Sunday, September 11, 2016

Grab My Button

my active logoSo I see tons of bloggers and review site with "Grab My Button or Logo" spot on sites and had much frustration in how to get one for myself.  Well I don't claim to know everything there is to know about creating them, but I can say I have figured it out enough after many hours to work for me and I am going to attempt to explain, in order to help out others.  There are sites out there just do a quick google search and you will find a bunch of them, one that seems to be really popular is this one https://www.mycoolrealm.com/sandbox/gbgen/ they have a form that you fill out with the appropriate information in each field then it creates a code for you.  For some reason this method didn't work for me, but if it works for you that is great.  This is the process I did to create mine, hope it helps. First thing you have to do is have or create the logo or image you want to be represented by your site (such as mine here in this post as well as the actively working one on my site).

sticky note example The image has to be uploaded somewhere, I choose to upload it to facebook and post it so that only I can see it.  You could use your google drive, photobucket.com, or where ever.  To get the web address of the photo you have to in most times right click on it and select to open in another tab.  In the other tab or window there should only be the image you want.  At this point you will need to copy and paste the address from the address bar into a document program such as wordpad or even use the sticky notes gadget from your computer (image to the left is a example of stick notes gadget).

Now the next thing you want to do is use the code that I have found and modify it to your needs.  If you have experience with html that is great.  If you don't that is ok, too, but you will want to be careful not to inadvertantly delete characters by mistake.  Sometime even deleting a space can cause an undesirable effect on the finished product.  Here is the code:

<div align="center"> <a href="http://Put the complete web address of URL or web site here, in between the quotation marks" target="_blank"><img alt="Enter text here, such as web site name" src="http://Put the complete web address of image URL or web site here, in between the quotation marks, this is the web address you copied and pasted into wordpad or sticky notes" height="197" width="197"/>  </a><br />Copy & Paste Code <br />Below To Your Site. </div> <div align="center"> <form><textarea rows="2" cols="25">&lt;div align="center"&gt;&lt;a href="http://Put the complete web address of URL or web site here, in between the quotation marks" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img alt="Enter text here, such as web site name" src="http://Put the complete web address of image URL or web site here, in between the quotation marks, this is the web address you copied and pasted into wordpad or sticky notes"    /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;</textarea></form> </div>


Stretched out imageOk now don't get overwhelmed, just take your time and breath.  A couple of things you can do to modify your button, is the size of the image and the size of the area that your guest would copy to their site.  If you notice in the code the height and width in blue, you can modify the size of your image by changing these number.  The number is representative of the amount of pixels big it is, so my image is 197x197pixels.  If I changed the width to 250pixel the image would be stretched out and look distorted.  See image to the right.   You could try removing the whole thing that say height and width including the quotation marks that are with that section, but nothing else and it should show image in original size.  Most of the time you will want to edit the size to help keep the appearance in a nice order. 
Stretched out copy & paste area
The next thing you may want to modify is the size of the text area that can be copied and pasted to anyone else site.  In the code above highlighted in yellow is the area you can modify. The amount of rows is how many lines down, in the example to the left I have 5 rows and 35 columns, essentially the columns is character in width, so in the example to the left it is showing 35 characters in width.

The last thing I would recommend changing it the text in between the image and the copy & paste area.  In mine I choose to write "Copy & Paste Code Below To Your Site",  see the code above again, and in red you will see the area you can change.  The "<br>" in the code just tells it to go to the next line.  I choose to do this because the text I wanted to put in didn't all fit.  You can even take section in red out but don't delete the <br/> before it, just what is in red.
Remember this is a great way to cross promote websites and blog and review site.  It is a great way to help you get extra exposure.  Send messages to fellow website owners and see if they would be interested in doing a "button swap" to help increase your websites viability.  Please respect your fellow bloggers and website owners and make sure you put up there site on your page and also follow up that they are doing the same.  It should be somewhat easy so don't get overwhelmed.  I am putting this blog out there to hopefully help others that are a bit frustrated with the process.   Don't be afraid to try new things to help jazz up your website and make it truly yours.  And if you are interested in doing a button swap, please contact me (at this time I can only add so many but I am working on making a entire link page). Have a blessed day.


Saturday, September 10, 2016

Forte by JD Spero

I have recently complete my first ebook review (if you want to see the video review either click or copy and paste the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpYZXKrk_OY.   I was a little intimidate because I cannot read all to fast, but the book Forte by JD Spero was a exciting read at just over 200 pages.  It is a wonder talk of a girl named Sami who moves to a new town and finds that her passion for the piano begins to wain as she gets involved in partaking of a mysterious sports drink, that seems to make athletes out of people who are not athletic at all.  What can Sami do, her passion is the piano, but the feelings of fitting in with a popular crowd could be all to overwhelming. I was a little taken aback that being a "guy" I found myself reading a book that may have seemed girly, but it was entertaining nonetheless.  If you are interest in the book for yourself check it out here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/635122  If I to categorize this book I would place it in a category of teen mild thriller.  Hope you enjoy for yourself.

See disclaimer page for full disclaimer information about this blog.

 #Forte

Monday, September 5, 2016

My Welcome Blog

Hello and welcome to Reviews by Dennis' blog.  My wife has been doing product reviews for a number of years and I have been very involved for some time and I enjoy it so much that I have branched out to do my own.  Of course I will still be assisting my wife where needed, but by creating my own I will have the freedom to express my own creativity.  Don't get me wrong I love my wife's style and creativeness but it is not my own.  I hope you all enjoy and find things in and around this blog site helpful and useful.   Of course comments are always welcome.  Thank you and God bless.