Saturday, August 29, 2009

Fun little blog tip, Link Within Widget!



We went to Galveston last week and had a great time. It is just amazing how much the island has recovered after Hurricane Ike. I will post more images of our trip later, but I had to post this one of the track hoe with the impact hammer, seemingly out in the middle of the ocean. We woke up one morning and looked out the window and saw this amazing view. My boys love construction vehicles, so this was absolutely thrilling to them. Luckily they get up early (yeah right, I would love to sleep in one morning, at least until 7:30...) so I was able to photograph it. It is on the end of a cement/granite pier which they are rebuilding after the hurricane. Notice the people watching on the lower left of the image; we weren't the only ones impressed. Nature and machines; strange mix for beauty but it sometimes works.

You probably have noticed that I have these new five little thumbnails below each post that link similar posts within my blog. I have seen these around lately and wanted to do the same, but hadn't really investigated it. Then I was looking at a blog design I had done months ago and she had added those little photo links and I decided to click on the credit link and find out how to install my own.

It is so easy! Just go visit LinkWithin and set up your own linking thumbnails on your website or blog. It is free and takes only a minute or two. LinkWithin says it can take hours for it to crawl your site and show reasonable links, but mine were working great within 10 minutes or so.

This is such a nifty feature for blogs like mine. I have so much information and it can be really hard to find what you are looking for without cool little widgets like this. I have added the label cloud and I hope that helps, but this is a fun little way to find similar posts that you might not have realized you wanted to read!

I am posting a new storyboard template (.psd, not action) and my newest action, CoffeeShop Vintage Honey, in the next day or two. I am also putting together a tutorial on how to make your own templates with clipping masks and a few more fun Editing 101 posts. I am trying to post more often, so check back regularly!!!

Hope you are all having a great weekend. It is a bit cooler here, but so dry. The Smith Brothers came and cut our hay fields yesterday, but we aren't going to get many bales. But the fields do look really nice and they are going to bale tomorrow, so the boys are completely excited!

On a sad note, we lost one of our 18 chickens while I was in Galveston. Poor little Henny Penny 1 or 2 (we had two black and white hens, Henny Penny 1 and 2, and I could not tell them apart) got out of the chicken coop and unfortunately is now gone. I will spare you the details, but her demise had a lot to do with tiny chicken brains and nature. The boys were not as sad as I would imagine they would have been, and when I mentioned it to Ike that Henny Penny 1 or 2 was dead, he said "Daddy killed her". What in the world??? I wondered where he learned the word "kill", and then I realized it was from me. As in "step on that fire ant and kill it", or "stand still, I have to kill that mosquito on your arm". Oops, I need to watch my words in the future! And no, Daddy did not kill Henny Penny 1 or 2, but if he had we might have had BBQ chicken when we got back! ;-)

Talking about tiny chicken brains, the other day my grandmother told me this story about this chicken that had its head chopped off by a farmer and it lived for over a year and toured the country as a side-show. The owner feed it through its neck using an eyedropper. I scoffed at my grandmother (in my head of course, never disrespect your elders, especially when they are tiny but incredibly tough) and told my husband about it that night, making a bit of fun of my grandmother. I then told my mom who decided to do a bit of Internet searching and found THIS. Well, needless to say, my grandmother got the last laugh, because Mike the headless chicken was a real headless chicken and lived 18 months with just a brain stem. The interesting part of this story was he did everything a normal chicken did, except he did not have a head or most of his brain. So that puts a chicken's intelligence in perspective. ;-)

But anyway, with tragedy comes new life, and now we have a little black hen (Blackie) sitting on 10 eggs, so we might have a few new chicks in three weeks. They are not all her eggs. She is sitting in prime real estate (according to the other hens) and I keep on finding other hens on top of her, laying their eggs! We have plenty of boxes (11 ones filled with hay and only 15 hens), but the grass is always greener on the other side and everyone wants her box. I finally went out there this morning and used a sharpie to mark the eggs under her so I can remove fresh ones. Otherwise that poor hen might be sitting on a 100 eggs in a few weeks... Haven't you seen those Loony Tunes cartoons where the chicken is balanced on a mountain of eggs? You thought that was funny, right, never realizing that the person who thought of that apparently had a broody hen sitting in a prime location. The chicken snakes also love that location, so I will keep you posted if any of the eggs make it to little chickens.

12 comments:

  1. I love Link Within! And their support is great! After I revamped my blog template I emailed them to ask how their widget could be centered under my blog posts, and they just fixed it for me! Awesome!

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  2. OMG Rita I cannot get over the chicken story! We kept a few chickens for eggs growing up and yes, I don't think they needed too much more than a spinal cord and brain stem. Sorry you lost a few though. Living around farm animals certainly teaches kids a different kind of perspective.

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  3. You did it with the chicken story. I couldnt stop reading...lol!!!! Thanks for all the GRE-AT stuff btw!!!

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  4. that is a crazy chicken story-i cannot believe it. I guess that is where "he is acting like a chicken with his head cut off" comes from?? Sorry to hear of you chicken loss and hopefully you will have some new little ones soon : ). Thanks for all you do rita! I have not written in a while, but I am thankful : ) for all your hard work.

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  5. I thought my husband would find the chicken story interesting so I started reading it to him. I didn't get past the first sentence and he said, "Oh, you mean Mike the chicken?" Yep, bizarre things like that are what he remembers.

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  6. Thank you very much! i am going to try link within widget!
    i am also very excited about your new action coming out soon!

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  7. I have been using Link within for a few weeks now. it is great.

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  8. Hi, Rita!

    I'me so amazed about LinkWithin that now I visit every blog that writes about it.

    Like Leigh said, their support is fantastic! I had some doubts about it and they answered me really fast - even on weekends. It worths a try!

    I also love your story about the chicken! Very interesting!

    Best regards from Brazil!

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  9. Well I don't understand all that blog/widget stuff, but I certainly get the chicken stories. Those chicken snakes have been very persistent in our laying boxes this summer.
    Good luck to your chickie poo and her hatching endeavor. We've not gotten any baby chicks this way yet. We try to watch and grab the eggs and hubby has built an incubator and we hatch them in the house.
    And as always thank you for the story boards, actions and tutorials. I love visiting your site.

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  10. Wow... Mike the Headless Chicken is amazing! What a crazy story!!
    Thanks for the info on LinkWithin- I've always wondered how people did that...

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  11. I know this post is old, but I'm just finding it now. First of all thank you for all the AMAZING tips and goodies! You are awesome.

    Secondly, I installed the Link Within widget and on my site underneath my thumbnails it has a hyperlink back to linkwithin.com. I notice yours does not. How did you disable that? Thanks!

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Thank you for taking the time to leave a message, I love reading them! All comments are personally moderated by me and I will post and answer them them as soon as possible.
Rita