How to Change the Graphic in Your WordPress Header

Another often asked question. How do I change the logo on my WordPress Blog?

You’ve got the theme you want to use, but want to customize it a little with your own logo/graphic.

  • Have your graphic ready, the desired size, as a png, gif, or jpg (others formats may work, but those are the ones I use). My graphic program of choice is Gimp. You can save it as logo.png or whatever you want to name it. Remember the name.
  • Upload your graphic to your host. Sounds simple and it is if you know how. First time I tried to upload anything to my first webhost, it was like visiting a foreign country, not knowing where to go, not even knowing enough to know how to ask for directions. Put this where? And it shows up where?
    Look for something called a file manager (or if you know how to ftp to your host, simply use that). Your file manager consists of files and folders.
    Find the folder which contains your wordpress blog. Then the wp-content folder. Inside this folder you will find other folders and files, look for the theme folder and open it. Here you’ll find the various themes for your blog. If you want to try a new theme, upload it to this theme folder. Open the folder which is your current theme and find the images folder. Upload your new logo image into this folder.
  • Edit your css so your new image will display on your blog. Not all wordpress themes are identical, you need to change the code so the logo/image in your old header image will be replaced with the new one. In your blog’s admin panel go to Presentation, then theme editor. Look for stylesheet, may say something like editing style.css above the code. Search for your header’s background image. In the header section of your stylesheet look for:

    background:url(images/logo.gif) no-repeat
    with images/logo.gif being your old image. switch to
    background:url(images/newlogo.png) no-repeat
    with newlogo.png being whatever name and file format you saved it as.

    Click Update file.

    Of course if you saved it with the same name and format and the original graphic you can just overwrite the image on your host and not need to change the style.css code.

  • View blog, if needed ht f5 to refresh your page.
  • Celebrate your new found freedom in changing your blog.

Some themes have a built in editor for your header.

Related Links:
New Gimp 2.4 released
How to Make a Custom WordPress Header
My Favorite Graphic Programs

A Little More . . . for Christmas

White Daffodill Globe Ornament

Not one more gift to buy, or one more dish to bake, one more party to plan. The season to be overwhelmed. Reading Bonita’s Whatever Happened to Christmas reminded me of a quote I discovered a couple years back. I need to put it on a note card on my fridge or some place at the beginning of the season as a reminder. Christmas should be an attitude, a state of mind, not a never ending to do list.

I’m very thankful to my family and friends, online and off. For the support, encouragement, inspiration, things I’ve learned from each of you. Merry Christmas!

“What a glorious and wonderful season of year this is.
Our hearts change.
Our attitudes change.
Our way of thinking changes.
There is a little more forgiveness in us.
A little more of kindness.
A little more of love.
A little more of understanding at the Christmas season of the year.”
Gordon B. Hinckley

Santa Came Early

First there was the Tennessee Santa, who sent me this nice gift bag full of organic herbs from Sage Hill Farms. Thank you Bea! Did I wait for Christmas? Well . . . the bag is under the tree, but every once and a while I takes some of the herbs out and use. Thank you Bea!

Yesterday was like Christmas come early, if this keeps up I’ll have to double my morning walk, burn more calories. I’d spent all morning at the hospital with my hubby (having minor surgery) but when I got back home; there were not one, but two packages on my doorstep. First one I recognized, smoked salmon from a relative in Alaska.

I was surprised to see a big square box full of Italian goodies baked by Gloria Mount of My Little Taste of Italy. A gift from Ora Stearns Smith, Divinely Framed.

One of our family traditions is to decorate our tree together, then read a Christmas story while sipping hot cider or hot chocolate. I don’t stress about getting the tree up. We get to it when we get to it, but Christmas was only a week away so we had gone out the night before and picked out a tree. Last night we decorated and the kids thought Gloria’s biscotti was perfect dunking material.

My son introduced me to a new line of chocolates John and Kira’s. One of my favorites is their Pistachio, flavored with honey and cinnamon.

Why Does the Spacing in My Blog Post Look Weird?

This is one question I’m asked a lot. If you compose a nicely formated post in word or some other program, copy and paste into your blog, you may get some strange consequences. Sometimes the spacing isn’t right. Other times, the font doesn’t match rest of your blog. Not as pretty as you expected. Yuck, What happened? My blog is possessed!

Many times I’ve typed a post, hit the wrong button, my cat walked over my keyboard. (Don’t you dare hack up another hairball on my keyboard again!!!) Or maybe on of the kids handed me something while I was typing. So sad to see those words disappear. Not as much fun to re-type as it was to create in the first place. No undo button in the blog. 🙁

Makes sense to compose your posts in your word processor. It is a little more forgiving.

Most blogs styles are set up with css. CSS is very cool. It tells your website what colors, fonts, etc. to use. Imagine changing just the color of your website which has grown to 100+ pages. Do you really want to go to each page and change the html code on each? Not me. Enter CSS. Change the style sheet and all your pages change at once. Pretty cool!

Now here is the thing. Those word programs format contains all kinds of code telling what font to use, size, color etc. When your copy from that program, all the formatting comes with it. You paste it into your blog and the formatting code gets added in, and often the results aren’t what you were wanting.

If you really want to see how ugly it looks, I will give you an example from Blogger:

< em >< span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);" >There are few things more basic (or tastier) than freshly cooked, light and fluffy rice.< /span>< /em>< /strong>

When all you needed was the words:

There are few things more basic (or tastier) than freshly cooked, light and fluffy rice.

Go to your edit post page, and click on the edit html code button and you’ll see what I mean. All kinds of extra stuff thrown in.

Solution

When you copy from your word processing program, see if there is a way to copy without formatting. I know Firefox has such an option, maybe some word processor does too.

Or simply copy your words into notebook, it dumps the formating, then copy and past into your blog. And you’ll have the added benefit of uniform posts. Of course if you want to get wacky and change something you can always insert a little html code into your posts.

Mailing Out Cards from the Hospital

Tuesday morning I was with my husband at the hospital. He had surgery, which went well, and we were able to go home soon after.

I love that our hospitals here have public wireless internet, so rest assured my laptop is with me. Especially helpful when my husband had back surgery in Little Rock. While waiting to check out, I saw that my nephew had a birthday coming up and was picking out a basketball related card when the nurse came in. While husband made a trip to the bathroom, I invited her over to take a peek. She thought it was so cool that I was mailing real cards from my laptop. I gave her a mail out cards service’s url so she could check it out herself when off work. (Note to self, get her name and number next time, works better, I just forgot).

So cool that hospitals have free internet. I hate leaving anyone alone in a hospital room, and sitting in a room watching someone sleep gets to me quickly. But add an laptop and internet, I find plenty to do, which I can put down when ever I’m needed at the bedside.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr Traffic Woes

Traffic has been bad, lots of road construction going on in hopes that once finished we’ll have less traffic jams near the major shopping area. Add Christmas shopping, (glad I do much of mine online) rush hour traffic, and I do all I can to avoid that area of town.

I knew something was wrong when I pull out of my subdivision and see a long line of semi’s on our little side road, as far as the eye could see. My 5-10 minute drive to pick up kids from swim practice became 50 minutes, return trip 70 minutes. Accident on the interstate had shut both inbound lanes down just before rush hour.

Annoyed with the traffic, knowing we’ll have to rush supper running late, errands I wanted to run no longer possible. Grrrr, who was the stupid person who shut down the interstate!

Then I saw the accident.

Sobering sight. One car was crumpled up like a wad of tinfoil. Hearse parked beside it. Firetrucks, ambulances, police cards, 18 wheeler, truck and a van. Tow trucks.

Someone lost a life And here I am griping because I’m stuck in traffic and can’t run all the errands I wanted. Yes it is a pain, but nothing like the pain of those involved in the accident. I can run my errands tomorrow. I know it’ll take a while, I roll down the window and talk to the other dirvers. Eventually we’ll all get were we are going.

Everyone just chill, no need to lean on your horns. A moment of silence for lost life.

Mail Your Holiday Cards Today

This is for those who wait until the last minute, pushing it to the wire. If you want you holiday cards delivered before Christmas, put them in the mail today.

According to the US Post Office’s guidelines posted on their website, First Class Mail needs to mailed by Dec. 20. Maybe for across town, but if you mail across the country, I’d give it a few extra days.

One reason many delay getting their cards out is that it is time consuming, and Christmas is such a busy time of year. We all look forward to getting greeting cards in the mail, but who wants to sign a 100+ cards? If you want an easy way to get personalized cards out in the mail test drive SendOutCards’ greeting card system.

Angela Betts – Quickbooks ProAdvisor

I’ve done taxes, but I’m not a bookkeeper. Yes some accountants do taxes and some tax experts do bookkeeping, but they are not the same. What you don’t want to do is take those shoe boxes full of receipts and drop them on you tax advisor’s desk on April 14th.

Consider this, 2 brothers with similar businesses. One had QuickBooks and filled in his expenses, sales, all his business info. Tax time came around and he had QuickBooks put his tax info onto a CD and took it to his tax guy, no stress. His brother kept receipts in several boxes. Tax time came and he took the boxes to the same tax guy. First guy had a very quick turn around, and the second guy had to stick around and answer a bunch of questions about those receipts. Several days longer before his taxes were ready. When they compared their fees to their tax preparer, the second brother paid several times as much in fees for similar businesses. Or the business owner who had QuickBooks and a tax program, but wasn’t sure how to use either, tax time came and on April 13, she was calling for help.

If they hired a Certified Quickbooks ProAdvisor, such as Angela Betts, to handle all that paperwork, think how much less stress and more time they’d have.

Now if you want to flash back to the 70’s, just visit Angela Betts’ Baby Boomer News, Reviews and Observations. Don’t forget to turn up your speakers, scroll on down to the bottom and you’ll find the jukebox. But I didn’t see the Happy Birthday song. 🙁

Happy birthday Angela!

Happy Birthday Angela!

Christmas Memories

Penguin ornament One of my favorite childhood memories is when we were living in Pennsylvania. Lots of snow. Not once did we miss school due to snow, but once we got stuck at the school for a few hours until the blizzard calmed down. My dad even made us an igloo in the backyard. I have many fond memories of the place. From the retired train engineer by the bus stop who’d start up his old coal burning stove in his shed each morning so we’d stay warm waiting for the bus, camping during the summer, and esp tobogganing down the hills across the street.

One of my favorite friends of our family was a man who was blind, and tuned pianos for a living. Sometimes, we’d give him a ride and he’d tell us when to turn to get where we needed to go. Every Christmas he’d put up a tree. He’d provide refreshments and invite all the neighbor children to come by and help decorate. I was always impressed with how it was important to him to celebrate Christmas and provide joy for others at the same time.

Christmas morning we were busily opening our presents, and something seemed a little different. It seemed like our gifts were a little slim that year. I don’t remember what they were, probably stuff like clothes, no toys or such. Santa seemed to have not added his gifts to the pile.

I remembered that in the basement we had an extra fireplace and chimney. Perhaps Santa had visited the basement. I don’t think you’d ever seen us kids run down those steps so fast. And what to our wondering eyes should appear, but more presents!

I’d helped make several of our family traditions. One year I put together a play and had my younger sisters and brother help perform. We had plays for the next several years and I’d put them together. Then I learned to make pinatas by covering a balloon in paper mache, filling it full of candy. We did that many years in a row.

Not long after we moved to Louisiana, my dad was building a family room with a fireplace. Yeah! Santa would have a chimney to come down. Christmas time and my cat was missing. Then we heard the strangest sound and our cat came down the chimney all covered in soot.

As I think back the details blur, but I’ll always remember the feelings. The fun, we had, joy we shared as a family.

Distances separate my brothers and sisters. We can pick up the phone and call each other, email, send a card, instant messenger. So many tools that make it easy to stay in touch. Yet do we use them? Or do we say let me catch up on one more thing. I can call, write a note, send an email tomorrow, or the next day, or the next?