Tutorial Tuesday - Adding a photo to your blogger sidebar

Following my post about my Flower Bangle Challenge I was asked by a few people how you add a button to your blog - so here's a quick tutorial!

A blog button is simply a picture that has a hyperlink to a website - in this example I'm using the picture I edited for the Flower Bangle Challenge and I'm linking it to the post I wrote about the challenge. The tutorial assumes that you have saved the picture to your own computer - simply right-click on the picture and choose "Save picture as". It is always best to save a picture to your own computer as otherwise you are using someone else's bandwidth, which isn't very polite!

1. Open up your Blogger dashboard and choose "Layout" from the drop down list for your blog.

 2. This will take you to the Layout page. Click on Add a Gadget.

 3. Scroll down the list and choose the picture option by clicking on the plus sign.

 4. A small window will open up with options for you to fill in. Click on "Browse" to go and search for the picture you want to use.

5. Once you have chosen and opened up the photo you will see a preview of it. At this point copy and paste in the link you want the picture to go to when people to click on it. The link to the blog challenge post is http://daisychaindesignsjewellery.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/new-designs-celebration-and-new-design.html. You can also add a title and a caption if you wish. I added text to the picture, but if I hadn't I would have put the blog hop details in a caption.  Save the information you've entered.

6.  The small window will clsoe down. Click and drag the picture to where you want it to be, and then save the arrangement. You can drag the button to the top of the page as well.

7. And there you have it - one lovely button! Blogger has tonnes of different gadgets that you can add to your blog, and for most of them it's simply a case of clicking on the one you want and filling in the boxes!

Thank you so much for all the entries to the Flower Bangle Challenge! Entries to the draw close at midnight BST tonight so you've still got time to get your name in the hat! Click here for details.

Goodbye Picnik - Hello PicMonkey!

I've had a few emails and comments over the weekend asking which programme I was using to edit my photos. Like many bloggers I was rather sad panicked when Picnik said they were closing down. Ever since Rebecca told me about them I'd been using Picnik to help me easily create the collages that I've used to show of my new designs - nice rounded corners, great colour effects, easy cropping and great frames for the photos, and I loved the fact that I could drag and drop photos I'd uploaded into the collage templates. What on earth was I going to do without them? Oh, I knew that there were software packages out there that would do much the same job for me, but I also knew that they would take more than just a few clicks of buttons and dragging the cursor around the screen - and I knew that I didn't have the time, or to honest the inclination, to learn how to use them. So I was very relieved when I read about PicMonkey in the emails the Picnik team sent out! It's been developed by the some of the old Picnik team, and would you believe it, PicMonkey is even better than Picnik was!

This is the front screen that greets you when you reach the website. At the moment there's no need to register and no fee, although I suppose they may eventually end up with a small fee for premier effects like Picnik did. See the picture in the top left? All you need to do to get started is to open up a window with your picture files, choose the one you want to edit and drag it across. No more waiting for files to upload!

Once you've done that, the editing page opens up - and it is so easy to use. The clicking on the symbols on the left of the screen shows you different menus of effects. Basic edits allow you to crop, resize and do things like change the exposure.  

Other menus add frames, overlays (you can upload your own - perfect for adding a logo to your pictures for example), and textures. I've been having fun adding text to some of my photos - it's so quick to colour, tilt and resize, and there are some great fonts to choose from. I can see this being very useful for adding labels to the photos I do for my tutorials.

And this is what I ended up with - if I hadn't kept stopping to take screenshots to show you it probably would have only taken me a couple of minutes at most. The only thing that PicMonkey doesn't have at the moment is a collage tool, but that is apparently coming soon. I'm not panicking anymore!