets” widgets section (somewhere near the bottom of the page).

Q. How many text widgets would you like?
If you have “1″ by default, you will need another one to add your image, so select “2″. If you already have 2 Text Widgets in your Sidebar, select “3″ and so on.

Click the “Save” button.

Step 2
Locate your “Text 2″ widget in the “Available Widgets” section (typically at the middle of the page, below the “Sidebar” section).

Please note the number will correspond to what you’ve selected in the previous step, i.e. if you’ve selected 3 Text Widgets in Step 1, then find a “Text 3″ widget in this step. For simplicity, I’ll just refer to it as “Text 2″ from now on.

Step 3
Drag the “Text 2″ widget from the “Available Widgets” section to the “Sidebar” section(you may have more than 1 Sidebar so be sure to drag to the correct one).

Move it to the desired location within the Sidebar (top, middle, bottom) by dragging it.

Step 4
Click on the blue list icon on the right of your text widget to bring up the text options box.

Step 5
A Text options box will appear in the middle of the screen.

The single-line field at the top is where you add a title for this widget, e.g. “My Badges”. This is optional.

Assuming you’ve uploaded the image to your own server, add the code to the text field as follows, replacing YOURIMAGESOURCE with the actual URL of your image on your server. Your image URL may look something like this:

http://www.yoururl.com/images/YOURIMAGE.gif

In which case your full code, with a link to NaBloPoMo page will look like this:

"http://www.yoururl.com/images/YOURIMAGE.gif"/>

Click “Save”. If you’ve done all the steps correctly, you will now have the badge on your sidebar.

Did you know?
You can download a variety of NaBloPoMo badges or buttons from this page?
Go do it now, because they are the cutest on the web, even if I do shamelessly claim so myself.

Tutorial: Uploading Images Using WordPress

If you plan to put a badge to your sidebar, you may need to follow through these steps first to get your image URL.

Step 1
Go to a Write Page or Write Post page.
Locate the “Upload” section below.
Select the saved image from your computer, give it a title and description if you want, and click the “Upload” button.

Step 2
(Usually, if you want to use the image you’ve just uploaded in a post that you’re writing, you’d click “Send to Editor”. In this tutorial, I’m showing you how to get the image URL so that you can use it on your sidebar)

Go to the “Browse” mode, click on “Edit”.
Alternatively click “Browse All”, select the image you want to use, and then click on “Edit”.

Step 3
Copy your image URL from the URL field. Paste it in a Notepad program so that you can use it later.

Now you can proceed to use this image in your sidebar by following this tutorial.
Remember you can download a badge from this page.

Tutorial: Adding Badges to the Sidebar Using WordPress

If you use WordPress for blogging, this tutorial will show you how to add a badge (or any image in general) for NaBloPoMo to your sidebar.

Q. How do you add an image to the sidebar in WordPress?
A. By adding a Text widget. (I know, how counter-intuitive!)

Read the full tutorial here.

More
NaBloPoMo March 2008 badges
Adding badges using Blogger
Uploading images using WordPress