How to make a post gallery for your sidebar!

Hello readers of Cropped Stories! I'm Alicia and I blog over at A Sweet Fragrance. My family and I are American-born but live as expats over in SE Asia. I blog about our life overseas, recipes I attempt to make while substituting lots of ingredients, projects I do around the house, "tot school" lessons I teach to my toddler, and lessons I learn through parenting and walking with the Lord. I hope you'll stop by my blog for a visit!

Just before the year 2013 came to an end, I decided I wanted to redesign my blog. I had a picture of what I wanted for the new design in my head but getting that design to appear on my blog required turning my thoughts into HTML coding.

Adding and Customizing the Pin It Hover Button

In case you aren’t familiar with the Pin It Hover Button, it is a Pinterest icon that appears when you hover over an image on a website allowing you to click on it and pin.  Why is it fantastic?  Well, for one thing, it’s very convenient for your visitors.  It prevents them from having to go directly to Pinterest and click on the add a pin option and past the URL of the content they want to pin.  Secondly, it’s customizable which means you can create the icon yourself to keep it consistent with the design of your website.  Are you sold yet?

Blogging resources, tools, widgets, html etc. you should check out!

If you can believe it, this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for at least a month.  It’s a good thing I checked it!  I’d hate to deprive you all of the adorableness!  I love these pictures of Livi in her room.  I took them the same day I photographed her BIG girl bed.  If you missed this post, feel free to check it out!

HTML to insert images into your posts!

You know when my bloggy life changed?  The day I realized I should be using html to insert my images into posts. 

I was having some major issues with the insertion of images into my posts.  Whether I used my hosting server (Blogger) or blogging tool (Windows Live Writer), the image quality always suffered.  It used to drive me absolutely bonkers!  There is nothing worse than spending the time to process a beautiful image just to have it be compressed during insertion.  The scary thing?  I was even resizing my images and saving them as maximum quality .jpgs thinking it would make a difference!  You would think resizing them would negate the servers necessity to decrease the image file.  Unfortunately this is not the case and they were still being compressed.  Do you know what happens to an image during compression?  Pixellization (I promise, it’s a word).  In a larger image, the pixels are difficult to see since there are more of them and they are smaller.  With compression, you start to lose pixels and they become larger (and more visible).  This usually results in a block type appearance which can be confused as an out of focus image.  And let’s face it, there is nothing worse than a blurry/fuzzy image especially when your subject is a person.  Is it too much to ask that my blog readers see the beautiful, crisp, un-pixelated (okay, I’m not sure if this one’s a word) images I see in my photo editing software?  I don’t think so.

Free set of frames!

I think my post title says it all.  I just created the following frames and I’m so excited to share them with all of you!  Each frame is numbered below and correspond to the file names within the folder!  This will be my first time uploading an entire folder (instead of one file) to Google Drive so I hope the link works okay.  Please let me know if you have any trouble downloading.    

New Pics… Creating a button for your website

Did you start your blogging website without really knowing anything about HTML?  I did.  Blogger made it so easy to create a website without having to know code which was nice.  If you want to customize, however, that’s a different story.  I’m always looking up code online.  You know stuff like ‘creating image code’, ‘removing page titles’, ‘centering and image’ and my most recent search ‘creating buttons (thumbnail pictures) with scrolling text underneath'.