Research time!  It seems the Twenty Ten theme had a little mistake, they changed a line of their code.  With the invent of Twenty Ten and the ability to make child themes (think skins or mostly appearance only changes) several themes were created that use Twenty Ten theme, thereby picking up this problem.  In addition there may be other themes with this problem.

If you have trouble with your blog images going back to full size, this may help.

CAUTION!!  THIS REQUIRES CHANGING CSS!!

If you are at all uncomfortable, ask someone else to do it.  Use this at your own discretion.

Here’s what you need to do, go to the editor under appearance.  On the right side select  style.css then scroll through the codes until you find:

/* =Images
-------------------------------------------------------------- */

#content img {
	margin: 0;
	height: auto;
	max-width: 640px;
	width: auto;
}

remove the line with width: auto;

Now your images should work fine.  If not you can remove the heigth: auto; as well.

HINT:  Copy all of the code in the area where you are working.  Paste in notepad.  You can always delete your changes and paste the original code back into place!!

Hope that helps my fellow bloggers keep their images the way you like!

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

I won’t say their names, because it really doesn’t matter. Unfortunately in a few months some other artists will be singing a similar song that says abuse is ok. This was the final straw in avoiding a calling I have had for years. I can no longer stand by and let the cycles of hate and abuse continue.

While that calling came almost 3 weeks ago, and I stated to myself that I would finish the Blog Challenge before leaving this blog behind. Although I nearly quit just 4 days before the challenge ended.

Each day, each post has become harder and harder to write. Some of you may know that I also write for 365 Online Tips. This is a daily success and motivational site. There is another motivational site in the works. I am actually looking for some women who are willing to make commitment to helping women.

But for those of you who are friends on my personal website, you probably have read that I am thinking of getting out of making websites and even out of WordPress. Well, the decisions were made as to what I was/am going to do as of almost 2 weeks ago.

Now it is time to confess….

Rockstar Guide to WordPress will soon no longer be available for sale as an ebook. I am working on getting it published. It will be sold on Amazon and hopefully on Kindle as well. It will be available at a much lower price and I am looking to get some other authors to add some chapters to help people with their websites. This is extremely important because half of the profits will be going towards special organizations and that new project mentioned earlier. It will need some funds for scholarships and such.

So…

• If you want to add a chapter to a WordPress book, please comment.
• If you are a woman and would like to participate in a special project to help others, please comment. (make certain that you use email box because it will be a private message)
• If you are a man, and would like to help get the project going, please comment.
• If you would like me to continue doing Freebie Fridays, please comment.

I still enjoy WordPress and very much enjoy tech stuff, I just won’t be able to do daily blogs or commit to WordPress projects.

Yesterday covered installing and setting up the Mingle Forum Plugin. Today is going to cover skins and how to add your forum to your website.

Adding to your website.

Create a new page. You will want to use a name that lets people know there is discussions, forums or talk on the page. On the page type [mingleforum] and then press publish. This will create a forum on that web page. With this you will have a great website forum on your WordPress website without the hassle other sites would create.

Changing Skins

Blue may not work with your theme. Or you may not like the default skin. While the colors of the Mingle Forum skins are still somewhat limited you do have choices other than blue. You can visit Get Forum Skins.

From There you can pick from the reds, blues, green, orange, blacks, and pink that they have available. You will need to download the skin, or skins you like.

Using your favorite method, (I prefer File Manager) you will upload the skins to /wp-content/mingle-forum-skins/ The advantage of this method is with changes and upgrades you will not need to reinstall several times.

IF YOU WANT TO BREAK IT

If you change the name of the folder, Mingle Forums will not work. If you delete the Default skin or change the name of it Mingle Forums will not work.

What if the folder does not exist.

Then you can create a folder using your file manager or FTP. You will want to create it exactly as the name as listed above.

Installing the skins

Go back to your WordPress Dashboard and activate the skin you want to use. Now you are ready to go with a forum that looks just as you need!

Good luck!!

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

Perhaps you need a forum on your WordPress website. Fortunately there is a very nice Forum plugin that is fairly simple to use*. Note the star… Forums are not exactly the easiest things to set up, thus fairly simple does not necessarily mean simple.

This WordPress forum plugin is called Mingle Forum. If you are on Mingle, it works great with it or stands alone. It is highly customizable. There are skins, categories, rankings for users and much more.

How to Install

Simply go to WordPress plugins, click add new. Type Mingle forum in search, then install. You will see a new box appear called Mingle Forum. Scroll down to it and open for the sub categories.

Mingle Forum

This subcategory you can mostly leave alone. There is very little you will want to change, unless you want to change the name or number of posts that it takes for users to go to the next level.

Skins

Only a blue skin comes pre-installed. Other skins will have to be downloaded and installed in a particular file on your file manager. This is something you may want to leave to your tech person, unless you are the tech person.  It will be covered in more detail tomorrow.

Categories and Forums

This seems backwards to me. When you add new you create a category. Then once you have created a category you can “add forum” which will be basically a subcategory. You could conversely create another category. These will be the main boxes, and the “forums” will be the sub boxes.

Moderators

You can be a moderator. Once you have users you can set up individual users as moderators. You can set someone up for all forums or some.

User Groups

When you add new, you can give a name to groups of users. After you name the group you can add members or remove members.

About

Just like it says some information about the plugin.

Final Touches

That will be covered tomorrow

1.  Ask fellow bloggers.  There are bloggers who want to write guest posts, some may be your friends, or you can look for ones that have blogs are similar to yours.    You may be able to ask them for a post or two or even a regular spot.  Some bloggers will be glad to step up.

2.  Use articles from Article websites.  Ezine articles is a great place to get articles.  You can find over 300 articles I wrote just by checking my author bio. You will find fabulous articles on WordPress, online tools,  success, motivational.   You can search by the terms you need with the author name to get articles by a certain author.

3.  Check out Public Domain works.  There is a lot of good information provided by the government or older than copyright laws that is available for public use.

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

Single site development, this method means putting emphasis on the single site. This means developing social interaction with visitors. This one site means it is easier to share with others. Spending time to come up with beneficial posts and development of relationships is critical, which can be a disadvantage to some.

There are several different ways to cover a niche.

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

How about a whole suite of tools?

You may know Mozilla as the creators of Firefox, but they have other programs as well. They actually a suite of creative applications that can be added to your Firefox or used as is in your browser. Just by visiting Aviary.com you can see the 8 tools together.

Phoenix allows you to edit images.

Roc can help you create music and can be used with Myna

Talon is a screen capture program. Capture web pages, then edit, crop, resize or mark the image.

Myna is an audio editor. Remix music or audio tracks. Record your voice and instruments or apply sound effects.

Raven conquers vectors, allowing to edit vector images online.

Falcon can quickly capture images and web pages from brower or desktop.

Peacock changes things as you see fit. This effects editor works just by pulling the effect into the mix.

Toucan allows you to use or create color swatches and palettes.

As you can guess with this many tools in one place, you could do a lot of different things. They have video tutorials and quick guides to help you get started. Knowing that you might feel overwhelmed, they also offer Frequently Asked Questions and site instructions not just instructions on the individual tools.

You can even set up and save your files online Aviary. This allows you to share and use your images and creations in more ways.

If you have found your niche, congratulations!  Now that you have, do you know what the next steps are? Finding your niche is just the first step in the niche business success blueprint.

What are you going to offer?

Have you researched to find products that fit your niche? What problems do people have? If you are going to provide a service or a product, even a digital product, have you studied the market to see if you can fill that problem or problems?

Are they willing to pay?

For a niche business, earning money is essential. While you may have the very best solution to a problem, it will not matter if the people will not pay. Even if there are some buyers, you need enough to make your niche business work.

Your niche business blueprint

A business is as unique as you are. There are no rules that are guaranteed to work or not work, these are guidelines to help you succeed. You need to consider if your market is big enough to have buyers and small enough to have a target market. Finding buyers and something to sell is the goal that is an absolute must.

1) I have not followed my own advice in getting ahead on blog posts so you have extras when something happens.

LESSON:  Make certain you have a few extra posts in case an emergency or sudden virus happens.

2) Also make certain you know what you are going to cover before time.

LESSON: Plan in Advance.

3) Yes, One hundred articles in hundred days #4 just ended but I have not shown my video from #3

LESSON:  Your blog should also show your accomplishments so people know what you are about.  (ME=writing)

4) Videos should be filmed in advance and can be uploaded on the correct day.  Note: videos are helping me prepare for being a speaker.

LESSON: Record videos early.

Ok, so yes I am a writer.  The pictures and videos are from #3 which was the first HAHD I entered.    HAHD #4 just ended and it was my second HAHD contest, completed with over 200 articles.   Yes, I am working on becoming a speaker.  Yes I am working on becoming a published author.  And yes foreshadowing.

What?

Can’t tell you, otherwise you would know and this post would not be foreshadowing.

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

I heart Ezine Articles Mug from when I became a Platinum Author

The cartoon mug for completing a mini challenge

The HAHD is from HAHD that completed in April!

See all my articles at http://RockstarGuideBooks.com/articles

From their blog!!!!

• Of the 2,615 Expert Authors who enrolled, 261 (10%) successfully qualified with 100+ articles.
• Total Qualifiers = 261, Double Qualifiers = 68

This blog post was by request.   NextGen Gallery is one of the most popular and highly recommended of the WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins.  You install via Plugins and add new. Scroll down your dashboard a bit.

Add a Gallery

Click on add a gallery. Type in your new gallery’s name in the add new gallery box. Then choose Upload images to upload images off your computer. When you upload images make certain you choose a gallery. If you have several images in a Zip File you can choose that. Another option is import image folder if you know the server path. (Importing requires the images be some place online and accessible.)

Manage Gallery will let you change the name of a gallery or add a description. Here you can also link the gallery to a specific page. The images in the gallery will be below. Click on them to change their name, description or tags.

Manage Albums will allow you to create an album and add one or more galleries to it. Tags will let you add, change or delete tags you use in the photo albums.

Options

Options gives you several options to change or create. You can change the maximum size of thumbnails and other images. You can choose the quality that of images Next Gen will set up for quality resizing. You can choose to backup images or automatically resize. You can set up features in the gallery, such as how the images display and much more. You can also add effects to how your images show. Next is the watermark, use an image or your website name or other text. You can choose the font, color and size. Finally the last option is what you want the slideshow to look like.

The next buttons under gallery.

After options is style. This requires knowing and understanding css code. If you have other users on your blog, you will want to set up Roles, as to who can manage, edit or make changes to the albums. About is the credits and the final one, you do not need to mess with unless you actually want to start over, or uninstall Next Gen.

On posts and pages

Make certain you have TinyMCE loaded. If you do you will have a button appear that looks like a little album with photos. Click this and you will be able to add images to your post. You can choose to add images, galleries, or albums. Whatever you need for that blog post.

There you have it!  Next Gen Photo Gallery plugin is great for photographers or those in need of many pictures.

Live  ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader