Prosperous Life and GoEasyDesign.com

New Location

curtjen — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 01:57:33 +0000

I finally decided to go get hosting for my blog. You can continue to learn at http://goeasydesign.com.

What is Meebo.com?

curtjen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:43:30 +0000

Have you ever been on a trip or away from home or office and the only computer you have access to is one that doesn’t have MSN messenger? Meebo.com is a free solution for you. At www.meebo.com you can log into your MSN messenger account, AIM account, Yahoo! messenger account, or your Google Talk account, and chat with your friends, family, or coworkers straight from the web browser. No downloading required. Meebo.com even has their own messenger that you can create an account for and sign in at this login page. There is even a way to embed a Meebo chat into your website or blog. The WordPress created blogs have this function as one of their widgets. For the free account, you can look it up by going to your Dashboard, then to your Presentation tab, then to Widgets. With WordPress sites that you have bought your own hosting for (like from Bluehost, or Hostmonster) you will need to download a plugin that would enable Sidebar Widgets. You can find a plugin at www.wordpress.org

Suggestions Welcome

curtjen — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 18:38:14 +0000

As you have seen, I have done different tutorials on how to use different builders such as Site Creator Plus, and WordPress. I’m always looking for suggestions. If you have an idea of something you would like covered or if you have additional questions, leave a comment with your suggestion.

Snipshot Cont.

curtjen — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:06:08 +0000

This week I played around more with resizing images with Snipshot. It was a lot of fun. I found it way easy to use, very user friendly, and straight forward on how to resize, crop, and enhance images. Here are some screen shots and a quick overview of how to resize, crop, and enhance the color of images.

1. Go to Snipshot.com and click on the button that says “Browse” underneath where it says “Open from your computer.”

2. A window will pop-up that you can use to navigate through your computer to the image that you are wanting to edit. Go ahead and choose the image you would like to resize, crop, or enhance the color of.

3. Now you can do any or all of the remaining steps:

a. Cropping: After clicking on the Crop button at the top of the screen, click and drag one of the red boxes to change the area you would like to crop. Press enter or double click to apply the crop.

b. Resizing: Similar to cropping, you can resize the image by clicking and dragging one of the little red boxes. Selecting the corners will keep the image to scale. Selecting the edges (top middle, bottom middle, left middle, and right middle) will skew the image (or scrunch it up).

c. Enhancing: I’m putting the rest of the options into this category. There are a lot of different things you can do with this. Clicking on “Enhance” will automatically alter your image for you, correcting the lighting, contrast, etc. Clicking on “Adjust” will give you options where you can change the size of the image (yes, you can resize it here too), tilt the image (this keeps the dimensions of the image but moves the contents of the image around. Just play around with it, you’ll understand), change the brightness (how light are dark the image as a whole is), change the contrast (how light the lights are and how dark the darks are), change the saturation (how concentrated the colors of the image are), change the hue (that’s the color), and change the sharpness (how blurry the image is).

4. When finished with your changes save your image. You can actually save in a variety of formats: to your computer (JPG, GIF, PDF, PSD, PNG, and TIF) or to the web (WebShots and Flickr). (I went over WebShots in a previous post).

(Note: I did all the cropping and resizing for images in this post with SnipShot)

Putting on a New Face

curtjen — Wed, 23 May 2007 00:14:40 +0000

A few months ago, for a college project, I was required to put a picture of my head in another picture and make it look realistic. This is what I came up with. Enjoy.

Before After

Check Out the New Content Available

curtjen — Sat, 19 May 2007 21:15:07 +0000

Along with this site I have been doing another blog where I have been posting different things that I have learned related to e-commerce, SEO, webdesign, and websites and builders. Feel free to browse through these post that I have imported from my other site. You can either browse a page at atime, or by category. And remember, if you ever want to give me a comment, suggestion, ask a question, or even just say hello, please leave a comment with a related post.

New Domain Name

curtjen — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:01:14 +0000

Well, I finally went out and bought a domain name for this site. You can now access my site by going to www.goeasydesign.com. The domain is forwarded right now. That’s why you still see the http://curtjen.wordpress.com in your address bar when you come here. I haven’t bought hosting, YET. Don’t worry I’ll let all of you know when I make major changes like that.

Snipshot: Image Resizer, Cropper, and More

curtjen — Tue, 15 May 2007 02:44:29 +0000

Snipshot is a good site you can go to if you want to resize or crop your images for use on the web. I was playing around with it today. What I was trying to figure out was if I could create an html code that refers to the image that I could use to insert into the html portion of an eBay post. Easy! You would be surprized to find how easy it really is. Go to www.snipshot.com and try it out.

Click on where it says “WebShots” under Snipshot features on the right hand side.
Upload an image (you can choose to keep it the same size by leaving it as “Do Not Resize” or you can change the image in the drop-down menu to a number of predefined sizes).
Then you will come to a screen where you can you get the link to the image in many different forms (as a thumbnail or original image: within these main categories for a Blog or Website, Forum or Message board, Email or Instant Messenger, or even the Direct Link to the Image).
You can now copy the appropriate code to the destination that you would like to use it. For example, it may be a good idea to use the “Blog or Website” code from the Original Image in an eBay listing. Just copy and paste that code into the html portion of your product listing.
It would be a good idea to bookmark this page. When finished you can choose to upload more images.

Example of the Thumbnail style link for Blogs and Webpages:

Paragraph Settings for WordPress: Change Color of Text, too

curtjen — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:02:27 +0000

Just found this out from another coworker. You can actually edit the paragraph settings in your post. Hold down Alt+Shift+V
and you will get additional buttons you can use to edit content in your posts. You can change the format of the post (Paragraph, Address, Preformatted, and Heading 1-6). You can change the color of your text. There’s a button you can use to paste from MS Word and from plain text. There’s even a button that you can use to clean-up messy code. There’s a button you can you use to insert special characters like the copyright©, arrows←, fractions ¼, and playing card symbols ♣♥♦, to name a few.

SEO in a Nutshell

curtjen — Tue, 08 May 2007 02:46:27 +0000

The best ways, really, to drive traffic to your site are: 1. Sell a product that there is a demand for and not a lot of competition. And 2. Use keywords and keyword phrases to optimize your site where search engines can find you. You can do this by: selecting good keywords that people are searching for; submitting to directories using good keywords; leave comments on blogs and other public sites; submit articles to article websites; and use your keywords in the text of your site (your text should be 20% keywords). All the while putting links to your site in these keywords. This will create backlinks to your site and will boost your search engine popularity. That is why keyword research is so important.