Category Archives: Blogger

Blogger Blogs and Google Products.

I just don’t know what’s going on with Google lately. More and more I’m moving away from their products. I find G-mail slow and clunky. Drive is useful but somehow I have issues downloading files on there from time to time. Then there’s Blogger! The first platform I started blogging on in early 2000. It’s always been buggy, and at times difficult. You really can’t understand unless you’ve used the product. Pages don’t format properly, images load funny, and you really don’t have a lot of control over the design.

So, I haven’t blogged on Blogger in a while. I’ve been on a weight loss kick and decided to do a blog about ketogenic dieting. My hosting company said I need to upgrade my service plan if I want to host any more blogs. I really didn’t want to increase my overhead and figured I’d use Blogger for a bit. On top of that, I wanted to put together a blogging portfolio and thought it would be nice to add a couple blogger blogs to it.

OK, great. Blogger is super simple to set up. I register a domain, point it to Blogger and get started. I love the easy setup with Blogger. You pick a theme, choose your color scheme, upload a profile pic and you’re ready to blog! It doesn’t get much easier than that.

You would think after all these years, pages would format easier but you still get the same weird formatting glitches when captioning images and formatting pages. I can deal with that, I know how to get around them most of the time using the HTML editor. It’s still a pain though!

So I’m starting to question whether or not I want to host the blog on Blogger. This morning I get an idea for a blog post. I only have my phone with me and decide to download the Blogger app to post it from my phone. I install the app, write my blog post, and I can’t get the image to load or the page out of draft mode. Complete frustration sets in! IMHO the Blogger app for Android is useless.

I guess the moral of this post is if you stop by here looking for advice and suggestions on blogging. My advice is, DON’T USE BLOGGER! Yes, it’s free but it just isn’t a good product!

I’m going to continue blogging there against my better judgment. I’ll have another blog to add to my portfolio, and I can always transfer it to a WordPress site down the road. If anything, it will be a good example of what not to do when starting a blog. Google used to be such a great company, creating great innovative products. I honestly don’t know what’s going on over there.

If you want to check out my weight loss blog on blogger you can find it here:

https://www.my-keto-blog.com/

Here’s a screenshot. There’s not much there now but I’ll be posting regularly and adding to the design as time allows.

A simple diet blog about ketogenic dieting created on Blogger.

Content Creation and Stock Photography

One of the projects I’ve been working on is a Spanish language blog. I’m not fluent in Spanish, yet I wish to be. So I decided to create mi-palabra-del-dia.com as a way to stay motivated each day and learn and practice my Spanish.

Each Monday, I usually spend the afternoon editing photos I’ve taken over the week and creating that weeks content for the blog. This morning I realised I really didn’t have any good photos pertaining to that subject matter. What to do ? morguefile.com is the answer.

When you’re in a pinch morguefile.com is a great place to grab some free stock photography for your blog or website. The term morgue file comes from the old newspaper days when journalists would need a picture for a story but didn’t have one. The photographers had what were called “morgue files” of images that could be used in a pinch. In a pinch the journalist would go to the morgue file and look for an image that pertained to their subject matter. I’ve used this site in a pinch for a long time now and you can find some really great photos there. The site really lives up to its name.

As far as I know , the only rule is that you can’t use the image in a standalone manner. In other words you have to edit the images a bit and personalize them for your content. Just what I needed. Here’s a couple examples of some things I created using there content.

Strawberries for my Spanish blog. Las Fresas Amigos !

La ardilla, a squirrel for my Spanish blog.

la ardilla, the squirrel. Cute little guy isn’t he.

The top image has really been manipulated using Gimp. I did a cut out of the image using a font as a mask to cut the image. I then added a border, some more plain text, and the original image of strawberries. For the second image I simply added a little text and my site url.

I’m pretty sure using the images in a stand alone manner pertains to offering the images by themselves for download. However, you could simply add some text, a border, or create a collage out of a couple different images. I’ll explain more on these things in future post and maybe even use some of these photos for examples.

For the tweeted version of this post: “If you need stock photography in a pinch, try www.morguefile.com

If you open an account, make sure to follow me here. http://morguefile.com/creative/newaeondesign

May News Letter

Like the spring weather here in Western New York, I’m getting a late start on the May news letter and monthly update. Things have been real busy around here, and I’ve started building a portfolio, and cleaning up some of my blogs and designs.

First things first, I’d love to explain the current theme of the blog. I haven’t gone soft, I’m simply trying to bust out of my comfort zone. Being a d00d many of my designs have a darker theme, and also a more manly feel to them. I thought for spring I would try to force myself out of my comfort zone and create something with a softer more feminine feel to it. Thus we have pinkish purple flowers, with a floral theme. I may have went a bit overboard but it’s my first attempt at this type of designing. I’m going to be changing it up in June with a more summery theme that I haven’t really decided on yet. However, for the next several months I am going to be focusing on getting out of the comfort zone.

I’ve been adding blogs to my portfolio. Currently, I’m maintaining 4 on Blogger, 2 using WordPress, and I’ve been playing around on Tumblr. I don’t really know what to think about Tumblr, but with Yahoo purchasing the company earlier this year I think it’s going to be an up and coming platform in the future. For that reason I’ve been giving it a little bit more attention than I believe it really deserves. Currently here’s what my blogging portfolio looks like. If your bored and any of these topics interest you check em out.

Blogger Blogspot Blogs

Maintained for clients :
Helene’s Mostly Jewelry – Jewelry Blog

Hobby blogs by me :
Notes On Using Linux
My Amateur Photo
Mi Palabra Del Dia

WordPress Blogs

The Bitcoin Blog – Whole Site Currently Under Development.
The Design Blog – This blog that your currently reading.

Tumblr Blogs

Because Tumblr is a really different type of blogging service, I’ve been using it to mirror some of my current blogs. I try to post different information but also link the post from my other blogs to it. This has proven very effective in traffic generation. I think Tumblr really falls somewhere between social networking, or maybe social blogging. It’s a very different platform then the other services available. For example, users really can’t comment, only share posts. I’m going to be doing some more posts about blogging this month. I’ll be sure to add more information on Tumblr. For now here are the blog mirrors.

New Aeon Design – Sort of a mirror to this blog.
Mi Palabra Del Dia – Mirror to my learn Spanish blog on Blogger.

Staying with the busting out of my comfort zone theme. I tried my hand at a retro redesign. This was a really fun project for a customers news letter. I learned a lot with the design, and on my next attempt I’ll be changing more than a couple things, but I had fun designing it and the customer was happy.

The concept is to take some old public domain ad stock and recreate the design. I found the above image, cleaned it up a bit, added some text with a basic font to maintain the old style theme. I went with a bold sans-serif and some classic script for the business name. In the future I’d like to maybe add an additional font and make the business name more pronounced. The customer however loved it and that’s really all that matters.

So, that’s what I’ve been working on over here at New Aeon Design. This month, expect some posts about blogging and blog design. I plan to change up a bunch of stuff on the Blogger blogs, and I’d also like to talk a little about WordPress. You can also look forward to some social networking posts, tips, tricks, and what I’ve discovered.

With that said, thanks for checking out my blog portfolio, thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone following members, rss, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook (Just started nobody following yet, you could be the first !), Pinterest, and G+. Feel free to comment and ttys ! SEE YA !