Boys Will Be Boys

Posts Tagged ‘geek’

These are the flowers my funny, yet geeky husband got me for Valentines Day. Thanks to www.thinkgeek.com for providing geeky guys with gift ideas  like this bouquet! Is it sad that 1/2 my friends do not get what this is but my 3 yr. old was explaining what different powers the flowers can give me? House of geeks I tell ya!

Let me just say that had my gift for Patrick arrived in time, it goes well with the geeky theme of this day! Hopefully it gets here tomorrow!!

I do <3 my geeky husband!

– Post From My iPhone

I fixed commenting on here to be more user friendly.  There are some things I really dislike about WordPress and the comment system is a huge one.  So, I did some searching and have settled on using Disqus.  I wanted a way that people could comment through various log ins like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter or whatever.  This seems to fit the bill so I’m hoping it works well.

I’ve been working on some other minor changes to this but the general layout/colors and such are going to stay the same for a while.  That is definitely one thing that I don’t have time for ..until maybe another break from school!

That does remind me, I never did post about the program I ended up loving to design this template.  It sure makes building your own template a snap, yet gives you a lot of freedom in designing with your own backgrounds, images and styles.

The secret:  Artisteer! I’ve used templates before, I’ve designed & coded from scratch (hello, not fun) but ultimately this one takes the cake.  It’s super simple and does a lot of that hard work for you, yet it gives you so much freedom.  You can use it to do your Blogger, WordPress and many other blogs sites.

Google Reader might just big one of my biggest time-savers when it comes to reading blogs.  If you haven’t already checked it out, you might just want to!  Hopefully after reading this it won’t seem as confusing as some might think.  I know a lot of my friends read blogs and have them just bookmarked in a folder.  Let me just get this out here….it is REALLY slow to do it that way and you are losing precious blog reading time haha.  Which, if you are like me and have kids, every little free minute of sneaking away at the computer has to be efficient!

So let’s get down to the nitty gritty.  Google Reader is your one-stop-shop for reading all your blogs.  If you’ve seen the “follow me on rss”, the “RSS” or the little orange R icon and wondered what it means, than hopefully this will help!   If you click on one of those while reading a blog, it will give you an option to subscribe/follow the blog.  There are a lot of different ways to follow blogs but I’m going to just touch on Google Reader since I happen to love it.  You can do some searching and find lots of RSS readers out there.

*first you will need a Google account, if you don’t have one – go get one!*

When you click on the RSS link, you’ll bring open a page that will give you different services to follow with.  Click on the Google link/image and that blog feed will now be put into your Google Reader.

You can access your blogs at any given time all in one spot by going to www.google.com/reader

On the left side you’ll see your subscriptions or blogs you follow.  Anytime a blogger you follow posts a new blog, it’ll show up.

Click on a blog to view the posts in the main window.  You’ll notice at the bottom of each blog posting:

• Add Star:  This flags it for you later, I add stars to favorite recipes, design ideas etc. so I can go back and look at them later.
• Like:  Tags it as a post you like, others can see that you do “like” the post.
• Share:  This allows you to share with friends or others.
• Share with Note: leaves notes with your sharing.
• Email:  love this feature too, I email various people the blog posts I find cool or interesting.
• Keep unread: use this a ton when I want to come back to something or I just want to skip it and go to the next
• Send to:  Facebook, Twitter or whatever options you select in your settings.
• Edit tags:  you can add to the existing or edit them.  Great for organizing favorite posts and such.

If you got to “Settings” you’ll have a bunch of options to select and change.   My favorite is of course folders because you can organize away!  Setting up different folders based on different types of blogs is very helpful if you follow a lot of them.  I currently have various folders for:  Cooking blogs, family & friend’s blogs, Parenting blogs, Deal/Bargain blogs, Design blogs, Geek blogs & News blogs.  The sky is your limit on how you organize with folders, tags and stars.

There’s a whole bunch more to Google Reader to explore.  I don’t even fully know the in’s and out’s myself but I do know I couldn’t live without it.   The basic story is, it’s a great way to keep up with blogs without visiting each individual site.   See how time saving this is?

Of course, I’m sure there are a few people I know out there reading this wondering why I even read blogs?  Another story, another day…but you’re missing out!