Creating a Header using Windows Live Photo Gallery

If your blogs theme allows you to use your own header, its nice to be able to use one of your favourite Vistas or scenes so that you can really make your blog really personal to you. Whether you use WordPress or Blogger, here’s how to make a fantastic header using the panoramic feature available in Windows Live Photo Gallery. You don’t need an expensive camera either, so here’s the step by step way to make that favourite scene or spot feature as a header on your blog.

1. Download Windows Live Photo Gallery from  http://explore.live.com/windows-live-photo-gallery?os=other and install on your computer.

2. Now you need to go and take your pictures of your favourite vista or view. You will need to take your shots of the scene from either left or right, and slowly swing your camera horizontally along the entire scene from one side to the other taking your individual shots. Try to keep the camera on the same plane as you pan either left or right. Each shot should overlap each other so that Photo Gallery can ‘stitch’ them all together. See the separate shots below and how they overlap one another as I took them.

3. Next we need to make our Panorama inside Photo Gallery, so select all three (or however many shots you took of your chosen vista) and then click on the Create tab from the ribbon in Photo Gallery.

4. From the Create ribbon, choose the Panorama icon and Photo Gallery will then begin to ‘stitch’ the individual photo together into a panoramic shot.  Once completed it will ask you to give the panorama a name and then you can click on Save.

5. It’s highly likely that your newly created panoramic shot will need cropping, so click on the Crop icon in the ribbon and then crop out all of the black excess from the panoramic shot. When you are certain that all of the black has been cropped out, click on Crop once more to tidy up your shot.

6. Now that our panoramic shot is complete, we can use it on WordPress or Blogger as our header. I’ll deal with WordPress first. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and click on Appearance and then Header from the left hand Menu list.

7. Next you will need to upload your panoramic photo so click on Choose File and then navigate to your panoramic shot and select it, then click on Upload. As it will probably be a large file it may take some time to upload.

8. Once uploaded, you may have to do some more cropping of the panoramic shot depending on the width of the header that your theme uses, then once you are happy with your final crop, click on Crop and Publish.

9. Now go to your blog by clicking on Visit your Site and admire  your new personal header!

10. Now let’s use our panoramic shot as a header on Blogger. Go to your Blogger Dashboard and select Design, then click on Edit in your current Header.

11. Next, from the window that opened click on From your computer and then Choose File.  If you want your blog Title to still be shown, then also select Behind Title and Description from the list. It’s also a good idea to tick Shrink to Fit so that the header fits into your chosen theme.

12. Once your new header has uploaded click on Save. Now you can go and view your newly created header on your blog!

TG

My 2010 year in blogging

Courtesy of the WordPress Team!

Happy New Year from WordPress.com! To kick off the year, we’d like to share with you data on how your blog has been doing. Here’s a high level summary of your overall blog health:

Wow

Blog-Health-o-Meter™

We think you did great!

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 24,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 5 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, you wrote 76 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 90 posts.

Your busiest day of the year was September 16th with 896 views. The most popular post that day was Problems with your Hotmail upgrade?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were digitalspy.co.uk, en.blog.wordpress.com, avforums.com, mail.live.com, and windowslive.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for technogran, hate ribbon interface windows 7, gufsdtr500hd review, scotland windows 7 theme, and hotmail problems august 2010.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010. You can see all of the year’s most-viewed posts and pages in your Site Stats.

1

Problems with your Hotmail upgrade? August 2010
19 comments

2

Grundig GUFSDTR500HD Freesat DTR review. January 2010
21 comments

3

Moving your Photo Albums over from Windows Live To WordPress. September 2010
39 comments and 9 Likes on WordPress.com

4

Windows Live Essentials 2011. Live Photo Gallery. November 2010
101 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

5

Who Am I?
23 comments

Share these stats with your visitors

Want to share this summary with your readers? Just click the button below, or paste this link into your browser: http://technograns.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?yib=2010

Post this summary to my blog

See you in 2011!

If you liked what you saw in this summary and want to know more about how your blog is doing, you can always visit your Site Stats, where our helper-monkeys are working day and night to provide you with pages and pages of detail on how your blog is doing.

If you have any feedback on this email, please click here for a very short survey (in English). We would love to hear from you.

Thanks for flying with WordPress.com in 2010.
We look forward to serving you again in 2011! Happy New Year!

Andy, Joen, Martin, Zé, and Automattic

TG  Wishing all my readers a very Happy and Prosperous New Year and don’t forget! Keep Blogging!

Adding a Slideshow of your photos to a blog post in WordPress.

As I have previously published a post on the subject of displaying a slideshow or Gallery of your pictures inside a blog post, may I first of all take the opportunity to point readers to my this post at http://technograns.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/beginning-blogging-11-slideshows-and-galleries/#more-1092 where you will find detailed step by step instructions on how to do both. However, as many bloggers who have been using Windows Live Spaces as their blogging platform tend to make use of Windows Live writer to compose their blog posts, I thought it might be also helpful to show you all how to  incorporate both a slideshow  and Gallery into a post composed with Writer rather than the WordPress online editor.

The new official tweet button added to WordPress.com

It was only yesterday that Twitter announced the launch of their official Tweet button and so sooner hd they done so than WordPress.com followed with an announcement that the new tweet  button was now included as an option for all blogs on WordPress.com. So for all of you who have a blog on WordPress, here is an how-to enable the official Tweet button to all of your posts.

Go to your blogs Dashboard and from the Appearance list in your sidebar, click on Extras.

Beginning Blogging. Tips and Tricks.

This will be my very last post in this Beginning Blogging series for anyone new to blogging. I do hope you have all found my posts on Blogger and WordPress.com to be helpful. Which blogging platform you choose is of course entirely up to you and where you feel that your blog fits in. To end, here are some tips and tricks to try and help all of you newbie bloggers out there achieve a long lasting readership of your blog.

Beginning Blogging 12. Social Blogging.

I think that one of the most enjoyable sides to Blogging, unless you happen to keep your blog private of course, is the socialising side of it. I have found that when compared to forming online friendships via other social network methods such as Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, blogging is the only way that you can feel confident that you know the person concerned and can decide whether you feel comfortable in forming an online friendship with them. Because of the more detailed information contained inside their blog posts, its easier to feel as if you actually know that person even if they live at the other side of the world from you and you will probably never meet each other in person. It would be very difficult to do this from the limited insight you can gain from a short sentence or a 140 letter comment!  So how do you find other peoples blog posts to read them and then form any online friendships on Blogger or WordPress?

Beginning Blogging 11. Slideshow’s and Galleries.

If you have a photo portfolio type blog, or if you simply want to include some photos for the readers of your blog perhaps to illustrate its contents, then its a good idea to familiarise yourself with using the Gallery and Slideshow features which are available to you on WordPress.com. These two features become available once you have uploaded some photos or pictures to your Media Library on WordPress. Let’s take a look shall we?

Beginning Blogging 10. Menu’s Pages and Tabs, oh my!

Most themes on WordPress allow you to add a Custom Menu to your blog page, where you can provide ‘click through’ tabs for your readers to access other areas. These can be either pages, such as About Me, or alternatively other blogs or websites. So let’s set up our Custom Menu. We’ll begin by creating a page about ourselves, and we’ll include a sort of résumé and a photo so that our viewers can find out more about the author of this blog.

Beginning Blogging 9. Keeping up Appearances.

Next let’s work through choosing another Theme for your blog, giving it a header of your choice and also choosing a new background. Some of the newer themes allow you to add a new header and background to them. So let’s choose one shall we? From your WordPress dashboard, click on Appearance from the left hand sidebar. You will be presented with all the themes that are currently available on WordPress. We need to narrow our search for a new theme down to background and header customisation.

Beginning Blogging 8. the WordPress Dashboard.

Just as with the Blogger Dashboard, the WordPress Dashboard is where you have total control over all the settings for your blog. At first glance it can appear quite daunting to a newbie because their appears to be a lot going on on the one page, but just take your time to familiarise yourself with the layout (which can be altered by the way) Because these posts are for anyone new to blogging, I intend to only concentrate on those areas that someone new needs to familiarise themselves with, so let’s take a look shall we?