Catagories on Blogger...

I'm not sure if this is the best way to organize a blog, but for one like mine it works fine. I don't have that many catagories, and in all essences, this is a personal blog.

So, to create catagories:

Go to layout>on your layout of your blog go to 'add a gadget' wherever you want your catagories spot. I wanted mine on the top left to make it easy to see and select.

When you click on add a gadget, a window will pop up> select 'labels' gadget.

Enter a title. When I first did this I added a title for each catagory, and it was all messed up. This should be a very broad title encapsulating all the catagories, like: Find me here, Search my blog, or All my topics. something like that.

Select all labels, alphabetically, list, show number of posts per label. at least, this is what I chose based on my preferences. You can do what suits you.
And your done! Now, you won't see anything on your blog until you start labelling your posts, then it will pop right up and file everything for you, which is so great!

If you, like me, are formatting after you have already started blogging and haven't labelled any of your posts, it's easy to go back and label old posts so that they get filed in the right catagory. This is boring though, so save it for a rainy day or late night boredom!

Go to Posting>Edit posts>select the edit button on a specific post>add your label to the bottom of thepost (in the box)>click on publish post.

This will repost in its original spot, but now it will be filed in your catagories.

So Easy!

Building a Header

Yay! I (sort of) figured out how to do catagories on the blog! I'm not totally sure if its the best way to organize posts on the blog, but I'm going to go with it for now.

I wanted to explain how I did the header to my blog and add the links to the posts I used. I know its not perfect, but its so much better than it was!

I googled how to add a header to my blog and got this tutorial. You might want to bookmark that blog- lots of awesome info!

I started by opening a free account in Picnik.com and uploaded pictures directly from my computer. When I was searching around the nets, one blogger said your header should represent you and what your blog is about, so I kept that in mind when I was choosing pictures.

I pretty much followed the steps in the tutorial above, but I didn't add the text in Picnik. They have great fonts to choose from, but I liked the ones I had in Photoshop better.

Its important to know the width and height of your blog header like she says. I didn't pay attention to that part and ending up fiddling endlessly. I kept it really simple: four pictures, spaced closely and with gently rounded edges. I saved it to my computer in my "My Pictures" folder as a jpeg.

Then I opened it up in Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop, Gimp is a free online photo manipulation program that is really similar to Photoshop. Or you can add words in Picnik and keep it simple!
I googled how to add words to my pictures in Photoshop and got this tutorial. I made two lines of text, one with "Grit and Gumption" and the other with "discovering life in the dust and wind of Wyoming" .Then I saved the image to my computer in my "My Pictures" file as a jpeg.So! I opened up my blog dashboard, went to the design tab, clicked on the headers edit button, and a window opened up. I clicked 'add a picture from my computer, used 'browse' and opened up the jpeg of my header that I had saved in 'My Pictures'. I made sure I selected "instead of title and description" and then saved it. Bam! Done!

All these steps may seem complicated, but it is actually very very easy. And fun! Picnik is a great tool to make all sorts of fun things, and its free!